My career started young and I was really ambitious, and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced, so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.
Once I started working as a professional actor, it was like, 'Bye-bye waiting tables, bye-bye bartending, bye-bye all the cliched jobs actors do.' But after a year of not getting work, there's this really difficult conflict, like, 'Do I have to go back to being a waiter when people recognize me from a show?'
However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
I started writing my own songs from the time I was a little kid. I would write my own lyrics to other people's songs that I heard on the radio and take whatever song and make it about fairies and angels - whatever little girls sing about.
I started working for Bethlehem Steel when I was about 16 during the summers.
In grade school I was smart, but I didn't have any friends. In high school, I quit being smart and started having friends.
Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!
I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, but I started doing theater in high school because it was a requirement. At first, I was completely irritated. But I ended up loving it.
No I didn't audition, I didn't even know David Lynch till the week before I started the film.
When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.
It suddenly struck me - I'm 70 years old. I wonder if I could possibly end my life the way I started it: doing the most joyful thing I ever did, which is to sing.
I started realizing I could be an example for women to not just be aware of breast cancer but to act on it, to make an appointment, to give themselves an exam.
I feel most empires fell when they started to act human, but then look at Russia. They kept a pretty strong hand, and they fell from Afghanistan alone because Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. I guess you just can't sustain it.
I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.
I started out mopping floors, waiting tables, and tending bar at my dad's tavern. I put myself through school working odd jobs and night shifts. I poured my heart and soul into a small business. And when I saw how out-of-touch Washington had become with the core values of this great nation, I put my name forward and ran for office.
When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
I didn't start working on children's books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children's floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.
After 'Jessica Jones' came out, I started hearing firsthand from a lot of women who were so inspired by the character, who felt represented, who felt like watching Jessica on screen helped them in their own lives. Women are devouring content like that because everybody is complicated; not everybody is one thing.
I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
I couldn't fight, and I wasn't particularly interested in the academic. So I started doing satiric bits in the school bathroom. Guys would cut class to come and see me.
I grew up watching Letterman, 'Seinfeld,' 'SNL,' and Monty Python movies. But nothing made me want to get into comedy more than when 'Mr. Show' started airing.
In '71 or '72 I returned to New Orleans and stayed there. I started cooking Louisiana food. Of all the things I had cooked, it was the best-and it was my heritage.
I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.
People ask me if my shoes were too small when I was a kid and I say it wouldn't matter how fight my shoes were, I just liked that feeling of them being in there. That's how I started tapping my toes.
At 13, I loved how so many of my peers sang and played acoustic guitar, so I started recording videos with covers of famous songs and posting them online.
Early on in my career, I'd go into the makeup trailer, and they'd spend an hour doing my makeup, and I would hate it. I'd go into the bathroom, wash it off and start over again, which took an enormous amount of time. So I just started doing it myself.
I started out in pre-law. I was going to go to law school. And I saw a production of 'Tally's Folly' that spring term. I took a theater class that term and auditioned for 'Harvey' at the end of the summer, and I was in a play every semester after that.
I just started writing for my own amusement and occasionally singing in little clubs around Los Angeles. Then I wrote 'The Rose,' and through a series of divine things that I had no control over and had no idea were going to happen, it got in the movie, and that changed everything.
When I started off with 'Dance India Dance,' even the TV show people thought it won't be accepted. But with the talent that the show received, I was able to personally tutor dancers to amalgamate contemporary dance moves on Bollywood tracks.
And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.
For me, I remember being 19 and coming out as bi to all of my friends. I'd had girlfriends, and all of these experiences and such, and then, as I got older, I started identifying as gay.
With hacky sack, somebody brought one to recess in sixth grade and it kind of all went downhill from there! The same with the yoyo's! One kid brought a yoyo one day and people started getting them. I just kept at it and found that I really loved it.
I'm into using acrylic, in a complicated kind of way: Making it just as good as oil paint - better, maybe. It's odd - when I started out, acrylic was for children, pretty much. It was a cheaper paint. It wasn't supposed to look very good or last very long.
Earlier, looking lighter or slimmer never mattered to me. Frankly, I didn't care. I had more important things to do. But when I figured that it's not that hard, and I have the time, passion and patience to take it up, I jumped onto the health-wagon. I started working out.
My family's business was actually an amusement park in New Orleans. My grandfather had started that, and my grandmother was a dance maven in New Orleans. It was just the theatricality and the Mardi Gras and the pageantry that I fell in love with at an early age.
