Barry Levinson saw me on a tape and put me in 'Rain Man' as the waitress who dropped the toothpicks. The scene was talked about a lot. Then, all of a sudden, I started to get more auditions.
I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.
In my final year of attending a Christian sports camp in rural Missouri, the year before I started high school, they began to offer an elective Bible study group for young Christians who wanted a chance to read in the afternoons instead of learn to water-ski.
When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.
I'd started acting as a child. But I wanted to see if it was something my true personality was interested in. I stepped away from offers when I took five years off to go to college. I've only really just decided to whole-heartedly embrace acting.
I started playing golf when I was just out of college and starting my career with KPMG. I took a few lessons, and my husband has always loved to give me pointers - for better and for worse! I realized that you could really enhance relationships by being on the course with clients. In fact, my very first golf game was with some clients.
Eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile.
When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.
One of the biggest misconceptions that has been thrown out there is the fact that I started on Vine.
Oh, the illusion of choice in the modern world - don't get me started. But don't you agree that the Internet has softened our brains and made us forget that 'choice' used to mean something different from selecting options from menus?
When I first started out in politics I was, what you might describe as, a hard right Conservative.
I attempted to do yoga in German, and it was not particularly successful. So at that time, I started thinking about the idea of just movement and how I could move to de-stress.
Once I started looking for a record deal, I had a trainer. And the trainer told me that I would never sell a record if I didn't lose weight.
When I first heard my song 'Georgia Peaches' on the radio, I opened up the car windows and started screaming to the other people on the road, 'My song's on the radio!' Of course, I wasn't driving.
Once I started getting paid to be a writer and not having lots of other gross responsibilities, like making the puzzle or whatever, then my ambition changed, and I thought, 'Now I want to be a good writer.' And that became my ambition.
I'm an odd mixture. I'm a sort of Geordie punk who started in classical theatre. It means nobody ever knows quite where to put me, but I like that.
When I was launched in 2010, people told me that I wasn't the best looking guy, so I would have to act really well. I am aware that I am not conventionally good looking. I have heard it so many times that I have started believing it.
A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promoting that point.
I started out doing things like 'Flash Forward,' where I was the girl-next-door, and then, I did a show called 'Higher Ground,' where I played this really mean, sarcastic girl. Then 'Firefly' happened, and everybody thought of me as this bubbly, sweet girl-next-door again.
The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects.
I wanted to be a complete player, and I felt like the dunks started to overshadow other parts of my game.
Everyone's inspired by Brando. When I started acting, my dad showed me 'On the Waterfront,' and I thought, 'That's the coolest guy I've ever seen.'
When I started out as a cover band, I was obsessed with Keith Urban and Jason Aldean and Eric Church; those are the songs I chose to sing as a cover band.
When I was 8 or 9, I started using bulletin board systems, which was the precursor to the Internet, where you'd dial into... a shared system and shared computers. I've had an email address since the late '80s, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then I got on the Internet in '93 when it was first starting out.
I was backstage at the House of Blues in L.A where I was about to perform, and Stevie Wonder and Prince turned up at my dressing room together! Stevie started beat boxing and Prince started singing one of my songs, all of a sudden it was like I was in a cypher with these incredible artists.
I dedicated most of my life to basketball, and that was my plan until my junior year of college when I got ill and was bed-ridden for eight months. In those months, I wanted to be productive, and I taught myself how to produce music on my computer. When I went back to school, I started taking all my classes in music and DJing a lot.
The welfare system was designed to do something different when it was started than what it does now. It was a safety net to help people get back to work: if they were sick, it would help them get back.
Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.
I actually had a buzz cut all the way to my junior year in college. I would just buzz my head with a one-guard all over, and then I started growing it out. When I had Tommy John, that was the last time it was buzzed. I've grown it ever since then.
I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.
Investment banks started recruiting at Harvard back in the day, and they'd fly me down to New York City and I was so poor so I would take advantage of the free flight, the per diem, the hotel. And then I would go audition for stuff.
I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.
I started a MySpace teen lit discussion group and invited people to join.
I got scouted for modeling, and it was really scary - I was walking my dog wearing heels for the first time ever because I had a party to go to the day after, and I wanted to practice, and this black car kind of started following me, so I, being dramatic, picked up the dog and started to run.
There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write.
Me and my brothers started a musical group early on, and we were playing in places where we really weren't supposed to be.
