The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.
I tried to be just a singer of standards when I was starting out. And there was nothing special enough about my voice to make it that far. So I feel a bit like Rod Stewart. Once you've had that rock career, people will give you that chance where otherwise they might not.
I had to do the full body shave for the first coupla weeks of 'White Chicks,' then I said, 'You know what? I'm just gonna be a hairy white chick 'cause this is too much!
To this day, most people think of me as the fastest human. They don't really think me as a long jumper, although that's the event I had more success in.
In my whole career, I've never seen this type of race that you had to wait for the last day. There's so many teams that are involved. You've got to smile because we're in it.
I am severely dyslexic, so I'm not the person who can do a lot of typing, writing and mathematics. I don't excel in anything except in things that had to do with creativity and things with my hands. I like to build things and take things apart.
There would never have been a British Ballet without Diaghilev. He had a wonderful influence.
It was an unknown thing, a lot of people had very bad trips and I like to be in control.
Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?
Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating, but a bit embarrassing.
I got snubbed about eight times for the Mid-Summer Classic, and I know what type of career I had, and I know that I'm a true All-Star. The selection process is not very accurate.
We had a big party that night and everybody went around gathering results from various precincts and each person would get four or five precincts and then come to the house. There were no cell phones or anything to get results phoned in early.
When I had a kid, it was a game changer.
Most of my stuff was sort of of-the-time. 'The Crazies' was, basically, we were angry about Vietnam, and it had a reason for being.
Reba McEntire came through town when I lived in Texas. She had this amazing theatrical show with, like, 13 different wardrobe changes. I was eight and I was like, Wow, I wanna do that!
The hardest thing about being at Sony was not the travel; it was being divorced from the public and private life I had in New York. Travelling as much as I did, while I didn't lose connection with my friends, I lost a sense of belonging.
I've definitely had obstacles in my career - my whole entire career - to stay a certain weight, to get smaller than I have been, but I look at my family, I look at where I come from and that's not really in our genes.
I had to spend a few years learning how to do movies. I wasn't really good at that. I was a theatre actor first and foremost. So I took my time learning that.
In football, there were drinks available everywhere you looked. On a golf tournament, you could find one free anywhere you wanted it. In tennis and NBA basketball, everybody had a hospitality suite, and so you could go there and load up if you wanted to.
I try to shield my children as far as possible from the public glare. I want them to have a normal childhood like we had. We went to school by the school bus, had school food... There was no special treatment given to us. The same applies to my children as well.
So I had to just kind of go back to the hotel, take a shower, sit quiet, dig down deep, warm up, and allow myself to move into some kind of zone. And then I remembered that a lot of my favorite musical moments are not about perfection.
I had dreams of catching the ball for the final out in the World Series and being mobbed by my teammates. Well, I guess all my dreams didn't come true.
The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.
I'd had my daughter when I was a teenager - I took my daughter to college with me.
I think being the conventional beauty is limiting, so I'm glad I'm not that. If I looked different, I wouldn't have the great opportunities I've had.
Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.
I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.
Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.
There's an academic tradition called the 'Last Lecture.' Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students? Well, for me, there's an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, for me, it wasn't hypothetical.
I had no trouble with strangers finding out about my anxiety. It was my friends and colleagues I was concerned about.
My dad bought a Beatles tape when I was in fifth grade, and that was the first time I ever really - I mean I was into music, but that was the first time it really blew my mind. When I heard the 'Red Compilation,' which wasn't like a proper album, I thought, 'music was more than I had ever thought it was before.'
By the time the 2008 election arrived, we had finally won the Iraq War, or we were on the road to winning it. We won starting in the summer of 2007 going into late 2011.
I baked bread, hand-ground peanuts into butter, grew and froze vegetables, and, every morning, packed lunches so healthful that they had no takers in the grand swap-fest of the lunchroom.
I was stunned to learn that more than 200,000 abandoned, neglected, or orphaned children had been sent from the East Coast to the Midwest on trains between 1854 and 1929.
I grew up in the South with my father; blues and country, that's always been my core. But I had it in me not to do what was expected. I wanted to find my own footing.
I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.
