I was trained as a fine artist. I went to a progressive public school in Pennsylvania that developed these talents, but I was never able to apply to a decent college because I had no math, no science - I was allowed to just paint all day and write.
I'd done plays in middle school, done some for the church in high school, but I had no intention of ever being a professional actor.
I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.
You know, I was the class clown in Catholic school, but I never thought I would make a living out of it!
With a lot of help from my high school teachers, I went to college and became a medical tech at a clinic outside Kansas City.
I was a bed wetter till very late. My mom used to hang my sheets out the window to dry, and I'd have to run home from school in order to beat the other kids to my house so they wouldn't see them.
I went to a Catholic School, and underneath my school uniform, I wore a metal shirt.
I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
Writing-wise, I started when I was 17. Whatever was bothering me, I could just write about it in a song. I was in the west suburbs of Chicago, then I moved an hour south, and then I went to school up on the South Side - Saint Xavier, though I was at Purdue for a second before I dropped out.
My sister is an artist and an interior designer. She went to high school for art. I went to high school for music.
I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.
I don't remember one thing I learned in school.
Unlike any other time in our history, we have to know that staying in school and getting an education is the most important thing you can do.
New Kids On The Block were never my thing; my middle school crush was on Rob Van Winkle.
Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.
When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.
I was lucky enough to go to a school which gave flexibility around education and sport. We had a 1-hour, 30-minute lunch break, and were able to train during this time.
I toned down my accent at school; otherwise, people would pick on me.
People in high school either feel like they're with the cool kids in a clique, or they're isolated - there's no in-between.
When I was a kid, they made us write these essays about what Heaven would be like. I went to this Christian school in Texas, and the thing that I wrote was no bees. No bees. No mud. No infirmities.
I've always been a geek and slightly awkward... slightly umm... I was never the cool kid at school.
Both the Winter and the Summer Solstices are expressions of love. They show us the opposition of light and dark, expansion and contraction, that characterize our experiences in the Earth school so that we can recognize our options as we move through our lives.
There is a lot of hype about drama school, I think.
My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.
The courts don't remove children from their home because the child underperformed at school or required extra long walks or a game of basketball in order to blow off the steam all 5-year-olds have. It's because the parents were unfit, not the kids.
I used to buy records in high school. Mainly dancehall: Super Cat, Buju Banton.
Football games on Friday nights followed by field parties every weekend was how I spent my high school years.
When I went back to New Hampshire after graduating from law school, my plan was to go work for a private firm because I had to pay some student loans off and make money and really just be in the private practice of law. Which can be very rewarding.
My mom told us never to reveal that we were Shia in school. You would find out that some other kid was Shiite, and you would whisper, 'Hey,' or you would see someone at the mosque, and you'd be like, 'Hey, that kid's Shiite!' There was a lot of tension, a lot of violence in Karachi between Shiites and Sunnis.
'SNL' has kind of been like my school.
I mean, I went to a Catholic boys' school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me.
I was always a very good student, 3.98 GPA... But once I found out I only had to take math and science for two years, I didn't take them junior or senior year. And I convinced my high school to give me actual credits for doing professional shows in Minneapolis... as work-study.
I don't want to ever say to somebody, 'You don't have to see it. It's not good.' I'm done with that. I'd love to just do things that I respect. That being said, I do have two children to put through school, so we'll see if I can put my money where my mouth is, but I would love to just work with people I respect.
My brother was an improviser. He's now a lobbyist, but he used to perform improv in the city when he was in high school, and one of the funniest guys I know to this day.