School Quotes - Page 368

[Manhattan School Of Music] were kind of just getting the jazz program up and going when I first started there. I was 17 in September of 1984 when I started there.

[Larry Laurenzano] gave me a junior high school saxophone to take to high school, because I was always taking one of our school horns home to practice and I couldn't afford to buy one. He gave my friend, Tyrone, a tuba and he gave me a junior high saxophone for each of us to use at Performing Arts High School with. My audition piece was selections from Rocky. We were not sophisticated. But we had some spirit about it. We enjoyed it, and it was a way out.

I asked all through third, fourth and fifth grade, when they were asking kids to be in the band, to be in the school band. But they wouldn't let me do it.

I was in choir [at school].

I finally got to junior high and I got to start saxophone. There were a few of us that were in the beginner band in sixth grade that made it to the advanced band, which was called the morning band at our junior high school in Staten Island.

I was finishing up at High School of Performing Arts and finally, by the end of junior year and start of senior year, made some progress as a 16 year-old classical saxophone player. But not really... not like how the legit cats do. But I love the [Jacques] Ibert, love [Alexander] Glazunov, love the [Paul] Creston.

I'm reaching a certain level [at school] that I had been aspiring to with all these incredibly advanced classical peers around me that I had been trying to be able to hang with them a little bit.

I also met Charles McPherson around that time, end of high school. I was 17 and I had followed Phil around for a year and pestered him enough to finally give me saxophone lessons. So all of a sudden I've got Phil Woods and Charles McPherson around me.

Hearing Sonny Rollins live... that was really amazing. There were so many things that really blew me away at that time [of schooling].

I had a lot of bad habits in how I was playing the horn. And I slowly, in high school and college, started to recognize them and get them a little better. But it was not an overnight process, I'll say that.

I got to perform the [Jaques] Ibert Concertino Da Camera with a brilliant pianist at school named Chunga. I got to perform the [Alexander] Glazunov Concerto in senior year with our school orchestra and the Jewish Grossman orchestra. I won a scholarship from the Goldman band to perform the [Paul] Creston Concerto. Which I never played with them, but they still gave me the money.

A tenor player named Bud Revels there at the time. A lot of really nice associations amongst the students. Garry Dial was a returning student. He actually got me on Red Rodney's band subbing a little bit. I gigged some with Red when I was 21 in 1988. So I had a lot of nice associations that came from [ Laguardia School of Arts]. But a lot of my education was going on in the clubs. Hearing music and sitting in.

I went to Catholic school in and out. I'm what you call a recovering Catholic. I have many major issues with the church.

I played sports in high school and in college.

The most important thing I learned in school was how to touch type.

I've always said that with kids' TV that people get stuck in it from drama school but that's not fair because I know myself that when you go in creatively, kids are so much more open to ideas. You're so much freer to mess about and try things.

I struggle as a writer, and I'm convinced that if I was at school now, I'd be termed as having ADS. Two minutes and I'm drifting.

I can't say I ever wanted to become an entertainer. I already was one, sort of-around the house, at school, doing my magic tricks, throwing my voice and doing Popeye impersonations. People thought I was funny; so I kind of took entertaining for granted It was inevitable that I'd start giving little performances.

Well, when I was younger, in high school, I started out smoking pot. Which escalated into taking acid on a regular basis, which escalated into selling acid. And then I started, when I went to college, I started doing opiates.

I'd be satisfied just coaching in high school. I turned down a number of colleges when I was teaching in South Bend, Indiana, before I went into the service. I honestly believe that if I hadn't enlisted in the service, I would never have left high school teaching. I'm sure I would have never left.

To work a fell revenge a man's a fool, if not instructed in a woman's school.

I went to a Catholic high school, which, to this day, I could burn down. And I got great revenge because they had their fiftieth anniversary, andThe Baltimore Sun called me and said, ‘What did you think of your high school?’ And I said, ‘They discouraged every interest I ever had.’ And I saw that in print.

Hairspray is the only movie I made that's subversive, because they're doing it in every high school in America. A man's playing a woman, and two men sing a love song to each other.

You go to school to figure out who you want to be and how you can do it, and [maybe] I should have, because the films would probably be technically better.

I never got along in school really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.