I was probably a B student in high school, but it wasn't until I got to college that I said, 'Oh! This is what it's all about.' And then I became an A student. I studied journalism in college and that's what really kicked it into high gear for me.
I was a jaded high schooler, I was still into pop music, though not as sincerely as I am now. It was more tongue-in-cheek back then.
I think old school TV shows helped in raising your kids and helped in the way things should be done. Now you just see kids disrespecting their parents, you see kids cursing and all kind of things that shouldn't be done.
Growing up the way I did, it was tough being one of only a few black people in the town and in school. What my upbringing got me is never feeling completely safe emotionally. Never knowing when something racial was going to pop off based on how I look. So that's something I've carried with me personally and is reflected in my work.
A lot of people I went to college with felt like they wanted to pursue theater exclusively, so I don't think that I really was in competition with people that I went to school with.
I'd say I've gone to grad school for comedy being on "Community."
My mom wouldn't let me buy clothes she didn't like, so I dressed like a middle-aged woman in high school.
I haven't done improv since I was in middle school.
If somebody is deemed more talented within the confines of the school it doesn't mean they're going to have the most successful career.
What happens in our lives is not really anybody's fault but our own... When I was in high school, I was in an atheist crowd, and it was the consensus that religion was a crutch.
People always ask if I was really voted Most Bizarre Girl in high school. But that one's actually true. I was living in Michigan in a very conservative town and had a nose-ring and a shaved head and did kind of strange things.
It was only when I went to acting school that I was like, "You are absolutely such a pigheaded freak show that you thought you, at the age of 12 or 13, could have a better understanding of Stanislavski. Why did you think that you didn't need to go to school?" It was quite funny. But, I was certainly inspired.
I discovered lots of music; electronic synth bands from the mid-'80s like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and Cabaret Voltaire. My friends and I used to take two-hour trips to the record store in Newcastle and we started buying copies of The Face and i-D. And then I went to art school and as time progressed, I ended up where I am now.
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.
A woman gave my dad $400 so we could get an apartment. We were living in a park. That's how we got started: Four hundred bucks, and look at me. When I donate a computer to a school, I never know what's going to come out of it.
I had a very tough childhood. I came here from Italy in the '70s and didn't speak a word of English, so the kids at school tormented me. Truly, it was horrifying the names they called me, and the teachers never really did a thing to stop it.
I think children learning to cook can be such a wonderful thing. It can help build confidence, make them feel good about themselves. It helped me build my ego and even start to get acceptance at school. I'd bring things to class that I'd cooked at home.
I started running in Junior High School. I was so slow and uncoordinated the coach set me up with a paper route so that instead of going to work out after school I went to the corner of Providence Ave at Crestline St. and picked up a bundle of 15 newspapers.
I'm quite dyslexic in school.
My dad's cool with that kind of stuff. He always wanted me to do my best. I'm quite dyslexic in school. My dad let me figure out what I wanted to do on my own. My parents never really lecture me.
Baseball was my main sport, but I peaked when I reached high school and so my baseball career stopped.
The "encounter" with the people on the peripheries is intended to draw them into the circle of common care and concern - that call to encounter is, to use a favorite world of John Paul II's, a call to solidarity. And that means, it seems to me, aggressive Catholic efforts to empower the poor - and a profound Catholic challenge to all those cultural forces that are eroding stable families, which are the elementary schools where we learn to take responsibility for our lives, which is the highest exercise of freedom.
I come from the school of thought that says when people have more money in their pocket during economic times, it increases demand or investment. Small businesses begin to grow, and jobs are added.
