I hate overweight, because it implies that there's a weight standard I should be adhering to.
Isn't it amazing how celebrity status preempts even the most ingrained hatreds?
The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.
I placed over a thousand deaf people in jobs throughout my career working for the deaf.
One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.
I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word.
So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.
On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people.
It's okay to be a fat man. It's prestige and power and all of that. But fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.
It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.
In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it.
For a long time, I really struggled with the idea of being an actor because I really felt that I should be in the Peace Corps.
I was scared, because I knew that in the political arena, you have to satisfy so many different types of people at once, and I wasn't sure that I could speak for everybody and be politically correct.
I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.
So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.
