In the Negro Leagues, we'd play three games a day on the weekends. Then we'd ride the bus and travel to play the next day someplace else. You'd hang your shirt out the bus window to dry.
Once in a while, I write in Malay and work on something fun that's more for the local Malaysian market, and when that happens, it's always something really special; it speaks volumes that I'm doing it for my fans who have been there for me since day one.
Of course, the whole Andy Kaufman angle was classic. I'm real proud of that. I mean that is something people are still talking about 20 years later, making movies about and that sort of thing. I mean not a day goes by that someone doesn't mention Andy Kaufman to me.
At the end of the day, we all want to win, so everybody has to sacrifice when you want to be a part of something special.
The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.
My initial training was on the keyboard - mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.
There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.
I'd actually love to play Sonny in 'Dog Day Afternoon' now that it's being adapted for Broadway. People don't talk about that movie that much, but it's really a beautiful gay love story.
Back in the day, I was afraid to speak out. When I get music behind me, it feels like I can soothe the hurt and put it in vocals and say it to the room the way I feel it.
I pray every day, several times. It soothes me. I don't ask for anything, except for health.
I am around people I love to be with all day; I'm not lonely. The simplest, happiest pleasure is being on my couch with my dog, Neville. Nothing is more comforting or soothing.
I will be up at 8 A.M. making spaghetti bolognese for Peter and Sophia's evening meal if I'm working that day. I may not get back for the evening, and I worry if I don't do that, then they won't eat anything.
My sophomore year I spent exactly one day on the JV football team. It was the tryout day.
Sunday is like this entertainment scrum for me, because I've only got a day, one day of fun. So I want to have brunch, and I want to see a movie, and I want to watch 'Game of Thrones,' and I'm trying to watch 'The Sopranos' from the beginning, and I want to play four hours of video games. So, it's, like, as regimented as my work life.
Not a day goes by where someone doesn't write me asking me for more 'Sordid Lives.'
I've been singing properly every day since I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I have never had any problems with my voice, ever. I've had a sore throat here and there, had a cold and sung through it, but that day it just went while I was onstage in Paris during a radio show. It was literally like someone had pulled a curtain over it.
I don't get sore. If you're working out every day, you're not going to be sore.
A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.
Every day is deeper and richer and more soulful.
When 'The Sound of Music' aired live on NBC, 18 million people were talking about theater the next day. That's incredible. 'Grease' felt like a chance for me to participate in that landscape.
