I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.
All I can really tell you about my father is that he did odd things like put tin foil on a bottle of beer after having a few sips, then put it in the refrigerator to perhaps have on another night.
I think my father kept struggling to get us into better neighborhoods, better schools. One of the worst jobs he had was folding shirts under these fluorescent lights all day at the equivalent of a Kmart. I remember visiting him at work, thinking, 'When I grow up, I've got to do anything else.'
The first music I was ever exposed to was Irish folk music, like the Clancy Brothers. My father plays that and Christmas songs.
Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969.
I knew Henry Fonda was my father, but I didn't know who I was. They all thought of me as Henry Fonda's son. Unfortunately for them, they never got to know me.
I grew up in the South with my father; blues and country, that's always been my core. But I had it in me not to do what was expected. I wanted to find my own footing.
I want to be fulfilled in myself, rather than try to follow exactly in my father's footsteps.
And since my father started training me, he always explained to me how important footwork is and how strong your legs have to be.
I just wasn't psychologically made to get married or, God forbid, be a father.
I've never had a particular skill. I can't cook, dance, play an instrument, speak a foreign language. This used to worry me. I'd think, when I'm grown up, at 18, then I made it 21, it will be clear what role I should have in life. It never happened. I never signed on the dotted line as the sort of adult my father wanted.
My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
When I was younger, my father was in the Foreign Service and we lived in Nigeria, Panama, and London, but for the most part I grew up in the South and D.C. I got the travel bug as a little person and I've bounced around a lot.
My father had been in the German Diplomatic Service, and although he had been in the United States since World War II and out of diplomacy, it was something that was very much talked about in the family. So when I went to college, it was always my intention to try to get into the Foreign Service.
When I returned from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972, my father was running a forging business with a turnover of Rs 3.5 crore. But I had no patience and wanted to grow the business via exports.
I have the strength from my mother, the survivability. I have wonderful qualities from my mother - but please, Mother, forgive me - I heard judgment constantly about my father.
My father had very little formal education.
I learned a lot in those first years in Miami, while struggling just for survival, by observing my father's fortitude.
I would not be gotten into a schoolhouse until I was eight years old. Nor did I accomplish much after I started. I doubt if I had gone to school six months in all when my father died. I was fourteen at the time.
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
