I was so stressed in the closet. In an interview, I was scared they were going to ask me about a crush, or the type of girl I liked, or whatever it was. And I was going to have to lie by omission. It was always in the back of my mind.
Often, when people ask me what I read as a young girl, I lie. Or, I should say, I lie by omission. I tell them about my brilliant fourth-grade teacher, Miss Artis, who assigned us 'Johnny Tremain' and 'Where the Red Fern Grows' and 'Tuck Everlasting,' all books that made an impression on me. And people nod in approval.
There's nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it 'jazz parenting.'
I was a huge 'Charlie's Angels' fan when I was a little girl, and I can go back to sitting on my couch in Ottawa, Ontario, watching TV and thinking, 'How do I get to there from here, because that looks way better.'
I found that if I offered to cook for a girl, my odds improved radically over simply asking a girl out. Through my efforts to attract the opposite sex, I found that not only did cooking work, but that it was actually fun.
I used to suffer from stage fright, which at times was an ordeal. I won't perform live again. I'm going to do some TV shows and videos but nothing else... I don't like to travel too much or do concerts. I'm more of a studio and home girl.
My mother was the kind of person who was very much part of her tribe and very much a satellite of her tribe. She was the girl who left her family at the age of 17 and went to Washington. My mother was orphaned at three and then was brought up by my aunt Goldie. So, yes she belonged, but there was a part of her that didn't.
LaGuardia High School is a place of acceptance. You have every type of kid there, performing. The outcast girl would not have been made fun of in my high school.
I'm an outdoors girl - I like to go fishing, riding four-wheelers, hunting.
Social media forces girls to bear witness to painful realities of relationship that were previously hidden from view. It is a new kind of TMI, or 'too much information': publicly posted photographs of an outing or party you did not attend, or a personal web page like Formspring, can send a girl into paroxysms of anxiety and grief.
I met a girl when I was in third grade. Kids were beating her up - she was deaf - so I walked her home. Her parents were deaf and they gave me the alphabet on a card. I learned it and taught my friends how to do the alphabet - which was outlawed in our school because we used to talk to each other in class.
In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls.
We feel we're setting a trend. Other girl groups watch our style and see how we rap. And there are some male rappers I feel we've overthrown.
I was a slightly overweight, spiky-fringed, rat's-tailed '80s girl who was just showing up. That's all I've ever really done to get here, just kept showing up. Even when I didn't want to. That's what I do.
I must be very clear in one thing... Being a pageant girl is not who I am or what defines me.
I want poverty to end in tomorrow's Pakistan. I want every girl in Pakistan to go to school.
I am the only girl in the family so everyone pampered me.
Once, in Australia, I ate 33 pancakes in 20 minutes, and I only did it because they said a girl could never enter the competition.
What's the worst that can happen? If it doesn't do well I can put on my big girl panties, deal with it and move on.
My first job was in pantomime; I was a chorus girl in 'Dick Whittington' at 16. I got the part by ringing the director daily to see if anyone had dropped out, and it paid off eventually, when I was cast as a rat!
