I'm only two years older than Brad Pitt, but I look a lot older, which used to greatly frustrate me. It doesn't anymore. I don't have to fit into that category and get trounced by Tom Cruise and Brad.
Brad Paisley has always been really great to me, and that's no secret.
It's ironic, really. Guys should be excited that I got Kristen Bell. If Brad Pitt gets Kristen Bell, it's like, 'Well, of course he did.' With me, it should be, 'Oh good, a normal-looking guy got her. Maybe I'll get me a Kristen Bell.' But guys hate my guts for always dating women I have no right to be with.
I have no problem with commitment - you can't have a real relationship without it. I can flip on a switch in my brain, and even if the next Brad Pitt is standing next to me, I won't look at him. But I can also turn that switch off, and then I collect attractive boys.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of 'The Brady Bunch.' Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying 'hi' to everyone, whether they knew me or not.
When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
I have met people in the street who say, 'You look like Karren Brady, but she is fat.' But I don't care. I am happy with the way I look; it's not something that drives me mad.
When I'm at home I'm 'Karren Peski Solido mother-of-two' when I'm at work I'm 'Karren Brady don't mess with me.'
As my father taught me, and he drove home that point, he said, 'Just remember something. You don't need to tell anybody how good you are. You show them how good you are.' And he drove that home with me. So I learned early not to brag about how good I was or what I could do but let my game take that away and show them that I could play well enough.
People like Bill Maher, who brags about being a cynic, it sickens me. I am the least cynical person I know, and I am very, very skeptical.
I pray every night, sometimes long prayers about a lot of things and a lot of people, but I don't talk about it or brag about it because that's between God and me, and I'm no better than anybody else in God's sight.
I am proud of my kids and happy to brag about their achievements. Their success has been an immense source of happiness for me.
I've toured around the world. I've worked with men, women. I feel like I've been unusually lucky to have supportive friends around me, and I feel tremendously supportive about my peers. I can't wait to brag about how funny my friends are.
That's why fame freaks me out in a lot of ways - because how genuine of a connection can you have when you're a commodity, and a conversation with you means bragging rights? That's terrifying to me.
Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.
When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
I wish my name was Brian because maybe sometimes people would misspell my name and call me Brain. That's like a free compliment and you don't even gotta be smart to notice it.
When I was a kid, my mother used to feed me mashed-potato sandwiches, brussel sprout sandwiches; my brain cells were starving from lack of food. I'll eat anything. I'll eat dirt.
I detest jokes - when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn't know it's funny or doesn't treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it's a sort of rage against society.
It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.
