I really turned into, you know, the real street kid. I was kind of like a runaway, but I had a mother, you know what I mean, and I had a place to stay.
We always had chocolates and my mother was careful to make sure they were unwrapped in advance so the paper wouldn't rustle in the middle of a performance.
I think of my mother constantly. And how she sacrificed her home and car for my freedom.
Thanks to my mother's sacrifices, I was able to attend one of the best schools in Chicago.
I was telling my manager that I wanted to quit the industry because the synopsis I was receiving from filmmakers all felt like a lie. Yes, they were heroine-centric... but the concepts were simple. Like a rape victim, her struggling against the odds and gaining revenge, or a wife who supports her husband endlessly, or a sacrificial mother.
My mother used to ask, 'Why do you always write such sad songs?' I don't know if I was different from a lot of adolescents in that respect.
When I was growing up, my family was plagued by poverty. My mother, a single parent, worked around the clock to make sure her children - me, my five brothers, and three sisters - could eat and have a safe place to sleep. We hardly saw her.
One of the first major storylines that 'All My Children' featured was Erica Kane, a rebellious daughter, and her mother, sort of a matriarchal type, who was trying to guide her daughter to a safer place.
When I read the 'Dick and Jane' stories, I thought they were afraid they might forget each other's names because they always said each other's names - a lot. So if Jane didn't see the dog, Dick would say, 'Look Jane, look. There is the dog next to Sally, Jane. The dog is also next to mother, Jane. The dog is next to father, Jane.'
I have a mother who never took no for an answer when it came to her creative pursuits. She started a hair salon in her spare bedroom and four years later had 30 employees.
I heard my mother talking badly of me to people who were talking badly of me in her salon. That's probably the thing that I'm most sensitive of in all my friendships and my relationships. I just... I just can't take that. I'm comfortable with enemies, but I can't take it from friends.
My mother was 45 when she had me, so when I was in high school my parents were the same age as my friends' grandparents.
Mexico is so close to us. No matter how long we stay here, we identify as Americans first, but we also have a place for our mother country. That is very visible in San Antonio.
My father was a Catholic, but my mother wasn't. She had to do that weird deal you do as a Catholic - they deign to sanction your marriage and you have to bring your children up as Catholics.
My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.
My mother was sarcastic and delightful and, trust me, quite remarkable.
The sassy black woman who can land a good joke was sort of my go-to audition. Or playing a struggling mother.
My father was placid and easygoing. He owned a small shoe store where I helped out on Saturdays. I think he'd have been pleased if I'd made a career of working in the shoe store. But my mother was ambitious. She encouraged us to read books, and she pushed us toward a musical education.
Nick spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums. His mother and I divorced when he was 4. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours.
My parents told me that children were taken from their families in 1941, and my mother had a child taken from her - with the goal of saving him.
