I worked a variety of jobs in retail and at coffee shops all through high school. And, though I was surrounded by people who cared about me, part of me ached with every accomplishment, because my parents weren't there to share my joy.
We didn't have a backyard, so as I child, I would turn the coffee table into a stage and put on shows. But it was just a fun thing to do; I never thought about it as a profession. That started as a fluke; my mother had a friend who was an artist with a theater company, and I started going there after school because my mom knew I'd be safe.
I'm from the Detroit area, just north of Detroit. But then I went to boarding school in northern Michigan, so a little bit colder up there. But beautiful, very beautiful.
No, my step-daughter just opened a theatre school for children, I have another daughter who works in the record industry and another who is going back to collage and I have two little ones at home.
I've been caught in parachute pants. And on my high school yearbook, they used the wrong picture. They were supposed to use the picture of me with a nice suit on. They used me with my collar flipped up, in a fuchsia and white striped shirt. I blame Prince and Michael Jackson in the Eighties for that.
Joe Frazier was the epitome of a champion. I mean, here is a guy who was total old school, blue collar, who would fight anybody. You know, he didn't tell you he was the best fighter pound for pound.
I dressed like Leslie Caron as a teenager: soft school pleats, Peter Pan collars.
Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.
When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.
I think my senior year in high school was when I started wearing Jordans. It was our team rule that we had to play in them so that's when I got - not introduced to them, but got into it. Through the minors I started collecting some, just to wear, and that's when I told myself I want to become a Jordan athlete and did all I could to do it.
In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in the Wisconsin State Legislature, and I openly supported many of their reforms, including changes to collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.
A friend at school was always being laughed at because his father emptied dustbins for a living. But those who laughed worshipped famous footballers. This is an example of our topsy-turvy view of 'success.' Who would we miss most if they did not work for a month, the footballer or the garbage collector?
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.
Americans donate blood every day - on high school and college campuses during blood drives, in workplaces after a coworker falls ill, and in hospitals as loved ones prepare for surgery.
Our promise to our children should be this: if you do well in school, we will pay for you to obtain a college degree.
My college degree is from a great university in 1944. I got my master's at Harvard graduate school, completely co-ed, in 1945. My mother got her college degree in 1920. What's the problem? Those opportunities were always there for women.
To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.
When I'm talking about the white working class, here's what I'm defining: high school degree, no more, and working in a blue-collar job or a low-skilled service job. When I'm talking about the white, upper-middle class, I'm talking about people who work in the professions or managerial jobs and have at least a college degree.
The first dream I had was just to get a college education. I got through college in three years, taking extra classes in summer school.
