I performed in high school for Black History Month at a talent show, but besides that I didn't have the resources to perform so I spent my time as a teenager writing music.
For children, diversity needs to be real and not merely relegated to learning the names of the usual suspects during Black History Month or enjoying south-of-the-border cuisine on Cinco de Mayo. It means talking to and spending time with kids not like them so that they may discover those kids are in fact just like them.
If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?
So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.
I ended up moving to Miami and bartending, but the party atmosphere is a black hole down there. People party all the time, and if you're working in the industry, you're sleeping all day and at the club all night, day after day.
A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.
The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.
If you wanted to travel backwards in time, you're out of luck. We have theories on how it might be possible to do so, but they all involve wormholes and black holes and other stuff that would probably kill you. If you want to travel forward in time, you just have to go really fast.
There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.
I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.
Between Alan Freed in Cleveland and Bob Horn and Lee Stewart in Philadelphia and George 'Hound Dog' Lorenz in Buffalo, they began to find out that white kids liked black music. It was a very significant period of time before I got there.
All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?
I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.
When you're travelling, your day is jam-packed. I just don't have time to whip out a PC all the time. But I can whip out a BlackBerry and tweet. I keep a constant diary of where I'm at and why I'm there.
I'm the blackest villain of all time.
Here's a big risk: Staying with my husband during the blackest time in our marriage. Several years into our marriage, I wanted to walk away, and I didn't.
A long time ago, my grandfather used to play blackjack with me, when I was very small, and I quite enjoyed that.
I have a theory. An audience doesn't need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn't have to be about race just because there's a Negro in it.
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
I woke up one time coming out of a blackout, and I was on an airplane, descending to land in Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. And all I can think is I must have decided it was a good idea to go to France, and got my passport, and got on a plane.
