My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn't be trusted.
She and my uncle were very sociable and would have a lot of people over at night to play cards or whatever. The high spot of those evenings was when we kids got dressed up to do a skit or something to amuse the guests. I loved it.
Even if they're not Asian or super rich... everyone has a nagging mother. Everyone has that obnoxious uncle, or that cousin who's a bit too snobby.
I had a wonderful contact, especially with Uncle Bert who was an angel and led the whole group over to my side of a steep ravine I could not cross to get over to them.
My grandfather left Cuba when Castro came into power and literally left everything. He had two suitcases and two kids and showed up in New Jersey and waited for my uncle to meet up with him. Imagine - there were no cell phones back then!
In those days, the late 1970s, one of the leading politicians was a soon-to-be uncle by marriage of Arnold Schwarzenegger, named Ted Kennedy.
I first went to the Chubut valley, the colony that runs about 800km across the width of Argentina, in 2000. My uncle had been there tracing family and came back saying I had to go. So a year later I did.
Fine-tuning a play like 'Uncle Vanya,' which is already well-known to the people playing it, is not so much a verbal exercise as it is a visceral one.
Even when I was a young kid, I always told my uncle that, when I became a wrestler, I wanted to be Rey Mysterio, Jr. and I wanted to wear the mask. I always pictured myself wearing a mask. I dreamed about it for so long. I wanted to be one of those luchadores who wore the mask, the cape, and the fancy outfits.
I grew up in Decatur, Georgia. We had three boys in the household; actually, it felt like four of us. My pops sort of raised my uncle, too. So, it was four boys and, later, a younger sister.