My brother and I always had conversations about me being a rapper. I always used to tell him, 'I'm gonna be the hottest rapper.'
When I was a little kid, I used to watch with my brother when there was Macho Man and Hulk Hogan. But then I fell out of it for a few years.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
My brother was an improviser. He's now a lobbyist, but he used to perform improv in the city when he was in high school, and one of the funniest guys I know to this day.
The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.
My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'
One Christmas, I wrote a nativity play. But nobody turned up on the day of the performance apart from my brother and my cousins, so I just read the whole script onstage and made my brother pretend to be one of the animals at the inn.
We opened Panda Inn on June 8, 1973. The whole family - my parents, a brother and sister - all worked at the restaurant for free. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in San Gabriel and didn't have any money.
Everybody I meet who uses 'WhatsApp', I ask them a question: 'How did you hear about it?' And they say, 'My friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp.' We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically.
I didn't have a fraternity-like experience. I mean, I grew up with an older brother and a lot of male cousins and we were very physical with each other. We were very rambunctious when we were kids. But I never thought much - nor did I have reason to think much - about institutionalized hazing. But I think there's a reason young men are drawn to it.
The education of my brother and myself was of paramount importance to my parents, and in addition to their strong encouragement, they were prepared to make any sacrifice to further our intellectual development.
You know, I'm a father. I'm a brother. I'm a son. And I'm a grandfather. So many times I have to be the intermediary, the person to referee and help solve disputes and to protect and to guide.
My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. So I don't think it was motivated by any anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.
One of my biggest influences growing up was Jamie O'Brien. He was like an older brother to me.
I put three productions of my youngest brother Jason on my album, on 'Konnichiwa,' and that made me happy, to be able to do that for him.
My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
I remember my brother was always a jerk to me. One time, he bought Jimi Hendrix's 'Smash Hits,' and he gave it to me because he didn't like it, thinking it was a punishment.
The last episode of Dallas was in '1991.' Unfortunately, it was a terrible episode to end the show on: it was a sort of 'It's a Wonderful Life' with Larry as the Jimmy Stewart character. In that episode, I was an ineffectual-schlep kind of brother, who got divorced three or four times and was a Las Vegas reject.
But my brother Joey was there, and my sister Tina Nina Minnelli was there.
Sometimes it's so weird just to do an interview. This morning I was back in my parents' house, with my brother, and we went for a jog together, then had breakfast as a family. And a couple of hours later I'm wearing high heels and a dress and makeup, and talking about my job.
