Growing up, I was surrounded by R&B and Hip-Hop, and the closest thing I could find to dance was gymnastics which I watched on TV. So, I just used those avenues I found available right in my milieu to express what was inside of me.
I often find that superheroes are the bachelors or the billionaires - and everyone loves them. Peter Parker is basically the complete opposite. I just think that's what a lot of kids feel like as they're growing up.
My sister was in ballet growing up. I spent almost the entirety of 7 through 12 backstage at Lincoln Center, just running around, waiting for 'The Nutcracker' to end.
When I was growing up, it was a bad time to be in the military. It was the time of Vietnam, but I was never called up.
Growing up in Connecticut, all the Colonial houses looked alike. In Los Angeles, the diversity is so extreme, it's baffling.
Growing up in the north of Holland, I had a healthy and balanced diet.
I love nutcrackers, as I was a ballerina growing up.
I was a ballet dancer growing up and that's what I was convinced I would be.
The best gift I was ever given was the arts. My mum gave me those on a silver platter. Growing up, her and my grandmother would take me to ballets, classical concerts, even smoky jazz clubs I wasn't supposed to be in!
Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados. When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines.
When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.
I had a lot of Barbies growing up, and a lot of porcelain dolls, but I was scared of them. I was so scared of them, I would try to turn their head away and would make my mom take them out of my room.
Growing up, my ideals were Barbra Streisand, Cher, and my mom.
When I think about growing up, I feel most affected by two travels that I made working in cargo boats when I was 16 and 18. One of them crossed through the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and Mobile, Alabama, and another went all the way to Europe.
As a kid, my dad would take me to see indie films when I would visit him in New York. Films that I just wouldn't see growing up in the Bay Area.
I did not sit down and watch 'Baywatch' growing up. But I do specifically remember it coming on, and I remember it going off. I watched something that came on right before and then going back to that channel to watch what was coming on afterwards.
When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.
Being pretty was always a very big thing growing up.
Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.
Growing up, I thought salt belonged in a shaker at the table and nowhere else.
