My mother was American, and my father was from the Caribbean, and there was a big open door into the world of humanity and music.
My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.
I knew the full 'Judy Garland Carnegie Hall' double album set at age 2. And then my mother wondered why I was gay. I was like, 'Are you nuts? You would make me get on the table to sing Judy Garland songs and you're upset?'
I was always singing and dancing for my mother when I wasn't glued to the television watching I Love Lucy or the Carol Burnett Show.
My mother's dad dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician. Anything that was broken, he could fix. Anybody anywhere in our community knew that if there was a problem, Carl was there to fix it.
My father's father died when he was a teenager, and dad went to work to support his mother and two siblings as a carpenter and as a builder's mule, hauling carts of lumber to construction sites when it was too icy for the mules to climb the hills.
My mother emigrated from Russia as a young child. She couldn't speak English and had no education. Her father died at age 32, leaving the family destitute. An uncle, who worked as a carpenter, supported the family.
My father liked doing carpentry work, construction work, in the summer vacation. And so my mother designed a cabin, a log cabin, like a - it was like a Swiss chalet. I was twelve years old, and my father and I built it on a rocky point peninsula out into Lake Superior.
An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.
There's no pressure; like Kate said, it is about carving your own future. No one is going to try to fill my mother's shoes; what she did was fantastic. It's about making your own future and your own destiny, and Kate will do a very good job of that.
It's really sort of morbid, but she said her mother wanted to see me all her life. And when she died, she made just one request: that a picture of me be put into her casket. So somewhere in England, I'm in a casket.
You can't help but feel a little bit like a mother to the younger cast members.
Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
There was always music in my house when I was a kid. On Saturday mornings, my mother would clean house to 45s blaring out the songs of Neil Diamond, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, Harry Chapin.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.
When I had photographed Prince William's mother, I brought along a CD of Dalida, a French singer, that we played on set all day to relax everyone. I decided to do the same thing for Catherine and William. The contrast of the contemporary informal music playing in the beautiful rooms with so much history caused a lot of laughter.
My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home - I think in those days we called them arguments - about who was right and who was wrong.
My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism.
