I'm a product of public housing. My parents grew up poor, but their dream was to own a home.
My parents were engineers. In the 1970s, they came to the United States as refugees from Uganda. Seeing everything this country did for my family inspired me to want to give back through public service.
Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and we're usually right! But it rarely works.
Maybe I was unpopular a bit because I was a teacher's pet. But even the teachers complained about me. They would say to my parents, 'For every one question any pupil asks, Walter asks 10.'
I had a stage when I was 12 years old. I had a puppet show career. I wrote horror stories in camp, and all the parents called and complained.
I never wanted to be a puppeteer. I stopped puppeteering when I was about 18. I puppeteered when I was eleven years old to 18 to make extra money to go to Europe, which I made half of and my parents gave me half.
I know theater can improve the quality of people's lives, and I know theater can heal. I've worked as a doctor clown in a hospital for two years. I have seen sick kids and sad parents and doctors be lifted and transported in moments of pure joy. I know theater unites us.
I needed to purge myself of all the attention my parents had given me - I wasn't neglected enough as a child.
My parents were teetotalers and my grandparents were - it's all the way back. It's New English puritanical tradition.
People think I must have pushy parents, but that's not the case.
Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
One way of paying tribute to my parents was 'bearing witness' as the Quakers do - writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great.
Above all, I believe every child, no matter their ZIP code or their parents' jobs, deserves access to a quality education.
Parents who neglect their children, who don't know where they are, who don't know what they're doing, who don't know who they're hanging out with, you're gonna find yourselves spending some quality time with your kids, in jail, together.
I have sometimes questioned the advice and direction I received from my parents and grandparents, but I never questioned the fact that they loved me. I learned that they were in a better position to know more about right and wrong than I did from my limited understanding and from my limited experience.
My parents started questioning me about whether or not I was transgender - whether or not I was trying to be a woman. It was a big argument.
As a person, I think you're always kind of searching for something or going through a hardship, whether it's your parents splitting up or anything like that. I mean, my parents stuck together, for whatever reason, until I was about 23, and then they decided to call it quits.
My parents have been together for 65 years. They're both really stubborn. They're not quitters.
My parents would drive us to Florida every spring in this big old, rusy Suburban, and we'd collect stuff on the beach for our aquarium back in Ohio; we had this big saltwater aquarium back in Ohio. Every time we found anything, any mollusk, my mom would bring out the guidebook and quiz us on what it was, so that stuff was built in early.
