I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.
I knew that I wanted to intern at 'Teen Vogue' from the moment the first issue hit newsstands. Luckily, the team at Polo Ralph Lauren, where I interned during high school, really believed in me and arranged for an interview with the editors.
Everyone wants to be a stylist. If you know that's your calling, then you need to intern as much a humanly possible. You need to go to fashion school if you can.
I'm not really well educated - other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don't know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.
I was super-obsessed with cover videos. When I was, like, 10, I would come home from school and watch them from 4 o'clock until 8 o'clock every night. I was so intrigued that people took these super-popular songs and did them their own way.
I remember, before I started high school, I was really intrigued by the Buddy Holly/James Dean style of glasses. This was a long, long time before they were sold at every Urban Outfitters.
I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.
I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science.
From the beginning, I knew intuitively that if nothing else, music was safe, and that nobody could tell me anything about it. Music didn't need a middleman, whereas all the other things in school needed some kind of explanation.
I was raised Irish Catholic and went to Holy Names Academy, an all-girl's private Catholic school. I loved the nuns there and I love them to this day.
After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin - where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband!
I went to school at the University of Rhode Island and pursued a degree in journalism, which is a little bit ironic.
I studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which was founded by Laurence Olivier and has alumni like Jeremy Irons and Daniel Day Lewis. It's a very erudite institution; its ethos, really, was always theatre-based.
I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, but I started doing theater in high school because it was a requirement. At first, I was completely irritated. But I ended up loving it.
I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated.
My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.
When I got into high school, I got really into basketball. I had this itch that I wanted to just move. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew that if basketball became a scholarship or something, it would be a means to that. It turned out I couldn't jump that high.
My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That's just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a 'B' because a 'B' was not good enough.
When I was 14 or 15, I was a really good volleyball player, so I thought, 'Well, maybe I'll just get a scholarship to an Ivy League school through volleyball.' Then I quit when I decided to focus on theater.
I never went to camp as a kid. I couldn't get into an Ivy League school. I wouldn't join a biker club.
