I like a challenge. I like learning new skills because I didn't learn much at school.
I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.
I watch old school film so that I can learn so much that I just sort of miss all the new stuff.
While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.
After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents' example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.
We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.
Mum and Dad used to always follow me and support me, taking me to Newcastle on a Sunday morning after getting up at 7 A.M. They have always supported my football but always told me how important school was.
As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.
My high school class was the first one to know, during the college recruiting process, to know there was the option to play professional basketball, to know that the WNBA was there, and to know I better pick a school that is going to help me get to the next level.
I love being in the present. When I was playing for my school, the only thing I wanted to do was get selected for the under-16 or the under-19 district teams. When I was selected for the district, I would think about the next level, which was getting selected for the state side. I'm a person who lives very in the moment.
I wanted to get that Division I scholarship and play ball and go to school for free, and I was always about getting to that next step... I was always ahead of myself in some way, shape or form, and trying to envision how to get further along and closer to fulfilling that dream of being free and having creative agency, so to speak.
I didn't want to act in high school, because I was sick of auditioning for Nickelodeon, Disney mean girls, or the cheerleader.
People would see me on a Nickelodeon commercial, and I would hear about it the next day in school.
I put everyone in my school on to Nicki Minaj before she blew up. I was obsessed with her and I was like, 'If she's the best female rapper then I've got to be better than her.'
I knew that I could sing when I was young. I would listen to a lot of jazz; I'm a big jazz fan. When I first got to high school and studied musical theater, I could sing. But I added certain things to my voice, and I realized after graduating high school that this is the kind of voice I had. It's not very nimble, but it's heavy.
I didn't want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.
I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.
Church was a requirement - there was no choice in the matter; so was vacation bible school. Gospel has been in me since I was a kid.
I am the worst at doing my hair. I have no clue how to do it; I just feel like I need to go to hair beauty school or something because it's really becoming a problem.
I wasn't popular in high school; I had no friends.
