When I got out of school, I just started doing plays of the off-off-Broadway route, and for many years, that's what I did, slowly doing work in tiny theaters, building relationships with people in the business. It's not a showy story.
Vail Resorts School of Shred program is a great way to help encourage kids to stay active by getting them outside and on the mountain.
I wasn't shuffling from one sport to the next that much. I had downtime to just be a high school student.
When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
I didn't really get sidetracked into being a singer. It was just something I started to do for fun in school, like singing the national anthem.
I was trying to become a legitimate trumpet player, and I had a scholarship to Eastman School of Music. I was really on my way. But I didn't take the scholarship. I got sidetracked, because when summers came around, I started playing with a rock-and-roll band.
When I wrote 'Sideways Stories from Wayside School' I never expected it to be published. It was kind of a hobby. Now, it's a job, but it's a job I like very much.
From high school, you can see my Sierra Club card - I've been a member since 1979. That gives you an indication of early interest.
In my senior year of high school, I read an article in 'Newsweek' about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. I felt a sense of shock - this was happening in the region where I'm from, and people don't know about it. I wanted to understand.
'Beasts of No Nation' began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.
As you look around the country there are still a significant number of states where their whole school debate is over school funding and we've been focused on the quality debate for most of the '90s.
My parents found this paper from my high school theater class where you had to write down what you wanted in a significant other. At the bottom, it said, 'No athletes, because they're arrogant.'
I've had many a player tell me all through high school and right up until signing day that they were coming to Alabama, then they signed with somebody else.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
When you're left on the floor of a hospital gasping for breath, or you can't get your kid a school place, the simplest things are your idea of radical.
I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.
A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
I grew up in Singapore, and I went to Australia for law school, and after law school, I started doing stand-up comedy.
My mother was a single mom, and she was a claims adjuster at an insurance company. She actually dropped out of school - she was going to become a registered nurse - because she had to take care of me and my brother.
My family moved from California to New Jersey in the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I will never forget the first day in a new school, walking into the cafeteria during lunch and not knowing a single soul. I didn't feel confident enough to share a seat at just anyone's table.
