I'm very much interested in getting prisons off the stock market. I'm very much interested in upgrading the public school system... and taking a second look at capital punishment.
In every school, community center, city hall, and state capitol, there are women who are making their voices heard and standing up for the people they serve - women who aren't just demanding change but finding ways to create it. They are making an impact, and along the way, they're inspiring others to do the same.
I walked to Seward School first through fourth grade. It's just amazing to me now that we'd walk down 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill.
I was in an a cappella group in high school.
I played piano back in my elementary school days and I sang a cappella back in college.
Hats have been my thing pretty much my whole life but finance has not. I would go to the corner store and buy really cheap baseball style caps and wear those to school.
I was a kid who got picked on in school, and now the guys beating up those kids were wearing red caps and using my music to fuel that aggression. But if they listen to the lyrics, the aggression is targeted at them.
High school is cool, especially that first-love mentality. That's what 'Sierra Burgess' captures is, like, his first moment of love. That's what I love. I like that innocence.
The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
My father was a sheep shearer, so I grew up in a caravan; we'd go around from shearing shed to shearing shed. My mother always wanted us to be educated, so I went to a school.
I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately - I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about.
In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn't sit too well with them!
Modeling was never anything that was a career choice. I did catalog work in Toronto to make money so that I could go to school.
When I was younger, I always liked acting. You know, like, acting locally, or community theater at school. But it's not an especially insured career choice, so I was like, 'It's a hobby. Whatever.'
Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.
When I was in high school at Northeast Catholic in Philadelphia in the late '30s, I found that drawing caricatures of the teachers and satirizing the events in the school, then having them published in our school magazine, got me some notoriety.
I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.
I wound up graduating from the Los Angeles County School for the Arts as a theatre major and then was honored to be accepted into Carnegie Mellon's Musical Theatre program.
I went to drama school for four years at Carnegie Mellon, conservatory training before television comedy. I was doing Shakespeare and Chekov plays. It's about delivering on the promise of a $100,000 education and taking the shackles off and trying the hand at my craft. I'm thrilled with what I've seen so far.
I always wanted to be an actor, even as a little kid. So I went to drama school in the late '60s at Carnegie Mellon.
