I remember I was playing basketball, and an entire arena was, like, chanting 'Big Foot.' It was a high school game, but... you're constantly being reminded you're bigger; you don't look like everybody. There were days where I would be upset, and, like, I'd cry about it.
I grew up in the Episcopal Church, went to private school in that church, went to chapel every day.
I had always dreamed of living in Chapel Hill. When I was a college student at Hollins University in Virginia, I came down to Chapel Hill for summer school and just loved it.
I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it's a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that's a chapter.
In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. 'He sounds too smart' is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call 'ugly acting.' Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.
The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.
Both the Winter and the Summer Solstices are expressions of love. They show us the opposition of light and dark, expansion and contraction, that characterize our experiences in the Earth school so that we can recognize our options as we move through our lives.
When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'
My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
I was born in New Hampshire, moved to Tennessee when I was 9, and lived there through high school, then went to school at College of Charleston, so definitely a lot of pieces of the South there.
Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school. And men such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think, 'Role model!' Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon.
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.
Indeed the Obamas, the Clintons, and many other elites who oppose school choice and make it harder for charter schools to operate, send their own children to private institutions that cost more than many Hispanic families make in a year.
The strongest results were in Florida and Texas. In just one year in a Texas charter school, an average student gained 7 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading, while Florida charter schools improved student performance by 6 percentile points.
An early attempt at education choice was charter schools. These were meant to attract the best and brightest students and provide them a level of education they often could not find in their local school districts. The problem is that, of the thousands of charter schools, many are outright failures.
Republicans get a lot of money from big business, but they are not tied to the union dollar. As a result they have been aggressive advocates of school reform, charter schools and vouchers for private schools.
Very few charter schools are being created in some of the best school districts in the state. If you're an educational innovator, that isn't where the greatest need is.
I would never think of asking a girl out on the High Street or the disco or at school. But on the ski slope, I would chat to all the girls.
A deep river of must-have school mania runs through the chattering classes. There is, of course, the parental adrenaline rush at suburban cocktail parties that comes from announcing one's son or daughter as an Ivy Leaguer.
Travel is the best and probably cheapest graduate school you can buy.
