A Quote by Arj Barker
My friend and I were up to all sorts of shenanigans at school. But one time it ended up disrupting the whole class and we got in trouble. His parents told him he wasn't allowed to hang out with me any more. I had a friendship break-up in third grade. It was brutal.
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After my parents got divorced, I had to go right into public school in the fourth grade. The Steiner school had never really taught me how to read, so it was a rude awakening. I was playing catch-up the whole time.
I went to school to play sports, but I got involved in theatre in college kind of by mistake. I ended up taking an acting class almost just to get rid of an arts requirement, but I wound up in this wonderful acting class with this teacher named Alma Becker who really saved my life. I was just kind of this knucklehead kid from DC and I was in and out of trouble all of the time. I took a theatre class and she really discovered something in me and I absolutely fell in love with it.
I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.
I was causing trouble in high school, and in order to get me to stop and to pass, they put me into theater, and I ended up winning a Shakespeare competition. All I had to do was imitate people properly, and I ended up going to the finals when I was about 16.
Our parents were very strict. Not in a brutal or awful way, but there were definite rules, such as after six on a school night you didn't go out, and at weekends you had to be home by a certain time. It wasn't particularly sheltered, but we were well brought-up.
My brother was a year younger than I am and he was never in the home with me hardly at all, ... My mom had to take him to every school there possibly was to get him some education. He ended up first in Columbus, Ohio, for grade school, then went to a high school for the deaf and Galludet in Washington.
People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.
As I got older, I'd say probably when I got to, like, seventh or eighth grade, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, and I went for an open call for an agent, a local agent out there, a woman named Joy Purvis, and she ended up picking me up.
I met a girl when I was in third grade. Kids were beating her up - she was deaf - so I walked her home. Her parents were deaf and they gave me the alphabet on a card. I learned it and taught my friends how to do the alphabet - which was outlawed in our school because we used to talk to each other in class.
A friend got attacked outside a nightclub just for being deaf. I stuck up for him but ended up getting in a bit of a trouble myself. I played with a tag at Stocksbridge. I had a little curfew. Luckily, it didn't stop me playing football. Being put on a tag, I could have lost playing football again.
My dad had a third-grade education in Mexico. Third grade. My mom had a fifth-grade education. They were raised in a poor home... They got married and they had their family, but there's hardly any future.
I ended up going to public school in the first grade, and that's when I knew I had to be very strategic about my survival in school. I tried my best to be friends with people who were going to protect me.
One of the high points in my career came from a time I had with Tim Conway on a film when I had him fall down with laughter. I had this scene with him where I was this mechanic down fixing his car. I can't remember what my line was as written, but they were okay with me doing a made-up line. So Tim asks me what's wrong with his car, and I look up and say, "Well, looks like you got a squirrel caught up in there."
My parents were great at making sure I got out of bed when I needed to play football on a Sunday morning and that I was ready after school to go to training on a Tuesday and Thursday. But it was never forced upon me or rammed down my throat. If it had been, I could have ended up hating sport.
Growing up in Flint, Michigan, I saw so many kids from my school end up in jail or unemployed, and gangs would hang out and cause trouble in my neighborhood. I had to learn how to protect myself, because it didn't feel like anyone else was protecting me.
I ended up dropping out of high school at 16 and getting kicked out of my home. My parents told me, sadly, that because I was so disruptive to the rest of the household, that I could no longer live under their roof.
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