A Quote by Eli Drake

If you look at WWE 1998-99, was it over the top? Sure it was, but they were still doing well. If you get into 2004-05, you've got HLA, Katie Vick and things like that - that's where it just gets dumb.
Yea, I still get the 'I used to hate you when you were on WWE. I used to despise you.' And now I get 'I look up to you, I have kids too and I want to see what you're doing.' And now they are just interested in my life.
With WWE, I got this audition and thought there was no way that I was going to actually get the job. They were doing the WWE Diva Search at the time, and I didn't think I would get the job because I wasn't a wrestler.
We were supposed to stay over in Boston, but when Scribners heard I'd won the Pulitzer, they told me to get on a plane - that Katie Couric wanted my body. And when Katie Couric wants your body, you get moving right away.
This year its just about winning the big matches because if youre going to get into the top 20 then youve got to do well at the Masters Series and the grand slams. I dont have any ranking points to defend for the first few months of the year so if I do well over the next few weeks then Ive got a chance of doing it.
I got very lucky that some of the things that I wanted to work did work. Not because I knew what I was doing, just through dumb luck, it just looked beautiful and sounded great and captured some magical mood. And you just have to hope that you get lucky when you do big things like making a movie, or something.
Just after I retired, Michael Vick came in. And just as background, I really thought the position had changed. I thought the dynamic pass-run, triple-threat quarterback was going to take over the league. And guys like Michael Vick and others would follow and that's what we'd do. But I learned the truth with Peyton Manning and Tom Brady.
It was dangerous stuff. We were running on top of moving trains. We got to do amazing things. I like doing stuff like that. I enjoy it. But believe me, there were things that were so dangerous that I wasn't touching them.
I think that we ill-prepare athletes from the very beginning. From the moment they pick up a ball or kick or whatever it is they're doing. We ill-prepare them. Especially with the major sports. What you see is this cycle of entitlement that gets thrown their way, so the kid who is in junior high and hasn't finished his test, but still gets to play because he is an athlete, fails the test and still gets to play because they're an athlete, gets to get away with not doing chores at home because they've got practice.
You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone's tired, things get on top of them.
More than anything, I wanted to make sure that everybody was a pusher of difference. And they had to be able to do it in a communicative way, not esoterically. Because there are a lot of people who push things forward but sometimes only you and two people out of 500 in the room get it, but you want somebody who has mastered their craft so well that an 8-year-old gets it just like an 80-year-old gets it. They get the same visceral feeling.
For me to be the first African-born WWE Champion is incredible because now, people who look like myself can look at TV and see on WWE television that anything is possible because I'm doing it.
I want to work on projects that I feel passionate about and do things that are fun and challenging. I would love to do a live musical. I'm not interested in doing the same thing over and over or the fame and exposure that comes with it. When people keep doing that, they just end up doing the same dumb stuff again and again.
When I first got my ring name as Carmella, I knew I was just going to do whatever I could to create this over-ridiculous, over-the-top character that would just help me get my face, and I don't even know what I'm trying to say, but just get me out there and just show, like, 'OK, wow, we need to pay attention to this girl because she has something.'
Be yourself and do what you actually like doing as an artist. Don't try to think too much about where am I gonna fit in here, and how is this gonna be received, and who is gonna like this? Just do what you like doing and make sure that you enjoy doing it. If you do that and you get good at it by practising, then people are gonna come around - there's so many people out there that listen to all kinds of music. It's important to just do what you like, otherwise the fun gets sucked out of it.
One of the great things about being a grandparent is you get to redo what you didn't or couldn't do as a parent. Oftentimes we forget that even while the parent is parenting, they're still a growing person. They're still trying to fix themselves. They're still out there not doing everything a hundred percent correctly. I had the best parents I could ever have, but the kinds of things that they were capable of doing, the things that they said and did, were very destructive to my sister, brother, and me. But they're so much more than those things.
I didn't have a ton of role models back in 1998. So, when I was looking to get in, it was really just looking up at all the men who were out there. When you're not seeing women - when you're breaking into anything - it's like, "Well, this is what the men do and how they act, so we're going to just emulate that behavior."
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