I still get called 'a stick of dynamite' or 'pint-sized dynamo,' stuff like that. Actually, I was too busy to notice there was anything unusual about being a woman director until the early 1980s, when I looked around the professional theater and realized there weren't many of us. You have to make more of a case for yourself than any man.
As a woman, it seems you can't just be a comedian; you're always classed as something else, too, whether that's 'beautiful,' 'pint-sized,' 'larger-than-life' or in my case, 'Hattie Jacques-esque,' 'the giraffe,' 'big.'
My dad was this pint-sized Nigerian with an oversized personality. My mother is a tall six foot something Irish-English woman. Us walking down the street was quite an unusual sight, when I was growing up.
The cool thing about being a writer is: you get to make stuff up. When I started wring about Vampires, I realized, I can take everything i did like about that mythology and anything I didn't like, I didn't have to; because until a real Vampire stands up and says, 'you've got it wrong,' it's anyone's game.
We hurt people by being too busy. Too busy to notice their needs. Too busy to drop that note of comfort or encouragement or assurance of love. Too busy to listen when someone needs to talk. Too busy to care.
I never realized that as a woman I would be looked at as less than until I was pretty deep in this business and realized, 'Oh my God. I'm being treated this way because I'm female.
When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.
Immigrants to America help us with the work they do. They challenge us with new ideas, and they give us perspective. This is still the nation that more people around the world want to come to than any place else. That has to tell us something about ourselves. If around the world this is the place people want to come to so much, maybe there's more here than many of us realize-and that many of us can take advantage of.
We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things which in our minds are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted to, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and commonplace are one…We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart
Anything was better than going to work. All those early tours before we made any money were more like vacations. I don't think it was until 2001 that we pulled our heads out of the sand and were like, "What are we doing?" I don't think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we're in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.
When a director can give you a word that allows you to feel less tense about yourself, to make you feel like you indeed are good enough before you even get to the work, you can't ask for anything more than that.
When you spend so much time away from home, travelling around doing things like this, talking about yourself too much, which is often very painful... So, to actually come home and just be amongst people who know you extremely well, who you can't pretend to be anything other than yourself in front of, is a relief really. It gives you a sense of who you are again. You just don't get any time at home... it's such an existence of feeling very unsettled and travelling around. It's great.
A man is not merely a man but a man among men, in a world of men. Being good at being a man has more to do with a man’s ability to succeed with men and within groups of men than it does with a man’s relationship to any woman or any group of women. When someone tells a man to be a man, they are telling him to be more like other men, more like the majority of men, and ideally more like the men who other men hold in high regard.
Rip Torn thought I was being a wise guy, and one afternoon he got pretty angry with me after telling me to do something and he thought I was pretending like I didn't know what he meant.But he was very frustrated. He was very frustrated as a director in trying to get his little theater group going. It was called The Sanctuary Theater Workshop, I think, and he wanted to do these classical plays by people like August Strindberg, and he was fighting hard to get his show up and be good and be professional.
I used to get a sort of sociophobia, and I still get it sometimes these days when I'm in a confined space with too many people. It's not like I freak out or anything, it's just that I'm far more comfortable in my own company sometimes than being surrounded by one thousand strangers.
In the very early stages of working in sports, I was sick of being referred to as "the Barbie doll" because I had long, blond, fake hair. So I went and bought a boxed hair color, dyed my hair black, and put on glasses. And I looked ridiculous. I looked like a completely different person. I was trying to get away from the stereotype but what I realized in doing that is that what I say and how I conduct myself in what I do will speak for itself, and I don't need to apologize for being a woman in that space.
You always notice a facelift on a woman. It's a tightness around the ears, and the scar is usually inside the ears. If I suspect it's been done, I usually move around until I can see it. But with a man, it actually pulls your beard and your sideburns back, and that's what's so strange.