Classes were incredibly boring. I took to dreaming. They took to punishing me. I was always working off punishments for not doing what I was supposed to do.
I got an agent when I was 12, and I started working in more amateur productions well before that. But even as a kid, I never felt like a kid actor, you know? I always took myself kind of absurdly seriously.
I was this little blond girl with a guitar case bigger than me - it was pink and sparkly at the time. But I always took myself seriously, and I think that people took that seriously. I would tell them about my goal list, and they listened. I was like, 'I want to be the one that swings the pendulum.'
Where I come from, camp was kind of looked down upon because the drag queens that I grew up with took themselves so seriously.
The idea of the duets albums was the people who joined Frank Sinatra in each song were themselves successful record artists, I never was. I felt a certain apprehension at the time that some people thought my being there was pure nepotism. I felt kind of out of place about that.
When I was a kid, like four or five years old, I was obsessed with the 'Batman' TV show in the '60s. And I took it totally seriously. At that age, I took it completely seriously. I didn't get the fact that it was kind of played for laughs. I didn't understand why my mom was rolling her eyes or chuckling.
The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.
I never took fans for granted. I always assumed subconsciously that people who followed what I did were just people who were kind of like me.
I'm kind of a boring person. People think I get to travel the world and I rap or whatever, but I'm pretty boring. My life is pretty crazy enough, and when I'm not on the road or doing something, I'm kind of boring.
I learned a lot from Elvis. He never took his image seriously. So many performers today put their image before themselves. It can ruin them. Like Elvis, I never took my image seriously.
Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time.
I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too.
People like me took Donald Trump literally, but never seriously. But his supporters took him seriously and not literally.
I was always respectful of people who were deeply religious because I always felt that if they gave themselves to it, then it had to be important to them. But if you can go through life without it, that's OK, too. It's whatever suits you.
Jeff always had a huge part in making a song a record. You felt like you were capturing lightning in the studio. It was never boring. He always was there to serve the song.
Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.