When people watch me on TV, they see part of my life. I wanted to let them know the real me behind the scenes. The child who was a concert violinist from the age of six. The young woman who took on the challenge to compete in the Miss America pageant. The television journalist for twenty-five years.
When people watch me on TV they see part of my life. I wanted to let them know the real me behind the scenes. The child who was a concert violinist from the age of six. The young woman who took on the challenge to compete in the Miss America pageant. The television journalist for twenty-five years. The mother of two who, just like most women, struggles to balance work and family.
If you think about it - if you watch a gymnast compete, you don't see their training behind the scenes. You just see the competition. You see the final result when it's polished. And that is very much what people experience with concerts. They go to the concert. And they see the final version.
I was very, very young when I first started acting. My first movie role I was in, I was eight years old at the time. My mom got me involved in community theater stuff when I was like five or six years old. How I learned to read was by reading the captions on TV, and I grew up from a really young age watching tons of movies and television.
There were nineteen years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years from the age of fifteen to twenty with a man who was thirteen years older than me who remains one of the loves of my life, and he passed away when I was twenty years old.
Twenty-five years ago my two main target species were goliath tigerfish and arapaima from the Amazon. Each took me six years to track down and catch, over the course of three expeditions to the Congo and six to the Amazon.
The Washington Post is and has been the greatest historic competitor of the New York Times. Half of me, though, the unselfish part of me that is just a journalist, is thrilled. I want newspapers to succeed. Let's take the Guardian, which is a new competitor in the digital age. Does it make me nervous that they compete with us and in fact beat us on the Snowden story? Yes. The part of me that's a competitive journalist and wants to fight and play says: bring them on! It's more fun that way.
I always took pictures, but about five or six years ago, I started taking more behind the scenes at SNL, and now I have some 60,000 photos sitting on my laptop.
What is important for me is that the people who know me for real know Mario how he really is. People who don't know me, they read newspapers and they watch TV. TV is made to give a lot of opinions... so I can't show the real Mario to everybody.
Television is a real woman's medium... but what's disturbing is, still even in television, women have so little to do with what's going on behind the scenes.
I don't have a television in my house. I haven't owned one in years. In truth, it's about mental health for me. It's hard for me to have a television in the house because I'll just stay inside and binge-watch stuff that I don't even want to watch. I've learned when I don't have a TV, it forces me to go outside.
I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.
I teach that people should watch less TV. I don't care what else they're doing! The average American's watching anywhere from three to six hours a day. If you watch six hours of TV a day, that's 15 years of your life!
I've reinvented myself many times in my life. I thought I'd become a concert violinist but burned out at 17. I thought I'd go to law school but became Miss America.
This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!
I used to watch people like Raven-Symone and, you know, the Olsens at a young age, and Will Smith and people like that, and just looking at them at a young age on TV. And just thinking to myself, 'I can do that,' and questioning why I wasn't there.
I also know that I have represented for us a certain kind of journalist and for me over the years when an older Black person comes and tells me how proud they are of me and the way I represent us on television, or when a younger person says to me, 'Hey Mr. Gordon, I watched you growing up and my parents made me watch you,'.