My father was a commercial deep-sea diver in exotic locations and my mom was British and we would travel there every year. So I always had that wanderlust in me.
My father Lloyd Bridges was very versatile in his parts, but he had a hit in the '60s 'Sea Hunt,' where he played a skin diver. And he was so into that role that people actually thought he was a skin-diver.
I got bored and then joined the British SAS. It was five very exciting years of my life, and then I'd always had this passion for swimming, so started swimming around the world, in some of the most exotic and distant and dangerous locations.
Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly, it’s something more animal and more fickle- more like lust. We don’t lust after very many things in life. We don’t need words like ‘worklust’ or ‘homemakinglust.’ But travel? The essayist Anatole Broyard put it perfectly: ‘Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live… in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.’
I was 3 and a half, and there was an open call for a Coca-Cola commercial. We were living around Dallas, and my mom took me. I think they were calling for 16-year-olds that could ride horses and swing a rope, and for whatever reason, my mom took me up there when I was 3. But I always had a rope, and I was a little cowboy at that age.
My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.
The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'
My mom was always active. She was always an active voter, whether it was local, state, or federal elections. My mom would take us to polling locations when we were kids.
I finally became a scuba diver at age 15 or so, and a couple of years after that, I attended a dive show that is held every year in Boston. It's the oldest one in the world and it's still going on - it's called the Sea Rovers.
There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.
She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.
My mom had an audition for a commercial when I was about two and a half, and I ran in crying and interrupted her. They thought I was cute so they offered me a commercial role. My mom was skeptical and a bit nervous about the child actor thing, but I was extremely bossy and convinced them I wanted to try it.
My mom and I had the same vision, and we want the same things. We would always make a goal list every year.
From the time I was a kid, I had a wanderlust. I always wanted to travel, in any form - plane, train, boat, car, motorcycle. So I think that if I ever do have a mid-life crisis, I have all the toys to refer to quickly.
I will travel to all 75 counties in Arkansas every year, listen to your stories and concerns, and work hard every single day on the issues affecting you and your family instead of visiting exotic foreign countries on the taxpayer dime.
I had one young man tell me he wished I was his mom. Another young woman told me that every time she watched 'The Office,' I reminded her of her mother, who had just passed away a year ago, and that every time she saw me she felt as if she had a piece of her mom still with her.
More than 13,000 Malaysians travel to the U.K. to study in British universities every year.