When I was 16, I started to spend a lot of time in Soho and downtown New York and noticed everyone's style and the eclectic things people would wear. And that's when I started to experiment with things like my lipstick and mixing different kinds of pieces and, of course, my hair color.
After that, I started going downtown and doing a lot of theater shows in Chicago. When you go downtown there, it's like you're in New York, it's like going to Broadway.
Then as everything, like I say, things started to come together, when things started to go our way, that's when you results started to come. I was no different driver. I was certainly learning every time I went in the car.
My wife has helped me with a lot of things. She's also got me to like a lot of different things like sushi. I never would have tried that if it weren't for her. I also went to Hillsong (Church) in New York for the first time with her. It's fun to experience new things with the person you love.
I started when Chris Rock did 'Bigger & Blacker.' I used to watch that before I went onstage as inspiration to get hype, but I noticed I started taking on his cadence and talking like him. I was also doing the New York-style comedy thing, which was angry and annoyed. I was creating a persona instead of trying to embrace my own.
Looking back on my wardrobe from 'Stranger Things,' I would probably wear a lot of it. I might style it a little bit differently but I like the pieces.
I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.
I love to learn, and I started doing a lot of studying of Spanish-style music and really started getting into it and how it is just a completely different form of guitar playing. It is just like if you started speaking in a different language like Japanese or something. It is something that you have to study and work at a lot.
I'm not a girl to wear a lot of bright color, but including a touch of color can pull an outfit together. I'm from New York and wear a lot of black, and color is refreshing.
If I was a bajillionaire, I would spend a lot of time at Barneys just buying all kinds of great things all the time. I would have so many black cashmeres it would be out of control. I like the way nice things feel very much.
In high school, during lunchtime I would go in the room where the wrestling mats were and try different flips and different moves. Like windmills. I just started mixing martial arts with jazz and contemporary stuff and it would get mashed together and became my style.
It's very much to do with how I'm feeling ... I love to be experimental and use eclectic mismatched things and put them together to see what third entity is created! I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.
I do a lot of damage to my hair every day because of my work. I just noticed this huge change. It started getting thinner and it started falling out. I hit 30, and I literally felt like I was balding!
When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.
I noticed that when my daughter was born, my son really, really liked her. But then as she started getting older, and as she started crawling around our house and touching different things that were his, sibling rivalry issues started appearing.
Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.