I don't think I made a conscious decision as a career choice. From my school days I had decided, persuaded by my parents, to prepare myself for the law. Then the Japanese occupation came and we went through three and a half years of what I would call the university of life, it was hard, it was harsh.
I attended law school, the progression into a career in corporate law was almost foreordained. I set about to craft a career reflective of my values. These included: public service, environmental protection, and leadership development. Trusting my instincts, following my heart, enabled me to create a calling that became a career.
You've got to pay attention to what you're attracted to because as you hold images of what you want, you're gonna be attracted to things that are going to be attracted to you, but it literally moves into physical reality with and through you and it does that by law.
To this day I get mail from women who say, I went to law school because of your song. But I would hate to think out of the wide spectrum of things I have done in my career, that's all I would be remembered for.
When you walk into my classroom, I'm going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that's the only way to prepare you for the real world.
Educating Lawyers succeeds admirably in describing the educational programs at virtually every American law school. The call for the integration of the three apprenticeships seems to me exactly what is needed to make legal education more professional, to prepare law students better for the practice of law, and to address societal expectations of lawyers.
Law became boring, but like every job I've done, it helped prepare me for a career in music.
My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creatore, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands - because such people did not often come my way, and I hoped that they might impart some great revelation to me, some insight which would help me to a clearer understanding of the world about me.
So far in my career, I've achieved what I've achieved because I've believed that I could do it. And I've never believed that anyone's better than me, because I think when you start doing that, you've already lost the fight.
I can tell you about Hillary Clinton's heart. This is a woman, who, after law school, went down to my native South. She went down, after graduating from Yale Law School, to help poor kids, to help disabled kids.
I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.
It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.
One thing that did happen to me, though - in high school, there was a club to help prepare people for scholarships and they wouldn't let girls take the class. But I studied for it, and that year I was the only one from the high school who got the scholarship. That was my vindication.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
I was a 36C or D, and at 5' 1'', I knew that being a small person with big boobs standing in front of an audience was not going to be easy. It would be really hard to get people to pay attention to me without mocking me. Getting a breast reduction to prepare for my career was no different from people who work to get good grades to get into a good college to get into a good graduate school to get a good job. I went down to a B cup, and it was the best thing in the whole world.
What they teach you in school doesn't prepare you for life. Textbooks don't compare to living in the real world. Rock and roll teaches you how to live.