I went to an all-girls' Catholic school for, like, six years during the time when kids actually had handwriting class. I've always had a propensity for getting the cursive down pretty well.
I've always had a propensity for getting the cursive down pretty well. What it evolved into was my pseudo-waitressing job when I was auditioning. I didn't wait tables. I did calligraphy for the invitations for, like, Robin Thicke and Paula Patton's wedding.
Me and my family, we sort of had this plan to... once we had kids, we had a plan that about every six years we'd move to a new country. So, when we had kids, we moved to Bali for six years, then we went to Australia for six years.
I had been practicing guitar about six months beforehand; I concentrated mostly on the songs I had to play. I got those down pretty well so they could use me actually playing.
Kids have little computer bodies with disks that store information. They remember who had to do the dishes the last time you had spaghetti, who lost the knob off the TV set six years ago, who got punished for teasing the dog when he wasn't teasing the dog and who had to wear girls boots the last time it snowed.
I had a great time in high school. I really did. I went to a private Christian high school and I graduated in a class of 67 kids, so it was pretty small, and I knew and loved everybody.
I was a careless Protestant, my wife was a good Catholic, and we had six kids in seven years and I'd endorse that to everyone.
From getting good grades in school, to thinking about getting a good career and settling down, we all have been running a rat race. We always thought that we were doing it for ourselves but actually we were doing it for others. Like, I realized, I never had time for myself.
I didn't like school. I was pretty much daydreaming all the time. I would be in the back of the class writing down random stories and stuff that would have nothing to do with school. I only lasted two years in high school before I moved out to L.A.
I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.
I think by the time I was born, my parents had pretty well run the gauntlet with their kids. The novelty had kind of worn off by the time the twelfth child was born. I was lucky to get fed and changed, picked up and taken to school.
It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life - how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time.
To start your working life after you've graduated from school and university, it takes you a long time to get started in the real world. Today, kids are not out into the workforce until 27 or 30 years of age. By the time I was 30, I had six kids and 60 trucks.
By the time I was in high school, Roe v. Wade had passed, so that was also happening; girls were getting pregnant and getting abortions - and that happened in my school too.
I was one of the first six black kids to integrate a formerly all-white school. I remember being looked at all the time and people laughing at my hair. I was also very self-conscious about the food I had for lunch. I had egg sandwiches, and the other mothers gave kids fancy stuff like bologna and Marmite. It took about a year to settle in.
I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
The best advice I never got. I don't know if it would have done any good, but to be more confident with girls in school. I actually had a couple of girlfriends, but I was still pretty timid and it was hard to ask girls out.