A Quote by Sherman Hemsley
I loved it, but had to forget about acting after elementary school because it was the sort of thing you just didn't do in my rough neighborhood.
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From elementary school on up through junior high school, I loved to perform. But I put it all away during high school and college. I thought, "That's not actually something you do with your life." But then I was compelled to try it after college. I just got overcome.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.
I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that.
I believe becoming an adult isn't a good thing for a guy. I think that guys should not forget about its youthful soul. So I want to say that I still have a heart of a baby or an elementary school kid.
Something happened when I was in elementary school. A Disney artist named Bruce McIntyre retired, and he had done drawings for 'Pinocchio' and 'Snow White' that was just classic stuff. He moved to the town I grew up in, Carlsbad, and he became a part-time art teacher at our elementary school.
Around 1969, my family had just bought a house in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood two blocks away from school. Then, all of a sudden, all the white people left the neighborhood and the school.
When I was in high school, my parents had this power over me - if I ever lied or got caught doing something that I shouldn't be doing, then I would no longer be able to go to LA and continue to pursue the acting thing. So that was this sort of looming thing they could had over me that just sort of really kept me in check throughout those formative years where you would typically be lying and doing bad stuff.
I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.
I didn't have any terrible survival jobs. The main job I had before I was able to transition over to acting full-time was working at an after-school program at a middle school teaching improv and standup. So even when I had a regular job, I was still lucky enough to be doing the stuff I loved in some way.
Modern acting is method acting, most of it. And there are sort of different schools, so I guess I'm not really from one school or another. I had a number of different teachers but they were all kind of drawing from the same pool, which is - What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? And, what is in the way? These are basic acting questions. Knowing the answers to those questions. So you're talking about objectives and actions and obstacles. That's a sort of shorthand that gives you a language.
I went to school for singing, middle school at LaGuardia High School. Followed by Berkeley College of Music and afterwards I went to acting school at the Neighborhood Playhouse for Theater.
For an actor to remain a child is rather important. It's a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It's the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that.
When I was in high school, I would perform every year in those plays and there was something I really loved about it. But I was completely unaware that you could sort of get into an acting career.
Even at recess, in elementary school, it was just a known thing that I was one of the fastest in the school.
I was, throughout school, in the theater program. Through elementary school, junior high, high school, and then J.J. Abrams, my closest friend in the world, we were living together. He was writing, and I was trying writing; I wasnt getting paid for it like he was, but I always had the acting bug.
'Sort of' is such a harmless thing to say... sort of. It's just a filler. Sort of... it doesn't really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like... after "I love you"... or "You're going to live."
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