The gratifying part of my journey is no one calls me a star child or a superstar's wife anymore. I think I have grown beyond that and have my own identity.
If you notice, no child star made it big when s/he grew up because the child's image was still fresh in people's memory. They could not digest the fact that the child star had grown into a man.
I don't like the word 'superstar'. It has ridiculous implications. These words - star, stupor, superstar, stupid star - they're misleading. It's a myth.
I don't consider it jumping ship. The 'Star Trek' philosophy is to embrace the diversity of the universe, and 'Star Wars' is part of that diversity. I also think 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' are related beyond both having the word 'Star.'
There's no slow build anymore where you get a little part, then you get a little better part, then a better part, until one day your agent calls you us and says, 'guess what, you're a movie star,' and you say, 'Thank you!'
My mother still calls me Jim and that is about it. Everyone else calls me Lee. My wife calls me whatever.
Since my father was a superstar, without me knowing it, I became a child star, as my father's entire fan base liked me, and I can't thank my father enough for this, as it was so effortless.
Every area had their own superstar. The TV was not national, it was localized. So you could develop in one place, or the next place and be a better star, go to the next place and be a superstar.
It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.
It's part of my game, getting to the free-throw line and being aggressive. If you say that I get superstar calls or I get babied by the refs, that's just taking away from how I play. That's disrespectful to me.
I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It's a journey of recovery. It's a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It's already there.
Maybe I had a 'secret identity,' but then when you think about it, don't we all? A part of ourselves very few people ever get to see. The part we think of as 'me.' The part that deals with the big stuff. Makes the real choices. The part everything else is a reflection of.
It's empowering and uplifting to hear the Special Olympics athletes share their journey and what's helped them to get to where they are today. I had no idea how much I'd learn and grow by taking part in Special Olympics. It's made me think about my own journey and what's important in life.
I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.
Up until 1920, women couldn't vote. Until 1974, married women couldn't get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband's professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife.
If only I had grown up worshipping Julia Child. I was already grown up - thank you very much - when Julia Child's book was published. When I moved to New York in 1962, you had to own it.
Some husbands think, "This is my wife," or a parent thinks "This is my child." From a spiritual perspective, this is a misconception. The higher truth is: "This wife is God's beloved daughter, entrusted in my care. And the way I serve God is by giving her respect, protection, appreciation and empowerment. This is what God wants me to give his child."