If I hadn't become a chef I would have loved to be a top tennis player, although I was never good enough so it wasn't really an option. But that has never dimmed my love of the game, which started in childhood when I was lucky enough to be a ball boy at Wimbledon.
Not only was I the only black kid and the only poor kid, but my parents were transcendental meditation devotees, and I live in an ashram for a good portion of my childhood.
I'm sure I had low-level scurvy all of my childhood.
And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.
Everyone has material about cats, and everyone has material about family and what they think about their government or childhood.
I wouldn't trade the childhood we had because, A, It was normal to me, even though, in hindsight, it's not normal. It felt normal, and I think we maintained a pretty normal healthy attitude towards what we did. And B, I just wouldn't trade it, the experience that we had and the growth we've had.
Studying acting has been personally enriching because it has taught me to take the time to imagine what someone else's life experience might be like. To look deeply at how our pasts and the circumstances of our early childhoods mold us as people.
One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children's childhoods is that I'm having my first childhood myself.
To be perfectly honest with you, having a mother as an actress - who I watched struggle tremendously during my childhood - and to watch fluctuations of ups and downs is difficult. She did mainly television, so I think I associated that with a life of inconsistency. As I've come into my own, I realize it has nothing to do with the medium.
I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.
