I do chat to my mother in Norwegian, particularly when we want a secret conversation. It is useful that way.
It is a sad but undeniable reality that people have died in the line of duty since the earliest days of the United Nations. The first was Ole Bakke, a Norwegian member of the United Nations guard detachment, shot and killed in Palestine in 1948. The toll since then has included colleagues at all levels.
I am really happy that my daughter Janhvi has been honoured with the 'Arets Stjerneskudd' award as the rising talent of the year by Royal Norwegian Consulate General.
My Norwegian family says, 'You're the most grounded American we've ever met.'
Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.
My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian.
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education.
In 1881, my dad's grandparents, who were Norwegian farmers, immigrated to the United States - the same year my great grandfather from Laguna Pueblo was put on a train to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
I'm a bit biased, as I married a Norwegian, but Norway is an incredible country.
