I ended up going to NYU for film school - close to Pennsylvania - but we talked about what if I went to UCLA or USC, and my mom's whole world was caving in.
I was born in Colorado and grew up in Pennsylvania with family in Texas and Oklahoma.
I left Egypt in 1969 for graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. I have been on the faculty at Caltech for 37 years and carried dual citizenship for 31. But my commitment to the country of my birth never wavered.
For a brief period, I had a gentleman's farm in Pennsylvania, but even then, I kept a place in New York.
I was like, 18 and it was in West Virginia because I was allowed to get into the clubs in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania where I was growing up. And we went in and there was a drag queen on stage and she was huge and beautiful, but she was lip syncing to a song. I was legitimately stunned.
I'm from Erie, Pennsylvania. We're just naturally really nice, I think. In a show like 'RuPaul's Drag Race,' that isn't always good.
When we put $4 billion into the U.S. economy, they were OK with this. When we preserved jobs in Dearborn, or preserved jobs in Columbus, or preserved jobs in Pennsylvania, everyone was happy.
Singing was my first love and I never even considered it after I started acting, but now I'm bringing it back into my life. I trained from the ages of 11 to 17. When I moved to New York and got into serious acting, I just kind of abandoned the whole singing thing. But when I grew up in Pennsylvania I went to voice lessons once a week.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.
The reason Donald Trump was elected was that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If you look at the voter data, it shows that the higher the level of concentration of manufacturing robots in a district, the more that district voted for Trump.
