When I was a kid, I'd practise Chopin on piano - and I love Chopin! He's my dawg! Then I'd go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I'm from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.
Triangle chokes are the refuge for cowards. I would never stoop to that level of locking my legs around a man and squeezing.
Think not that humility is weakness; it shall supply the marrow of strength to thy bones. Stoop and conquer; bow thyself and become invincible.
The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
I have a picture of me sitting on the step of a brownstone stoop with my mom and all the Muppets around us. And Perry Como, for some reason.
My dad grew up in Pittsburgh in the '50s, and he used to sing Four Seasons songs on the stoop. He made me listen to Cousin Brucie - the guy who broke the Four Seasons on the radio. So I knew all of their songs, but I didn't know they were all by the same group.
There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
For my seventh birthday, my parents gave me a plain, unfinished wooden dollhouse. It had six empty rooms, two floors, a staircase, and a door that swung out onto a little front stoop. The windows opened, and the roof retracted on one side, revealing an attic.
I love the story of how my parents met because it seems very 1950s Brooklyn. They met on a brownstone stoop as my father was singing a little doo-wop.
