When they asked Jack Benny to do something for the Actor's Orphanage - he shot both his parents and moved in.
Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, 'Would you take my son with you?' He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.
Why can't we build orphanages next to homes for the elderly? If someone were sitting in a rocker, it wouldn't be long before a kid will be in his lap.
Our ministry also supports orphanages in the U.S. and overseas, thousands of poor children in Latin America, drug centers for addicted men, and a drug center in Israel.
My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
The earth is a great big orphanage for most animals.
So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married.
My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.
My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.
My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay.
