My mother made soft polenta often, and as a child, I would watch her stir until she looked like her arm would fall off.
Forecasting Armageddon has become trendy of late, with a great deal of attention being given to an interpretation of the Mayan Calendar suggesting that Mother Earth is destined for doom in December of 2012.
My biological dad was Armenian. My last name is Lopez, and I have a darker complexion, which throws people for a loop. My mother's first husband is Mexican. That's where I got Lopez.
On my father's side, I'm descended from immigrants, one of whom was a Syrian refugee from the Armenian genocide, and my mother was an immigrant from Germany whose visa had expired and, for a year and change, was undocumented here in the U.S.
My parents met at Fort Riley, Kan., during World War II. My father was an Army civilian; he had been trampled by a horse in his youth and couldn't enlist. My mother was studying to be a nurse and, when war broke out, joined the Women's Army Corps without even telling her parents.
I grew up in a Hindu household but went to a Roman Catholic school. I grew up with a mother who said, 'I'll arrange a marriage for you at 18,' but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to an encourage us to dream of becoming prime minister or president.
My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres.
I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.
I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.
My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.
I grew up in New York, and I grew up with a mother who was an arts lover herself, and I went to these New York City public schools with these great arts education programs, so it was something that I was lucky enough to be able to be exposed to very early.
Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.
I want to make as much money as I possibly can so that when my day comes, my mother and sister is fine. My close friends are fine. They don't have to worry about anything ever again.
Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
I didn't feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.
My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother's brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well-educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but solitude.
I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.
What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?
My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California, where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.
Fashion for my mother was about asserting and demonstrating you had aesthetics, tastes, sensibility, manners, beauty - qualities that black people were always trying to prove they possessed, because it was often assumed that we didn't.
