I visualized high school as being like 'Saved By the Bell.' I decided I would do all the things they did on that show.
I designed a theater magazine that was full of plays and essays about the theater, and then I worked at a theater school. By osmosis or something, I was learning from reading plays and not being analytical about them, but when I would read them, the joy in me was mostly from imagining them in my head and visualizing them.
I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.
With nearly all students leaving public high school having taken some vocational education, this bill continues to provide communities with the funding necessary to give students an edge on career training.
By the end of high school, I had this fork-in-the-road moment where part of me considered going to vocational music school to really pursue it.
I went to a vocational high school, which is where they basically train you to go out and dig ditches. You gotta learn a trade. Well, why do you gotta learn a trade? Because you're not smart enough to go to college. That was the underlying gist of it.
When I decided I wanted to go to drama school, I realized that a lot of the actors whose careers I really admire and whose work I really admire were English and English trained. I felt there was a real vocational feel to work in the U.K.
I started playing piano and guitar when I was in elementary school, and then I was finally like, 'I want to sing.' So I started taking voice lessons and decided I wanted to go to an art school and take music seriously.
In high school, I started training, singing with choirs, and getting voice lessons and doing a lot of creative writing and decided that that's really what I wanted to pursue as a career, and that's what I was going to study.
I went to school to learn guitar, solfeggio, and harmony. I wanted to know more about music, how it works. I wanted to take voice lessons, too, and that's when I discovered what I could do with my voice. At the beginning, I thought I would do classical and pop, but then I learned that I really liked the classical music.
I went to drama school in England, and you spend your first year working on the muscles surrounding the vocal mechanisms. You learn how you support it and create characters through your voice so that became an obsession. So I went to Hollywood thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to be one of the great voice-over artists.'
I do a lot for PETA. I do a lot of things I think are really important, I volunteer at school and I'm still amazed I can pay my bills because I feel like I don't work that much, I really don't.
Our teachers are responsible for our children's welfare for the six or eight hours they are at school and we need to know without question that their safety will be paramount on the minds of teachers, faculty and volunteers.
President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.
If all schools become privatized in the U.S., the poor wouldn't be given vouchers for 'school choice.' They would have no choices.
If you were there behind every family's closed doors, everyone's a little wacko. Chances are that your family is no weirder than the next family or than the other girl at school's family. Everyone can be quirky at times, and I embrace that, personally.
It was such a wake-up call going to music school and being one among so many that are really good at singing.
I believe in the 'Wal-Mart' school of business. The less people pay, the more they enjoy it.
My high school was the closest thing to hell on earth that exists. I was around a lot of ultra-preppy, very mean-spirited girls, and they were very cruel to me. I ended up switching schools and going to this performing arts school near Boston called Walnut Hill.
I wound up going to the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, which was a really life-changing experience that's still the most intense working environment I've ever been part of. Even now, as a professional actor, I've never once been held to the standards I was held to at my high school.
