I'm trying to bring the romance back to music. Old school... Music is meant to be a part of your blood stream, and if it doesn't affect your bloodstream, then you may as well put it back in the shoebox underneath the bed.
At eight o'clock the curtain goes up and that's it, you're out there with yourself, the audience, the other players. There's no "take two" business. You're on. The great thing is the rehearsals, too. When you're bouncing around on film sets and TV sets you don't really get the opportunity to - generally speaking - rehearse much. With theater you're kind of four-to-five weeks locked down in the room with the guys figuring stuff out. It's back to play school.
For every young person living on the streets tonight, there are many at home zoning out inside their homes through video games, and even more who disengage from school. These are direct effects of internalized discrimination based on their age.
Because we are unqualifiedly and without reservation against any system of denominational schools, maintained by the adherents of any creed with the help of state aid, therefore, we as strenuously insist that the public schools shall be free from sectarian influences, and above all, free from any attitude of hostility to the adherents of any particular creed.
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.
I come from somewhere and from specific black people in the South, including my parents, who built our first school, and rebuilt it after it was burned to the ground. And they used to bake pies and cakes to raise money to keep it going. So, I learned to struggle from a very early way in a way that was truly indigenous to the South.
Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America - but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America - is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs. So now they're all graduating.
Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.