I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
When Bob came through Cincinnati, he wanted a girl singer to be on his show. There was a local contest, and my sister and I entered, but Bob said, Gee, I wouldn't break up the team.
My sister and I said, Dad, are you doing to do anything about that? And he mentioned treatments other people sent him that he'd been working on. So we thought it would be kind of cool to give these guys a real script.
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.
