Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.
I don't have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don't find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren't interested in those stories.
I've learned to try to sustain myself by holding on to the integrity of who I am. I'm not talking big diva. I'm quiet. I'm shy. And I became stronger when I stopped trying to be the person they wanted me to be.
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.
My success was due to good luck, hard work, and support and advice from friends and mentors. But most importantly, it depended on me to keep trying after I had failed.
I have been trying to lose weight for the last two-three months and it has gone really well. In the last 6-12 months I have been in the best form in quite a while.
During my Austin years, I was drawing a regular strip for the University Of Texas newspaper, going to school, delivering blood, and trying to change my approach and "style" as much as I could, since I knew that I'd calcify as I got older.
Sometimes I get worried I'm getting too caught up in the nauseatingly oily smoothness of my own line, when all I'm trying to do is make it as clear as possible.
However, most of my part, I play a pediatrician, and most of my role had to do with being in another place, staying at the hospital and trying to save kids and stay until people could come. So, it was more based on reality.
I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.
It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.
Trying different things is very important to me. I see people and want to wear their clothes and drive in their cars for awhile. That's probably one reason I became an actor.
I was just talking about women, just in terms of understanding them as much as we can ever understand the opposite sex. I'm trying to let go of certain male approaches to things that you inherit, that you grow up with.
