Returning to South Carolina meant getting a normal job in a normal town with normal people and marrying a normal person. I wanted the glamour and opportunity of the world.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
To be in the South in my first big job was very nostalgic. There is an energy to the way we do things in the South.
In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.
It was the only ambition I ever had - not to be a dancer or Hollywood movie star, but to be a housewife in a good marriage.
I wasn't brought up as a society girl to go to balls and be a debutante and marry the social set and money and go to parties. No one in my family lived like that. And I never wanted to live like that. I was brought up to believe in work. I always wanted a career. Always.
I had a nutty career. I was living in New York. Then I got to an age where my friends and sister were having children, and I started to think I needed to orient myself towards a world where it could happen.
I grew up in the South with my father; blues and country, that's always been my core. But I had it in me not to do what was expected. I wanted to find my own footing.
North Carolina has been so great because nobody asks me about work.
Growing up in the south, N.Y.C. always seemed like a destination to visit but not to live in.
And the main thing was that I wanted to live in south Florida. That's why I left the Cowboys; to live in south Florida.
I wanted more people from my city to be able to have the kind of opportunity that I had.