We didn't have a TV in the living room and all my friends thought we were kind of weird. When they'd come over, my mom wanted to talk to them about current events.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I bugged my mom and dad to 'get me inside the television set' when I was about four years old.
I remember as a kid not ever wanting to have friends around to my house because it was, for want of a better description, disheveled.
There's a book called 'The Shack' - it had a lot to do with me coming full circle, meeting my birth mother. Awhile back, my birth mom and my adopted mom came to my show together, and it was pretty surreal.
We didn't have a TV because we didn't have a whole lot of money. My parents would have their friends over - their friends who thought, 'How can you live without a TV?'
I had a couple of really cool friends when I was a kid, and we'd find cool music and movies and show them to each other. My friend Dennis had a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' and he'd already seen it once, and he was like, 'We need to watch this.' I was sleeping over his house - and I think we were literally 15 - and we watched it.
Naturally, people are curious about how my real mom feels about me having a TV mom.
When I was 9, I asked my mom if I could be on TV. She was like, 'Well, okay. You can try.'
The fact that my mother was on television every week while I was young was occasionally awkward, and often frustrating.
My parents separated it, and that let me know that TV life wasn't my normal life; that was my job and my hobby.
As I got older, I never considered that tons of people were watching me on television every week. I give a nod to my parents for keeping me as normal as I could be in an un-normal adult world.