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I went to Midwood High School in Brooklyn and then to Brooklyn college for 1 1/2 years.

I was the first one in my family to go to college.

My mom graduated from the University of Michigan, which is a great school. Then she got her Master's from NYU. She wanted to be an actress, so when she graduated, she had a dream, and she started following it. She moved to New York and took acting classes with people like Denzel Washington.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

I think, if I had a dad, I would have went the normal college route. I'm so stoked my life panned out how it was.

I'm from Brooklyn. I grew up very poor- seven people, four rooms. My dad had no education.

I went to UCLA for a year and a quarter. There were too many students at UCLA interested in what I was interested in, and they couldn't accommodate all of us. I wasn't allowed to take voice or dance, only theater and acting. So I saved my money and, at 19, moved to New York.

My childhood here... was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.

When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.