Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I tell my friends about my conversations with my father - conversations with an artist.
Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.
The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.
My mother listened to everything I said, carefully - not that what I said was particularly interesting, but I was her daughter.
I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.
Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.
I'm in my father's car at age 9 or 10 crying to Leonard Cohen's 'Famous Blue Raincoat,' thinking that you could write nearly a love letter to a man who betrayed you by having an affair with your wife. I was thinking how wonderful and pure music can be for explaining situations.
I listened to the radio, so I was influenced by everyone from Michael Jackson to Milli Vanilli. But thankfully my dad had a collection of Cat Stevens albums while my mom was listening to jazz.
I grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood. So going over to friends' houses for dinner, their parents listened to Al Green and Luther Ingram. It was something that hit me early on, the feeling that came across.
I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.