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It started in middle school. Once, a group of girls locked me in the janitor's closet. Another time, a girl spilled chocolate milk down a dress I made. Girls would try to trip me in the hallway.

I think I'm trouble-adjacent. I remember hearing once that good girls don't get caught. I think that's sort of a lot of what my teen years were like. I skirted the stuff that other kids were doing because the idea of actually getting in trouble was not appealing to me, but I still wanted to have adventures.

I got thrown out of school several weeks in my senior year being caught in the girls' dorm. This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.

You have no idea how many doors closed on me and how many adults were either initially reluctant to take a chance working with me or who outright laughed at me behind my back.

I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn't have much money. Then that generation went, 'OK, great', and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn't caught up.

The thing was, at a young age, my mom and my grandma always tried to keep me out of the streets as much as they could, so they put me in a private school when I was super young.

I grew up in a family that was multifaceted, sexually oriented, and pretty much open to everything. And because I was working, my friends were all adults. I had a tough time going to different schools because people knew me from films and I was the fat child who got beaten up every day.

I was smart enough to go through any door that opened.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.