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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Mom was so funny and loving to us kids. She was our first audience. When my dad died, I was suddenly alone in the house with her because my two older brothers were away at college. I was the man of the house, and she was the grieving woman.
Back in the old days, when I was a child, we sat around the family table at dinner time and exchanged our daily experiences. It wasn't very organized, but everyone was recognized and all the news that had to be told was told by each family member. We listened to each other and the interest was not put on; it was real.
My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties.
I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.
When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.
My mom and dad - they were always there. They were always on the set. They focused on our family life. The entertainment business wasn't the end-all. They weren't out to get the next big paycheck or the next big movie. It was about 'What can we do as a family.'
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.
My family was amazing; they exposed me to the world of show business, and, boy, it was the '70s and I got to spend a lot of time backstage at theaters and see the inner workings of how this entertainment industry is really put together.
My mother and father met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a senior and she was a junior, and their marriage didn't last very long.
I was a kid who did a kid show. Then I went away and raised my child, and the world has never met me as an adult.