My earliest acting memory is making up a play for my mom and dad called The Lonesome Baby. I have no idea what The Lonesome Baby was about. I just remember the title. But I'm sure it was an epic.

I hope that through my work artists will take some chances break some rules and make art that comes from inside of them. I would like to be remembered as a kind person a great Mom and a bit unruly - in a good way!

I remember my mom saying that after you have a baby you get really thin. So you gain all that weight and then you just lose it and keep losing it.

We've got activists all across the country like the members of the Million Mom March organization some of their leaders are here tonight. We're phone banking congressional offices and pursuing editorial boards.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do and then I got this call from a casting director in Los Angeles. She remembered me from something years before and she called my mom wanting me to audition for this thing.

I was watching TV at age 9 or 10 and my mom said that I came from the front room and I told her that I want to act. And she said if you want to do this at 18 then you can. It was a very simple story yet I do not even remember the conversation that I had with my mother. Until she reminded me of the story many years later.

I remember my mom saying to me that what your friends do is one thing but what you do could be on the front page of the paper.

I remember my mom dressed like Janis Joplin.

I can't remember a time when my mom didn't work. She has forever been on the move: a go-getter. When my brother Adel and I had a paper route as kids my mom would get up before us at the crack of dawn to drop off the Washington Post at different corners.