I was always embarrassed because my dad wore a suit and my mother wore flat pumps and a cozy jumper while my friends' parents were punks or hippies.

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.

My mother and dad were big animal lovers too. I just don't know how I would have lived without animals around me. I'm fascinated by them - both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me and it's made such a difference in my lifetime.

A spirit is like your mother my dad who've made it. They can come around but they come around in a loving way because they've already made it to God. Most people make it.

My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early '70s when I was 5 years old my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.

My mother raised three children on her own and my dad was a doctor working 16 hours a day.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

My dad was like a stage mother he always pushed me to do what I wanted.

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say 'You're tearing up the grass' 'We're not raising grass ' Dad would reply. 'We're raising boys.'

Don't forget Mother's Day. Or as they call it in Beverly Hills Dad's Third Wife Day.