My mother had me on four times on TV show 'To Tell The Truth'. Four times. Only once as a contestant, but they had a bunch of kids on at the beginning of some shows, playing with toys or things like that.
Like most parents, I want everything for my kids that I didn't have. But I don't intend to spoil them. I just enjoy everything that comes naturally with parenthood.
I had an amazing childhood, lots of love. But my dad worked his tail off, getting up at 4 in the morning and going off at 5, 6 o'clock, yet he always had time to spend with his kids and his wife.
Here in Los Angeles, school's out for summer. For thousands of school kids, this is the first week of summer vacation. And for thousands of parents, it's the first week of hell.
You know when you're a kid and you think, 'Oh no, I've got double math, this is never gonna end,' but then it ends, and it's like it never happened? That's like life.
I think when you get married, it should be forever. Even though I did get married once and it was annulled. I don't know. For myself, I just want to have kids by the same person and stay with the same person.
I think it's hard, the fact that there's a certain age that we can't have kids anymore.
So many people have so much trouble having kids.
I wasn't even a theater kid in high school. I studied classical piano, and I ran track.
The cruelty of nature is you have to work out harder when you get older ... It should be the other way around: Work out hard when you're a kid you should be able to coast when you get older. But unfortunately you have to do more to stay in the same position.
I was bullied pretty badly especially in middle school. High school was not as bad as middle school, but I was not a macho kid at all. And the kids saw me as different from a very, very early age.
When I was really sad, I would be like a little kid wiggling a loose tooth or touching a sore spot - there were things that I did to make myself sadder. It was almost as if I were luxuriant in my own melancholy. Looking at the diaries and thinking about my old self, thinking about my lost youth - that was part of that project of making myself totally miserable.
I've always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form.
In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.
I don't want my kids growing up believing that there is nothing destructive in the world.
Ever see a little kid walking around talking to himself? I'm the same way.
And one day our grandkids will ask us, 'What was it like to be a minority?'
I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
I don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.
Ultimately, I felt fortunate, because in many ways I did identify with aspects of being gay that were very stereotypical. I was a big theatre kid in high school, I was creative, I was very emotionally sensitive, even hypersensitive. I loved female divas.
Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.
Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.
The Twilight Zone' wasn't around with the kids. They think going up in space is neat. Within their lifetime, there will be paying passengers on the shuttle.
As a kid, I would do all of the plays at my school, and I was notorious for being in five numbers in one show. I'd go onstage, run backstage for a wardrobe change, and then go back out onstage. I'm always trying to do more than I should but when I got my lucky break (or whatever it's called), I was prepared because I studied and worked really hard for it.
People ask me a lot of questions and I don't always have the time to stop and talk, but I do a lot of email mentorship with college students. So if I meet a college kid during a motivational speech or something like that I'll stop and say, "I see you need help in this area. Here's my email. Let me help." So, it's just my way of giving back.
