If you're not running through chaos together with kids, you're not really playing together.
Today I'm a candidate for the office of president of the United States of America. My kids can't believe I just said that.
I wouldn't know anything about opera music if it wasn't for Bugs Bunny. That was my entire introduction to opera music. I wouldn't know anything about classical music if it wasn't for "Fantasia." They didn't have to do that stuff. They chose to base this ridiculous, funny, intriguing, creative story on this beautiful classical music. It's the combination of the high and the low that I thought was very cool. But I had no concept of it as a kid.
When I was a little kid, I kind of liked the commercials more than a lot of the stuff on TV. My favorite ones were the Miller Lite ads with all the jocks in them. "Tastes great, less filling."
People go through different stages of their lives at different times. If you're out of sync with your friend group, that gets exploded once everyone starts having kids because they just have to deal with different stuff that you don't really relate to.
There are great jazz educators that I meet all the time. I met a guy named Paul Luchessi who has a high school jazz program in Fresno. And Bob Athayde who runs a junior high program in Lafayette, California. And man, we walked into these schools and Paul Luchessi said, "Jon is the composer of Paradox." A hundred or something kids started to applaud. "What? You guys know that? I'm so blown away.
We [with my mother] listened to music when I was a kid. We listened to a little bit of Bob's [Gordon] music, but just a little, I think it was too painful for her.
I just think that I associated music with something that was healing and transformative as a kid.
I asked all through third, fourth and fifth grade, when they were asking kids to be in the band, to be in the school band. But they wouldn't let me do it.
We had been thrown out of a couple of places that we had lived in when I was a kid and all the family photos and records and toys were long since gone. But I think somebody had given us a couple of records.
Surfing and music were incredible outlets for me when I was a kid. And there are some really tricky times when you're growing up and it's easy to make a wrong decision, even with a good family and community around you. Surfing and music kept me out of trouble.
I didn't have a good childhood because I never could get along with other kids. I was the child that sat in the corner eating lunch by herself.
I'm a tough person. I wasn't afraid of other kids because I understood that someday they'd wash my car.
I think it is important for young people to see other young people on television doing something positive with their life, making positive changes and growing. I don't think there is enough of that on TV. I mean, we've got 'Jersey Shore,' and I don't know what that teaches young kids.
I've always said that with kids' TV that people get stuck in it from drama school but that's not fair because I know myself that when you go in creatively, kids are so much more open to ideas. You're so much freer to mess about and try things.
I was loved as a kid; I was raised with more love and emotional support than most folks could wish for my memories aged nought to ten are all bound up together in a mesh of innocence and fun.
I'm a small-town kid from Kerrville, Texas.
It's unfortunate when kids get hurt, but I wish parents would monitor what their kids are doing and watching. It's common sense, really.
I was a really bad kid. Then, I got sweet as I got older.
You don't ever have to teach a kid to do wrong. You have to teach them to do right.
other kids pack lunch
I had just had a daughter, who was three or three-and-half years old, and I had been watching nothing but cartoons. That's really it. There was no YouTube. You're in France and you're raising a kid, so you break out the Tex Avery.
I think kids, in general as an audience, are the way forward because they're not sort of sullied by intellectual expectation or this or that. It's a very pure kind of response to the work.
When I was a kid, we watched the Vietnam War on the six o'clock news, and it was desensitizing. You felt you were watching a war film; meanwhile you were really watching these guys getting blown to bits. Parents need to protect their kids from watching that stuff.
Kids accept a lot more, and they buy it, because they're free.
