I just think there are enough hours in the day. If you just focus and dedicate yourself and approach each task as it presents itself, you can accomplish a lot.
I wanted to make a home that was similar to the kind of home that my mother made. To be able to create something like that in my adopted city, New York City, one of the toughest cities on the planet, is really special.
I'm a rabid Steelers fan: I'm originally from Pittsburgh. So if the Giants or Pittsburgh are playing, the rest of Sunday is all about food and football.
The first thing I do is brush my teeth - we like to start the morning with fresh breath - and put on my pajamas and meander down to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice. No coffee. No caffeine.
Understand that the time in the audition is your time. Really own it and take control of it. And do what you prepared. Focus on really executing what it is that you intended to do.
We sit and read the paper in conjunction with having a little breakfast. Usually fruit salad, or I make myself a smoothie with rice milk, coconut water and yogurt.
When I first got to New York, all I did was musicals. After a few years I had to make a conscious choice to close the door on musicals, because I was getting pigeon-holed as a musical theater performer.
You have to continue to grow and evolve as individuals in order for your marriage to evolve. It takes two pillars to support a structure. If those two pillars become one, you have a structure that teeters.
My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.
I took the whole college prep trajectory, and then in my senior year of high school, I decided that performing was something that I had always done as a kid, and I loved it... I said, 'This makes people happy when I do this, I feel good, I get to pretend and explore other areas and learn so much'.
I wake up late, say 10 or 11, because we've usually been out and about town until 2 or 3 A.M. listening to music at the jazz clubs or hitting the jazz clubs post-theater.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, and regularly, my parents would take us to the Holiday House Supper Club to see acts like Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughn, Ben Vereen, Freda Payne, Stephanie Mills, and The Temptations, to name a few.
I grew up in a funeral home, born and raised, and everyone was always like, 'Well, what was that like?' and I was like, 'It was normal', because it's all I knew.
All you have is yourself and what you have to present, and just focus on that. And if you can walk out of the audition and say to yourself, 'I hit all my beats,' 'I accomplished my emotional honesty,' or 'I remembered my words,' then that's winning.
