Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.
Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.
I have three younger siblings, so the four of us were outside all the time after school playing games, making up games. My sister made up a game called 'roof ball.' We'd play that constantly. She always beat me in it, and it made me very mad. But we were outside all the time.
I remember being a kid, and if you had to pee, well, you had to hold it until the commercial break. Then you rushed, and hopefully, if you're going to the kitchen for a snack, you'll be back before so you don't miss a line. If your sister sneezed or was talking over a line, there was no way of knowing what that line was or what the joke was.
I'd say we do reach somewhat of a younger audience, but I think for the most part that younger audience is picking our music up from a brother or sister or even parent, who is turning them onto the band.
My sister does all this community-service type stuff in Portland that makes the world a much better place. And I make as much in a two-day commercial shoot as she does in five years, which is ridiculous.
I was born in New York City, along with a twin sister. I am five minutes older than Emily. It was Emily, for reasons no one knows - she certainly doesn't - who called me Avi. It stuck. It's the only name I use now.
My eldest sister Beth is a doctor who studied at Harvard and Columbia and played basketball for Harvard. She set the athletic and academic standard for the rest of us to follow.
My sister learned she was a carrier for a recessive disease, Bloom syndrome, late in one of her pregnancies. I remember the panicked call and the weeks of worry as she and her husband awaited his test results; if he was also a carrier, this meant their daughter had a one in four chance of being born with the disorder.
I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad's sister is still there, but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.
The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.
My parents homeschooled my sister and me for many years. Why? Because the local school insisted that I, being three, should go to preschool, and my sister, being five, should go to kindergarten. The problem? You learn your alphabet in preschool, and I was already reading chapter books.
