It scares me to think that one day I'm not going to be in school anymore.

Everybody just told me from the day I went into high school that I looked like Carol Burnett.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it's just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

It occurred to me in my junior year of high school. I got my first letter from a big college. I still have that letter to this day - a letter from Indiana.

I've had many a player tell me all through high school and right up until signing day that they were coming to Alabama, then they signed with somebody else.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

I think back on that day when 16-year-old me scribbled on some silly piece of paper for some long-forgotten high school career-day project that my dream job was 'romance novelist.'

I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along.

The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

There probably wasn't a day that went by in high school that I wasn't bullied either physically or verbally. It made me stronger, and I knew I had to stay steadfast to what I believed in.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade and had gone to a special school for it and then left the school. I'd learned to read and write, but it was still a real struggle for me, as it is to this day.

Well, in brief, I was discovered by a lady called Beth Boldt. She had also been a model. She used to take pictures of the girls she found, and she took a picture of me one day in my school uniform, and it all kind of started from there.

Ever since I was little, my mum used to choose an outfit for me and lay it on the bed so I'd know what I was wearing the next day. I never went to a uniformed school, so I always had an outfit - and I never really grew out of that, I don't think.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn't pay me enough at my first newspaper job to venture onto the grounds of South Boston High School when bricks were being thrown. Instead, I would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each day.

I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'

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