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Both my parents died on the young side. My father was 45, and my mother was 61, so cancer's affected me in a big way.
My parents were very supportive of me and my artistic endeavours. My father and mother came to every school play I ever did.
My parents divorced when I was 10, but when my father was there, he was trying to create almost like a little prison for me.
My parents separated when I was nine, but my father was always around, and he still follows me now. He is always sending me messages.
My parents were gigantic influences on me. I had a deep hunger to impress my father, who was a professor and an intellectual. I wanted his approval.
Growing up, I stayed in a child's place. My father was murdered when I was 20. I was a model and never had a real job and my parents took care of me.
My parents got divorced when I was nine months old, and my father would only pop in and see me once a year, if that. I don't have much contact with him.
I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.
My parents always supported me, but I was put to task. My father thought when I sang, I was sharp; my mother was upset when I wasn't in the first line at recitals.
My father was a very big musical influence on me. He was a trumpet player. And that's what I started with. Then, when I was 7, my parents introduced me to the piano.
When I came out to my parents, I knew that they knew. My father was like, 'Are you sure?' I literally said, 'You took me to see Barbra Streisand at Madison Square Garden.'
I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.
My father made with me one serious mistake which I see parents about me making. He got himself somehow into the awkward position of an authority; I thought he knew and was right on everything - for a while.
I want to say that nobody accuses their parents of abusing them without justification to do that. I didn't just make it up. A lot of things were true and abusive and horrible things that happened to me that my father did.
I'm the youngest of four boys, and my oldest brother, Todd, was like a father figure to me. We were very close even though we were 23 years apart. When my parents were working, he was the one there for me. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was 15 years old.
We lived in Colorado, and my parents were outdoorsy mountain people. My father would always say, 'Go out and don't come back until you have something to show me.' Which meant he wanted me to come back with a scraped knee or an injury. When I went out to play, I felt like I'd better get hurt.
I think in the case of my father, in terms of the things that influenced me, he never pressed me to go into academics or pressed me to go to a field, and indeed, my behavior was largely to move as far the other direction. I don't think that's uncommon with people with very successful parents.
My father took my mother, me, and my brother from Sicily to New York. He got us one-way tickets but booked himself a return flight. He dumped us with my mother's parents, who had just arrived from Italy, and abandoned us. That was 1986. I didn't see or speak to him for another 12 years. That's cruel.
You always want to break away from your parents, and you always think, 'I'm never going to be like that guy.' What I've discovered is you kind of wind up becoming your parents, which is also a cliche in itself. My father, despite the fact that he's been dead for over 25 years, he's been a huge influence on me.