I'd stand on a coffee table, and my cousin Edith would give me dimes, and you put the dimes on your head... And when your forehead was full, show was over.
The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.
My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!
I haven't watched a lot of television, but when I was kid, I watched 'All in the Family,' and I liked Archie and Edith a lot.
Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives.
I love Aretha Franklin, Edith Piaf, Blondie.
I listened to John Denver and Simon & Garfunkel. Edith Piaf was a huge favourite. Then I discovered musicals - I loved 'Les Miserables' - and, at about 14, I started listening to David Gray.
'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.
I look up to people not necessarily based on what they look like. For example, Edith Piaf is somebody I think is a beauty hero even though she was definitely considered to not be beautiful. It was just her charisma and stage presence, and to me, that really defines beauty.
I was in art school, and we had all these random classes. We'd listen to a lot of Bollywood. I'd listen to Spanish music - and I don't even speak Spanish, but Hector Lavoe is amazing - we listened to French music like Edith Piaf. She's tight. I like cool vocal inflections; I like cool sounds. I pretty much listen to anything I think is good.
