“I love pasta with the homemade marinara sauce I had as a kid.”

I know Mama Rose is a great role and I love having a chance to do it.

You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much.

I love Some Enchanted Evening, and If I Loved You. And as I sing them more and more, I find new favorites.

It was one of the most exciting, perfect evenings of my life, my solo debut at Carnegie Hall. And knowing we were all there to raise money for Gay Men’s Health Crisis made the evening an extraordinary experience.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Anton Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

I’d like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

Working on behalf of companion animals is so important. We start to realize how healing they are.

Singing lessons are like body building for your larynx.

“Into the Woods” was… a lot of running around in the woods! I can’t wait to see the show again. People didn’t realize it back then, but kids still come up to me-young people-and they talk about it. It really made its mark.

I feel strongly for gay marriage to be accepted.

I don’t smoke, I don’t drink much, I don’t eat red meat. I stay out of the sun.

We’ve been listening to Wagner, which is so great.

Animals speak with pure affection. It’s important to me to get something going in NY so we can get to be a no-kill city, and give the animals homes and more attention and love.

It Might As Well Be Spring… I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.

When I grew up in the ’60s, your hair had to be straight and you had to be skinny and have no boobs, and it was like not my era.

No One Is Alone by Stephen Sondheim is all about thinking for yourself and being your own person.

Saturday night at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it’s important to teach kids about American culture, and films are certainly a big part of it.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he’s a human calculator. He says it’s a skill he learned as a kid. Now he’s a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it – twenty years from now, they’ll be marching off into other things and that’s still the legacy you leave.

I guess you’re not gonna be happy til’ it’s for real. Four year old kids, doing drive-bys on Big Wheels.

Scholars, street knowledge, Carter kids stuck in the projects.

Mister, I don’t want no trouble. I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain’t looking for no trouble, Mister.

My parents put me in the water very early, and also had me skiing at a very early age. They put me on skis when I was one and a half.

I wasn’t terribly aware of Catwoman. She was a DC comics character and as a kid, I wasn’t terribly fond of the DC comics characters. I was a Marvel boy.