You know, I'm not unwilling to listen to people just because where they're coming from. I'll listen to them, but I'm not going to be beholden to them.

Growing up, when we would get dragged to these events, I didn't want to be there. Over time, as we got older, I developed a real appreciation of the importance of being involved in the democratic process.

I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent, the same brains, the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.

Hopefully, in not a too distant future, we will see a Latino president, and who knows how's that going to happen. It's just a matter of time.

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

I have to say that despite being born in a Congress family and being the daughter of a respected Congress leader, I joined the BJP and served the party, forgetting my past, and without making any compromise.

My father's Alfred Newman - born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he's one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter - went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay.