I don't wear pants, or like them; I'm a Jewish woman who's made the decision to wear skirts, so I wear mostly skirts past the knee.

I'm one of those people that makes a better adult than I did a kid.

As a kid, I felt really weird.

To be honest, it's considered very late to start acting at 11 and a half, for the industry. Most kids are doing it from toddlerhood on.

Chemistry is one of these crazy things you can't teach or learn or you can't fake. You go in hoping it will work, hope that you will connect with the other actors. I was fortunate on 'Modern Family' and 'The Procession.' They are great people, very easy to like.

But then my mother, who's a very selfless, stoic person from a family of Marines, would tell us that what was good for our father was good for us - he would make more money; therefore, we'd be able to get better educations.

No one ever said, 'Be a doctor.' But because so many members of my extended family - aunts, uncles - were doctors, there was this expectation that I'd probably be a physician.

I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood, she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite.