I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.

We came to Portland because there was a good alternative public school. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it. I left his dad and went to work slinging hash in a breakfast diner and working nights tending bar in a biker tavern.

We did have kids driving to school. They don't belong. It's not fair to the younger kids on track and the older kids, ... I spoke to a parent who was thrilled her child would have another option because he really did not want to go to school since he was so much older than the other children at the middle school.

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

I'm not a figurehead for anything. I was a single mom with two kids. What else was I going to do? It was either be in a band or be a waitress.

My own theory about the phlegmatic qualities and properties of the English is the mountain of pure white sugar hydrocarbons they consume every day bloody day of the year - the stiff upper lip is petrified sugar; that's Bermuda's revenge, the with death, the rotting future square in the teeth of it.