Our children await Christmas presents like politicians getting in election returns: there’s the Uncle Fred precinct and the Aunt Ruth district still to come in.
I was painfully shy, so my aunt suggested to my mum that me and my brother go to Stage 84, a performing arts school in Yorkshire. I’ve probably romanticised it in my head, but I seem to remember that in the space of an hour’s drama workshop, I was transformed. I went in really shy, and I came out full of confidence.
My dad had an aunt at the turn of the century who died from diabetes, but she was the closest affected relative in my family.
It’s Charley’s Aunt and The Odd Couple rolled into one.
Coming out was crucial to changing attitudes about gays and lesbians: will people feel differently about abortion if they know their mother, their aunt, or their friend had one?
I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.
I was born into a household where my aunt, grandmother and mother lived their music. They all sang harmony, and by the time I was 2, I could sing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ in three-part harmony.
When I was in senior year of high school, my mom lost her job, we lost our house, and we had to move in with my uncle and my aunt.
I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it’s a magical city – it’s big, sexy and very ‘cosmo’ with a small-town feel.
I remember, when I went away to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, my aunt sent me a book with the rules of being a Southern Belle. One of the rules was to never wear white after Labor Day. Fashion has a lot to do with confidence and making up your own rules.
You know how there’s all these rappers like Mike D and King T and Ice T and Cool C or something like that? Well, on Mayberry, on ‘Andy Griffith,’ they had Aunt B.
My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for ‘Happy Days,’ I took a cutting with me.
I was a bio major, and I was going to take over my aunt’s dental practice and be a dentist.
There’s so many good comedians in D.C. I started hanging out with those guys. Dave Chappelle was there. Actually, Dave was too young to be in the clubs, so when his mom couldn’t make it, he would ask me to pretend I was his aunt, so he could do open mike.
Even my aunt Joan, hopelessly sentimental about every member of our family, admitted that I was hideous.
When I was 13, I would come visit my aunt and uncle in New York. I decided I wanted to live with them after seeing my cousin’s school. Honestly, I just wanted to go to a school where I didn’t have to wear uniforms, and my mom said okay.
My aunt was Frances Hodges, who in the Fifties was the editor of ‘Seventeen’ and later one of the creators of ‘Mademoiselle.’ She was my Auntie Mame; she loved culture. She was a Quaker, but she became a milliner against all Quaker logic – they feel that fashion and art are vanities – because she loved fashion.
My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that’s when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt.
I’d rather be the cool aunt than the authoritative aunt.
I basically don’t do that well with children, although my sister says I’m a great aunt.
My mum lives in Boston; she’s famous for teaching wushu and t’ai chi. So from when I was young, my mum and aunt were like: ‘You’re training; you’re not playing baseball or football.’ Training every day was normal. Later, when I was almost a teenager, Bruce Lee became my idol.
I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt’s copy of ‘In Cold Blood’ and she didn’t ask for it back.
There are a lot of kids out there that look at me as their mother, and I have my two biological children, and there are so many queens that look at me as an aunt or some sort of confidante, and I can absorb it really well.
I’m a character actress. I’m the girl next door, the aunt, the quirky cousin. You have to innately know who you are and be happy with that.
I would not be a good mother. I mean, I love being an aunt to my niece and nephew. And I used to want to, like, adopt 10 kids – because I had friends who were adopted, and I thought that was the coolest thing, to be chosen. But again, my job is too selfish.
My favorite game was one I invented with my cousins called Mean Aunt Rosie, where I was a deranged maiden aunt who chased them around the house.
Why is she Mrs. C.J. Walker? It really was a matter of her trying to insist that people respect her, because during that time, white people would call any black woman ‘Sally.’ ‘Aunt Sally.’ So this was like… you can’t call me that.
‘Daughters of Britannia’ is a fascinating book, not least because it shines a light on a very dark corner of Foreign Office dealings. Diplomatic spouses are the Aunt Sallys of the foreign service: responsible for nearly everything, recognised for almost nothing.
Female influence came from my grandmother and my aunt. They would sing Corsican love songs while cleaning the house and dress all in black and say melodramatic things like: ‘I want to die.’
I have a part-time dog. I’m actually an aunt to a dog, and he’s an awful dog, but I love him. He’s only interested in doing what he wants to do.
My dad’s side of the family was very poor while growing up, but my dadi raised three kids, got my dad through medical school, sent my uncle to America where he wanted to work and helped my aunt become an accountant, because that’s what she wanted to do.
I love so many directors. I love David O. Russell. I love David Fincher, I love Alexander Payne and Jane Campion and my aunt. Spike Jonze. There are just so many amazing directors.
I want to be the coolest aunt in the entire world.
My aunt had a season ticket for the Friday afternoon concerts, and I would go down for lessons. My lessons were Saturday morning.
It was more my uncle – my mom’s brother – and my aunt who turned me on to hoops. He was more into basketball and he’d take me to Raptors games. And then my dad started taking me with him. And I started falling in love with the game.
My Aunt Lori is my mother’s sister and has always been a mother figure to me. She is smart, driven, successful, and kind.
My aunt Ruth Brown was a jazz musician. I got hooked on it at a young age, understanding what John Coltrane was doing playing two notes on the saxophone at the same time, which is impossible.
There’s been times when I’ve had heartbreaking moments and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you said that,’ or ‘I can’t believe you did that’. And it hurts, it still hurts, and it’ll always hurt, but I’ve never had somebody that I truly cared about just walk out on me, whether it was a boyfriend, or an aunt, mom or dad.
My aunt Caroline was really a character. She lived and worked in my grandfather’s old house and even wore some of his clothes.
Well when I was young, when I was very young, when I was a little boy I don’t remember the music I heard, but there was an article in the Brooklyn Daily written by my Aunt about how I could choose phonograph records.
Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I’m borderline diabetic.
I had a lot of female role models around me as a kid, but my aunt Marcela Rodriguez was the strongest. When she was only 26, she opened Artes Culinarias Internacionales, one of the first culinary schools in Baja. She started with six students and built up to 800.
For young people, it doesn’t matter so much, but when you’re older, less is definitely more – too much make-up can give you the ‘eccentric Aunt Sally’ look!
My aunt looked like Lucille Ball, and everything she touched was beautiful and elegant. But I was intelligent enough to understand I would never be like her.
There are firefighters in my family, plus my aunt is now an EMT, and I want to do it, I want to help save lives.
But you have to be told you’re special first before you believe it yourself. I was first told I was special by my aunt. The second person was my scoutmaster.
From my earliest memories, my aunt was squirting out oil paint. I could just eat it. I would go from her studio and walk down to my father’s house, and there he was, working in egg tempera.
Something I’ve definitely learned from my aunt and my mom is that you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball. You have to realize that, in some instances, you may need to work twice as hard to get half as much, but you don’t stop. You don’t stop fighting.
I’m after joining the ‘This Morning’ family, so I’m going to be doing a bit of presenting. I’m going to be taking some phone calls, like an agony aunt type thing, I’m going to be taking on some challenges, they want me to do a skydive and drift a car and things.
I found my style in my aunt’s attic. She hoarded all her ’60s clothes there, along with the tiaras she’d won as a beauty queen, and I’d steal her wedding dress to wear around town.
