Actresses From Baltimore

"It felt right because really if I hadn’t taken his class, I wouldn’t be where I am right now. I’m happier than I’ve ever been."

"She has already been a close collaborator of ours for years in front of the cameras, but she also brings a wealth of experience in writing, directing and producing from her own independent adult and mainstream projects. I'm excited to see what she will bring to the table!"

"Unlike adult performers of the past, Casey Calvert is an educated woman who didn’t stumble into porn, but headed there because that’s what she wanted."

"Sean gets sex work. He just does. It's so exciting to me that I can't even think about it. It would feel like this industry that I love being recognized on a stage it's never been recognized before on. It's not about the taboo of sex. It's just about a marginalized community of people who he finds really interesting and wants to explore."

"I told my parents I was moving to LA to do porn before I moved to LA to do porn. They were really cool about it. They actually paid my first three months rent when I moved out here."

"Being a porn star is just like having any other job, except you're naked on the Internet. When I'm not on set, I'm doing all the things normal people with normal jobs do. I'm certainly not running around banging strangers ‪24/7."

"Porn has long offered a glimpse of the future. Long before alternative sexualities were accepted in popular culture as they are now, porn accepted them. Porn accepts everyone. There is content for everyone."

"As a sex worker, it’s impossible for me to make a general statement about sex workers as a whole, because I see them as individuals. What I can say is that not all sex workers are the stereotype people want to believe. Many of us are college educated, feminists, and absolutely love what we do."

"A man can CHOOSE to belong to someone. And if he does...he is considered noble. A woman is told she MUST belong to someone or...she is not worthy."

"Having the courage to be with all that we are, even in the face of the disappointment and the anger and resentment that comes with the breaking of the romantic idea around the feminine," she explained, "part of the freedom and part of the empowerment of women is being able to withstand that."

"so that's what I'm really playing with right now. And I love the juxtaposition of going from beauty to rough, the balance of both."

"You cannot make a cake with all sugar. In one lifetime, we've lived about 20...If I had to say what kind of art piece our union is, I would say it is a tapestry."

"I think everybody's life is their own work of art and then we have many pieces within it. I have a lot of ideas around marriage and I think it can be one of the most powerful dynamics."

"if we so CHOOSE to bond with someone from this space … we will erect monumental love and give birth to treasures."

"We mere mortal women are worthy simply because we exist!,"

"If you really want to know, I'm thankful for the Hollywood scrutiny, that that's my problem. There are mothers out there losing their sons, their husbands, their daughters. I'm blessed. So scrutinize me. I'll take that any day over what the majority of my people are dealing with on a daily basis. I dare not complain."

"You gotta trust who you're with, and at the end of the day, I'm not here to be anybody's watcher. I'm not his watcher. He's a grown man. I trust that the man that Will is is a man of integrity. HE's got all the freedom in the world, and as long as Will can look at himself in the mirror and be OK, I'm good."

"I've always believed a woman's superpower is how deep she can love, you know? And one of the things growing up in Baltimore, I grew up around a lot of Black women that didn't have, necessarily, resources to give, right? But they had their strength and they had their love to offer."

"The ego will never fail to strangle the love out of one's heart if we allow it to take center stage in our relationships. Transferring our trust to our hearts from our egos is a painful process in learning HOW to love. BUT… through it all… when we finally get to the place where we can give and receive love in its most pure state… ego free… it is only ever… beauty."

"When you've walked through the darkness of your own heart and mind ... there is no shadow you fear."

"I really thought happiness had a lot to do with pleasure, and I realized that happiness is about peace."

"For every woman it's important that we recognize that we have the right to figure out what works for us personally. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing. If we are good, our family is going to be good."

"It's more of a life partnership… I don't own him. He doesn't own me. He has to be his own person first, and vice versa… Love is freedom."

"I fought hard for her to get that job. I wanted her to get that job. And she was paid her money. She was paid the money for the budget that we had."

"I abused and betrayed the trust of another sibling, my sister, my blood. I’m sorry, Mo’Nique. I’m sorry."

"Oftentimes, we get scared because we’re too afraid to lose something, We’re too afraid to lose the mortgage payment...too afraid to lose our stuff, so we’ll just go along to get along. Be unafraid, even if [you have to] stand alone. That’s what has to happen. Because when you look in the mirror, you’ve got to be OK with the one looking back at you."

"And stop hiding behind what you call is negative comments…what people are beginning to do is see you for who you are."

"So often times, we do it to ourselves. But, I just can’t. Understand, I love my sister. However, when you know you’re being fed the wrong food, you must say, ‘I can’t chew this, y’all."

"Inequality is devastating and it's extreme."

"There was an energy in that building — of honesty, of truth-telling, of freedom, and that was what that show was, Because it is my journey and my story, where I pick and choose to tell it is totally up to me."

"What you’re saying to the community is, as Black women, you’re devalued. And if you stand up and you make a stand and you say We need equality and we have to say what’s right and what’s fair."

"It all depends on who's directing. A lot of directors are very conscious of the fact that they can be difficult things to record, and they'll save all the screaming and yelling and everything until the end of the job, which is always really nice."

"When you've played a character for five years, I don't know… they kind of start to take on a life of their own. So, if I see people in chat rooms or whatever and somebody's dissin' Sandy, I get really like, "Hey! You leave her alone!""

"But every time I look at myself and think, oh, my body's not OK or my worth in value are determined by my appearance and my marketability, I'm kind of engaging in one form of this same narrative. So writing this work has been really cathartic and humbling for me."

"The performance obviously is the main reason you’re going to the theater, but what’s unique about this medium and hopefully the audience we’re attracting is the diversity. I have a diverse group of characters on that stage. If they’re just performing for one kind of people it’s not the same experience for the audience themselves, so I really want to think of it as, yes you’re going to a one-person show, but you’re also a participant in a hundred person show."

"Even if they are not guilty of anything and are not convicted of a crime, because of the draconian bail system and the fact that they are poor and can’t make bail, they can sit on that island for three years. I just got so much clarity that we’re doing it to adults, you know, we’re doing it to children. And they’re all, you know, black and brown…"

"The words are verbatim. The words are exactly what the people said. When I was a girl, my grandfather said, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you,” and that’s really my technique. I really believe that if I learn exactly what somebody said, that I will find myself, as an actor, in a similar state of mind as them. I’ll never know what they’re really thinking, but I’ll have some of their feelings…"

"…White racism is about people who don’t feel so bad about fixed things. But white racism is a fixed thing, and it is perpetuated because of fixedness. Anything that we can do that causes people to desire movement more than fixedness is going to disrupt racism…"

"I do believe that character is a process, that truth is a process, and I am not interested in winning and losing…"

"My life's work has been to go around America with a tape recorder trying to become America word for word. And I've met a lot of people who I disagree with. I've met a lot of people who you would think I would disagree with. But I have to say it's enriched my sense of being an American to reach out to people who are very, very different from me…"

"It's a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt. But, you know, you know, my black relatives, my white relatives, the people who you meet in my shows are these amalgamated versions of people I really knew. And I had to learn to code switch, as we call it now, just to like get dinner."

"I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics. Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside. Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is."

"I hope these babies have a world to live in. I hope they have a place to go, a land to walk on. I remember when I was ten years old, in Washington, D.C., and I lived with fear of the atom bomb that would keep me awake nights and make me wake up screaming. I used to babysit for my younger brother and sister and I'd be terrified if I heard a siren, a police car, or an ambulance. I'd say, "My God, what if this is it! How do I protect them?" We used to have duck-and-cover exercises in school, where they'd ring a bell at any time of the day, sometimes five or six times a day, and we'd crawl under our desks and put our hands like this to protect the back of our necks from the bomb. We all carried that with us."

"I've heard that story about kids are high naturally, but I've seen kids that aren't high, kids who've had the high taken out of them."

"I've always wanted to go to England; I've always felt a tremendous drawing to England — especially the Elizabethan period. I felt I was familiar with a lot of it — more than what I was familiar with from what I read and studied in school. I went to England. I started driving. I drove to Stonehenge and found that I had been there. It was familiar to me. I went to the tower of London and knew that I had been there. It was more than just feeling vibrations, which a lot of people can do — feel, you know, vibrations of a place that has antiquity screaming through it. It was an irrefutable fact. It was like coming home for me."

"I would say that there are certain glittering generalities that can be made about every sign that will hold true about everybody who's a member of that sign. For instance, if you had been a Virgo, you would have understood how I hate to be late. I broke up a group I was in once called The Big Three because one of the guys was chronically late and I couldn't take it. I feel when you're supposed to be some place on time, you're there on time. You don't hang people up. It doesn't matter if you're the President of the United States. That's not what you are here for, to hang people up. When I know somebody's sign, and I usually know everybody's sign whether they tell me or not — after getting into this for several years — it helps me to deal with them. Usually I'd rather let people deal with me. That's a total ego hang up, but that's where it's at."

"I say, "Look, I'm here now. There must be a reason I'm here." If that's fatalistic, be that as it may. Where my work is, is where my life is, and if we're falling in the ocean, we're falling into the ocean."

"Everything I've learned in life I've learned either by doing it or watching the changes other people go through. And when you're famous, you don't get to meet people — because they want you to like them when they present themselves to you, present the best sides of themselves, and you don't see the real people. Which is why I don't really go anywhere. And when I do, I put on my silly face and do what they expect me to do. Actually, I never do what they expect me to do. It's the only way I could go on doing what I have to do. I do whatever I… you know, I didn't even comb my hair today. I didn't know we were taking pictures but when I found out, it didn't change my mind any."

"I would love, in all honesty, to do another album with the Mamas and Papas sometime. I miss them. We're still friends and we want to be friends. Because you break up a successful group, which is really what I did, you know, there's some kind of karma here. I don't feel guilty about it; I left the group because I had to. That was being honest."

"I hated it. Everybody'd say, "Hey, mama, what's happening?" Then came the Mamas and Papas and I was stuck with it. And now people call me Mama Cass because of the baby. So I don't know whether I'm gonna be able to really get away from it."