Well, you kept R.S.V.P.'ing no to all my Fifth Column dinner parties.

He always asks people out, but nobody says yes, because he had a girlfriend once who worked here, and they broke up, and he fired her butt so fast.

So he gave me homework to invite someone for dinner on my next day off.

But when I told him that maybe I could bring everyone, he said he was taken off the bench, so he has to practice.

So since she said she didn't want to hold hands yet, he's afraid that if he asked her out, she'd say something like that again?

Just go up to someone who's from a different culture, a different country, a different ethnicity -- some difference -- and engage them in a conversation.

It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "Here, let me tell you a story.

(Laughter) But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule -- not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing -- "you've got to dance with the one who brung ya".

And the simplest way that I knew how to co-opt myself into that experience of wanting to be in that song somehow was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds and play "Wild Boys" at the school talent show.

And we even moved into the neighborhood when one of the guys that lived on the street, Elias, told us that we could come and live in his house, together with his family, which was fantastic.

(Laughter) The Southern waitress asked me to play with her one evening when I was on my way somewhere, and I said, "Yes."

My way of engaging in activism is by doing all the things that we fatties aren't supposed to do, and there's a lot of them, inviting other people to join me and then making art about it.

I very much like its title – "The Future You" – because, while looking at tomorrow, it invites us to open a dialogue today, to look at the future through a "you."

It's a tool that empowers the child to build his or her own world, and then to inhabit that world through play and to invite her friends to join her in cohabiting and cocreating that world.

So we rented some suits, I invited a girl that I had just met -- we'll get to her in a second -- (Laughter) and off we went to the big black-tie gala.