I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.

When I celebrated my bar mitzvah, there was no cake. Today, there is no such thing as a bar mitzvah in the United States without a special cake. It can be even more complicated and expensive than a wedding cake, because bar-mitzvah cakes are often based on a particular theme.

Personally, I would miss a wedding. I would miss childbirth. I would miss a bar mitzvah just to see me talk at all.

I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents.

At some point in your life, if you live in Venezuela, you come across or own a cuatro. Either at school, either at camp, either at a friend's house, at a birthday or Christmas or bar mitzvah, you end up with a cuatro. It's like a must.

In a bar mitzvah, you do the candle-lighting ceremony with the cake. Every birthday, the cake is the big moment.

When I celebrated my bar mitzvah there was no cake. Today there is no such thing as a bar mitzvah in the United States without a special cake. It can be even more complicated and expensive than a wedding cake because bar-mitzvah cakes are often based on a particular theme.

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings Bar Mitzvahs funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.