My Journey to the Top

Kyra Sedgwick
Actor

When I connect to my soul, project it into another character, and then bring it to the stage or to a film—that has always been for me the great joy of acting. It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around. And that's always this image I've had when I really am enjoying what I'm doing, when I'm really loving the acting process.

All of us want to speak in a language that we all understand. Having other people's words come through my mouth is a way of having a deep conversation with mankind. Acting is a way to exercise people's compassion and my own compassion for others.There have always been long periods of time that I haven't actually worked, like a year or two when I just would get nothing. And those are devastating times. They really are. It's not like I was hungry. It's not like I was living out of my car. But emotionally if you're an artist, not being able to speak your language or to express yourself, is like being in purgatory.

I did "Born on the Fourth of July." I did "Mr. & Mrs. Bridge." I did "Something to Talk About," and "Phenomenon." And then I didn't work for a couple of years. I'm sure that no small part of it is due to the fact that I chose to have children and get married. It was a monumentally unsexy thing to do, frankly. It's just not sexy for a young, hot actress to get married at 22 and start having babies. You're no longer available, and I think that for some people that may be something that gets in the way of some kind of mystique.

I had this dream that when I had my children I was just going to want to be with them, and I wouldn't want to work. And that was sort of this ideal, in a way, based on nothing, because my mother always worked.

I had this dream that somehow I'd be so fulfilled, and I wouldn't need to work. I bought into this ideal that one should just stay home and be with one's children, that that should be enough. It's taken me a really long time to embrace my ambition and to embrace my need to express myself and to accept it in a loving way as part of who I am instead of putting myself down for it.

It took me a really long time to say, "You know what? I want this. I want to be successful in my field. I want to be able to make choices on my own and make my own choices based on success." And I just think that's a hard thing for a female. We're still not really supposed to want it as much as a guy does.

And I wish that we could embrace that and have that be a positive thing and not a negative thing: with the connotation of "Look at her. She's working so hard and therefore not being with her children."

While I was home a great deal, I was working sometimes, and I always had a lot of guilt about that. I gave myself an incredibly hard time about work. And if there's anything I wish I could look back on and change about my life, it's that I wish I hadn't given myself such a hard time. The fact of the matter is that my kids have turned out great. Recently, when I was offered the role on my show, "The Closer," I got a lot of encouragement from my husband, Kevin Bacon, to do this show. I wouldn't have taken this job without his encouragement, and I don't know if I'm proud of that or not.

In "The Closer," we have this sort of iconoclastic character, Brenda Lee Johnson. She is turning 40, and talking about how it feels to turn 40. My character's first love and last love is work; all her ego lies in her work. So in a lot of ways she's sort of taken the man's role, and in a lot of ways she's incredibly feminine and fragile and delicate and very womanly and very sensual and sexual.

My character works with all these men. She bosses them around. And I think it's good to show young girls the image of women in a powerful position. The amazing thing is that men like this show as much as women do.

I think that women as a group are so powerful. I still don't think we are able to embrace our power well enough yet. We think we live in a man's world and we have to follow their rules, and yet, we're so different, and our rules are so different. I wish that we could come together more as a political force. If women ran the world, I don't believe that there would be war. I really don't.

And I just think that we're so right about so many things politically. We understand the bigger picture. We understand our impact on the environment, on the world. We understand the generations that will go after us because we give birth to them. I would love us to be a more cohesive group. I really think politically we're still forming—we don't realize how much power we wield.

Lucy Jones
Chief scientist, Multihazards Demonstration Project

There were a lot of earthquakes in L.A. in the 1950s and 1960s. I grew up in California, camping every summer in the Sierra Nevadas. Seismology brought all the pieces of me together: being outdoors and hiking, being a fourth-generation Californian. Geophysics meant I could go play in the mountains and get paid for it.

I saw all of these interesting questions that needed to be answered. There's so much about earthquakes that we don't know. We don't understand most of the physical processes that cause an earthquake to happen today instead of tomorrow, and so there were lots of open research questions.Science is the process of trying to understand the nature of reality. And it's a fundamental of science that we believe reality exists, instead of having it be a human construct or all a matter of relative point of view. There isn't another side of the story in science. There are the right and wrong answers, and you do a better or worse job of understanding that reality, but we do believe reality is there. That's fundamental to what we're doing.

I've been in a lot of earthquakes, maybe 200, some in California, some in Taipei. I've been in shaking strong enough to really scare me only twice. Once I was in Taiwan and an earthquake hit as we were hiking up in the mountains crossing a very steep slope. So if you fell, you would have been going a long ways. The Pasadena earthquake in 1988 was probably located just about directly below our house. It was a 5.0, which isn't that big, but the shaking was right underneath us. It was in the early morning. I felt like I was being thrown out of bed, and there was a real moment of fear.

My husband is also a seismologist. We met in grad school. Our work crises tend to coincide. As a research scientist, you have a lot of flexibility in your time schedule, so managing my children was OK. And my husband is a full partner in this. That's a really critical issue.

Once my two boys were finally both in school, we were able to adjust our schedules to make sure that they were never in day care after school, and I think that made for a much healthier family life. I worked less than my husband did, but we both juggled. On a regular basis, that works. But then you have to deal with the fact that we were having earthquakes, and it was a very active time in California.

During the 1992 Joshua Tree earthquake, my husband was at home with the kids, putting them to bed, and telling them to stop jumping around. And then he started realizing it wasn't them jumping around. It was the earth moving! And he grabbed the boys up out of bed and ran into work with them, because I was already there.

He was called immediately into the computer room, and you don't take little kids into computer rooms with all the sensors. So he handed me the kids while I was doing a live television interview. The little one, at 19 months old, had been woken up from a sound sleep. He was really grumpy. If we put him down, he screamed.

The quake was a 6.1. There was a 10 to 15 percent chance that that earthquake would be a foreshock for a San Andreas earthquake, and we made a public statement about it. One of the things we find about foreshocks is that they happen within 10 kilometers of their main shock. They're very close in space, and therefore when an earthquake is close to a really big fault, we're more concerned about it.

I then proceeded to carry my son and do dozens of interviews. If I put him down, he screamed. There was a CNN moment when they were being real aggressive and stuck a microphone up at me to ask a question, and my son took a little finger and pushed the microphone away because it was in his face. It was such an image of a working mom. People still ask about my baby, who's now applying to colleges.

I think there are a lot of issues there. A very large part is how you balance work and home, and all of us are dealing with the problem, but mostly we try and pretend and don't talk about it on the job, and there I was dealing with it in a very public way.