I'm named after a horse. My mom's best friend had a horse named Brooke, so my dad suggested 'Brooklyn' as a more formal version, and it just stuck - and now I live in Brooklyn part-time, so go figure.

But my mother and father were married when my mom was 20 and my dad was 24.

You know that I am living proof that the American Dream is real. Growing up, our congressman cut through government bureaucratic red tape to help my mom buy our first house. That's the kind of congressman I'll be.

When I was 11 my friend's mom made a peanut butter sandwich. I ate the sandwich and was like, 'I'm never eating anything else again.' And I still eat peanut butter every day. I would put peanut butter on a steak.

My mom raised us three boys by herself on welfare. It's not worse than anybody else's life.

Now, if you're Al Gore, you can afford $10 a pop for squiggly-pig-tailed fluorescent light bulbs. But if you're mainstream America, two or three kids, mom and dad working outside the home, that's not a very good deal.

I still feel like a kid sometimes myself so hard to believe that I'm a mom. Now I'm an adult! It only took 38 years!

I was really lucky. My gal pal was my mom.

In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, 'No, you're going to stay with it.' Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard.

I love to fly. I always wanted to fly. It's been one of my dreams since I was 3 years old. I remember saying to my mom, 3 years old, every day, 'I can fly!' Living on the ninth floor, it was dangerous.