We grew up in a middle-class family in Chicago. Even when we went on vacation as a family, it wasn't a really fun time, because my father didn't want to spend any money when we got there.
With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I'm living high off the hog, I've got one paycheck.
We have an economy that's really geared toward rewarding the investor class. What are we doing to make sure that people who want to have a middle-class life are able to keep up?
If we can figure out how to give more Americans a shot in tech, a shot at the ordinary jobs that don't necessarily afford rock star status or come with generous stock options but that can sustain middle-class life, then we might just take a step toward stitching our nation back together.
I grew up in a very middle-class life. I'm grateful for it - it has given me a lot of stability.
I'm from Texas and grew up in the South. Very old-school and traditional. Married, had a kid. Suit and tie. The guy next door.
One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
I want people to know that movie stars live a normal, middle-class life.
I did not bring up my child to think that she was a star. If I had treated her any differently, it would have messed everything up. She was brought up normally, like other kids, in a normal house, and it was a normal, middle-class life.
I've had people ask me in interviews what it's like to have money, but that's not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.
I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.
If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.
'The Bill Engvall Show' is a comedy about a middle-class family in the Midwest. It's a great family show to watch if you want to laugh and unwind.
When you think of the later '50s and 'Far From Heaven' and Eisenhower and Sirk, you think of that Hollywood panache and gloss to American middle-class life.
I'm from a typical middle-class family in Delhi, with one of the most down-to-earth childhoods.
There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life.
We weren't poor growing up on Long Island, but it wasn't lavish - just a regular middle-class house.
I think people do like extremes in cinema. There are very few films told about everyday middle-class couples, which is odd to me, as there are a lot of everyday middle-class couples.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.
Before, it was always, 'Oh, no, here comes Clancy, that insurance agent.' Now it's, 'Oh, here comes Tom Clancy, bestselling author.' But I'm still the same basic middle-class slob.
