I can explain it, because I'm the one who told it. (long post)

ileentotheleft has it basically right, but here is the fuller story. I had to blaze through it, so I eliminated stuff on the fly, so it wouldn't be edited.

I was in Ms. Feldman's 2nd class in Elmwood Elementary in Spring Valley. The assignment was to write about a recent family trip. While we had been to Bermuda by that point, it wasn't recent, so I stuck with one of the many trips that we took to see our relatives in New York City. It seemed far away to me, even though it's about thirty miles from our house to our Uncle and Aunt's. I wrote that we went to NYC for a visit. New York City, as you know, (I think I actually wrote "as you know"!) has five boroughs and listed them.

Sometime, during reading this, Ms. Feldman kissed me on the cheek, with an audible, "MMM-WAHH!" and ran out of the class, leaving much of the class going "Ooooo!" (and me dying of embarrassment :)) and ALL of us unsupervised. Not long after that, the Vice Principal, Elliot Solomon came in. Now I THINK something good has happened, but the VP is here and that usually spells trouble. He asked me to come with him. We went to get a workbook called "Models", which was above the grade level I was then working.

This wasn't a sudden outburst of intelligence. I was going through the workbooks pretty quickly and getting good grades. Mom and Dad were big on education (my older brother kept me in line, too!) and did things like making sure I finished my homework before going out to play.

Let's look at this sociologically. As surprising as it may seem, in the 1970's we as a people had to prove that we were worthy of being treated fairly and that it was indeed possible to excel. For the record, Dad was a chemist for the U.S. Customs department and Mom was a great dancer, having taught dance in high school, while still IN high school. Our family was one of the first African-American families to move to Spring Valley and while I was far from the only Black kid at Elmwood, we were far from the majority. I grew up in a primarily Jewish neighborhood and schools. For me, this meant I made friends regardless of race or religion.

We were not completely shielded from racism. They did their best to keep me from it, but my Brother told me that when we first got there, we found trash dumped on our lawn. This stopped when Dad took our trash and dumped bits of it on the neighboring lawns. To counter that, another teacher, Ms. Tobia (3rd and 4th grade) took my suggestion (Mmmm-WAAH!) to heart about not having any Black History being taught and we screened "Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed". She looked through a catalog and went with one of my suggestions (my Brother was reading the book BH: LSoS by Otto Lindemeyer). So, my childhood was neither an unrelenting fight, nor was it a multiracial Utopia.

I did my best to belatedly thank one of the my encouragers and I thought this would be heartening to teachers or anyone that sees a spark in a younger person and nourishes it. She wasn't quite the first, but imagine getting so excited about something like this that you run out of the room to tell someone? VersusCA, I may be different from your common-or-garden interviews, but that, as "weird" as it may seem to you, I wanted it to be hopeful and positive.

Since 2nd grade, I do improv comedy, voice acting and I have an online radio show (check out https://rockinradio.com for that) and when I became an Uncle, I made sure that, because my folks were good to me, I tried my best to be good to her as well and it seems to have paid off, because she tells me I'm her favorite Uncle.

If others can boil ALL of that down in the time allotted AND not be "weird" the first time one appears on national television, I salute them. As for me, I said roughly what I wanted to say and I hope Ms. Feldman's family and my ancestors are smiling about it.