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I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.

I was involved with my theater program in high school, and I was involved in a festival where I could audition for a lot of different schools.

I graduated from Brown in 2001, moved to New York, and spent a year and a half just looking up 'Backstage' magazine auditions and grinding.

I did a lot of theater when I was in high school and college. I also did stand-up in college, so it was always part of what I did.

I started once a week in North Carolina at a pub called Charlie Goodnight and met a lot of comics there. Then I moved to L.A., and if you're not known, it's hard to get stage time. So you start out doing what they call 'bringers' - you have to bring five people if you wanna get on stage. It was a lot of hustle, a learning curve.

When I was younger, I always wanted to be a musician, a performer and an entertainer - but I never thought about becoming a poster or anything like that. It's pretty cool.

I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.

When we lived in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, my sister and I did a local play. My whole family got involved. My mom did the makeup. My sister and I were being homeschooled, and my parents wanted us to be socialized. We had a lot of fun with the other kids hanging out backstage.

I was obsessed with being popular in high school and never achieved it. There's photos from our high school musicals, and I'm comically in the deep background, wearing a beggar's costume.

I started performing in high school. There was a pretty great drama department at my school, and that's when I started doing plays and musicals.