Quote

There's a different energy at one of my shows than anybody else's.

I just feed off the energy of the audience.

The better your audience, the more energy you have, and the more energy you have, the better show you do. The better show you do, the more they love it, and the more energy they give back to you.

In a live performance, it's a collaboration with the audience; you ride the ebb and flow of the crowd's energy. On television, you don't have that.

Being on a major network television show is like long-distance running: You have to pace yourself and maintain your energy level and your morale. There's the role you're playing on the show, and there's also your behind-the-scenes responsibility to the crew, the guest actors and the fans - not to mention your own life as a mom.

The real challenge in doing a TV show is in what I would call the maintenance energy. You take that creative energy and you use it every week, of course. But you then need to maintain the quality of the stories, and it's harder to do.

I think there are certain actors that have that kind of energy about them, that taking over a room energy.

I would say that the energy on set is always the energy of the director because he's the boss.

I always improvise with the crowd. Sometimes it will be a 50 percent show, sometimes 70 percent, sometimes it's almost a whole show where I wing it. It depends on my mood, the energy in the room. For sure, a portion of it is just kind of winging it.

Some deeper part of me wants to write comical dialogue; I'd be foolish to not follow that impulse. Now I recognize that if there's energy to a section of work, you go where the energy is. It's a living thing, and you just follow it.