My growing up years, we watched 'Happy Days,' every night. I don't know what was reruns and what was new.

Growing up, I always loved Disney movies, but the first movie I remember seeing is 'Sleepers,' so I wasn't really taken to children's movies.

Smells definitely do have a crazy impact on me.

The first time I did stand-up I was 17, and I was really a stand-up once I was 19 in New York, and now I'm 41, and I still feel like I haven't found myself onstage. Earlier in my career, I was really tight, really together, and knew who I was and I was confident.

I went to Wellesley College, and it was really hard for me to get a job after I graduated. I would go into places where I would not see any black people at all in Boston - like, zero. And then in publishing in New York City, it was pretty much the same. I knew that it wasn't about the value of my work.

It might sound cowardly, but I do agree that if you speak out about the casting couch, it will end your career.

I'd been a housewife and mother to our son Thomas Jefferson, and I was looking for a new career. So when my agent called and said a producer named Paul Elliott from E&B productions, the biggest panto company in the country at the time, wanted to meet me I agreed.

No one's career is full of highs. Somewhere down the line you are going to get kicked where it hurts and it's how you deal with that.