I looked at the job of piano accompanist. It's a selfless position and generally they are odd people, according to opera singers I talked to. Just like everybody else, they want more from their life, but now their job is to make others shine.

There's also these moments when you're like, oh, I really want to do different things. Not instead of this show [The Big Bang Theory]. It's just a hunger to do something else, too.

Generally people are nice, but it's so weird that it has made me more cautious. Just like anyone else, I like looking around at my environment, but now as I walk down the street I tend to look down.

I met a bunch of people and they said, "We're gonna do a show [Second City]." So we would buy the theater out and do a show, and we did that for five years and we ended up becoming popular. It was before sketch comedy was hipster-time - when you would hand out a flier, people would roll their eyes. Now it's kind of cool.

I came in ["MADtv"] kind of late in the season. Some of the producers didn't want me but the network did. It was all (messed up) from the beginning.

There's no real escape from the work, but in some ways, if you're as obsessive as I am, it's a sweet little thing we've figured out. You bring your work home and you work 24 hours a day, but it's good.

I did not want to be the accompanist to an operatic star. But I was at a very high level for a 16-year-old, and I maintained that. So really good, but more impressive than classically trained. So I had to take a crash course in classical technique because I really wanted to get away with playing this character [in Florence Foster Jenkins] without people saying, "That's not really accurate."