I wanted to come to Chicago. I also wanted to do "Saturday Night Live." And then I got to a place where I didn't want to do those things anymore.For the sketch comedy thing, I got cast on "MADtv," and that will kill any man's desire to do comedy.

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.

It's amazing to watch somebody who is kind of this sleazy, degenerate lothario, sex-crazed guy become sort of a romantic, settled-down man about to have a baby.

That is what's disconcerting about working on the show, you can't seem to get an instinct about what works and what doesn't. It happens a lot, and in different ways.

There are those moments where you realize that your parents or your heroes are human and are fallible. That concept, in and of itself, is something that is dangerous to me, in a good way. It's exciting and scary to meet those people.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger. Maybe we don't all have that dream. I don't know. Getting to role play or step back to a different moment in time and see things through a different lens is something that resonated with me, for sure. We don't get to do that, generally, but when the right neurological disorder lines up with the right unstable woman, that moment presents itself. Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.

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.