When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages.

When we were growing up we were all asked to accept ourselves as British citizens, and I still hold on to this idea that multicultural Britain is possible.

But I like the process of putting a show together and the impact that Edinburgh has on me as a performer.

I got fired from a job years ago. It was an accounting job. They were basically trying to cut corners, so they employed a bunch of temps to do proper accounting. And it just caused absolute bedlam and I did get fired.

When I was 13, I came back from summer camp - summer of '74 - and my mother had had an accident during surgery and was in an oxygen tent in a coma. It was so traumatic. My parents had been divorced for six or seven years at that point, and it was sort of the seminal event of my life.

My family came to Newark in the '20s. We've been there a long, long time. My father's name was LeRoi, the French-ified aspect of it, because his first name was Coyette, you see. They come from South Carolina.

My family brings me great energy.

The most successful detectives owe their success to noticing small signs. Scouts are natural detectives and never let the smallest detail escape them. These small things are called by Scouts 'Sign.'