I obsessively listened to all of James Lapine's shows as a child growing up in Cleveland and had every cast recording and every VHS tape of 'Into the Woods' and everything that James had done that I could get my hands on.

Pub life was such a huge part of growing up for me, going to pubs and being around them. It made me who I am today.

Growing up in bars might sound like child abuse. And if it does, then you're what my mom would call 'Protestants.'

I spent a lot of my time, growing up, at the Beck Center. I'd be in plays there, and I'd get there an hour or two early just so I could be there, where I felt safe and where I belonged. And that's such an important feeling to have as a young kid. The theater community, and especially the Beck Center, really embraced me and got me started.

My own experience with trains dates to long-ago childhood trips with my family in Mississippi to see my grandmother off at the station in Jackson, bound for Memphis.

We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.