When I attended Emerson College in Boston, it was confined to the Back Bay, but now it has taken over a lot of Boston, which is great.
I went to Harvard College, grew up in Boston, and went to high school in Boston.
I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand. And actually, most of the bats in Massachusetts are used off the field instead of on the field, and we all had baseball bats in our cars in high school.
I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director.
I started piano when I was four. My mom taught me. And then I went to Manhattan School of Music during high school, like every Saturday. And then I went to Berklee for college, in Boston.
From elementary school on up through junior high school, I loved to perform. But I put it all away during high school and college. I thought, "That's not actually something you do with your life." But then I was compelled to try it after college. I just got overcome.
By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.
After high school, I moved to the U.S. and studied music in Boston, at the Berklee College of Music.
In 1987, when I was 19, I was studying musical theater at Boston's Emerson College. My sister, Tricia Leigh, told me about a summer acting retreat in Italy. Mom paid, so off we went.
When I began doing theatre in high school I saw that I could get laughs from people but I didn't really connect that to going on and becoming a comedian. I was interested in acting and while I was at Boston College I was part of an improv group, Mother's Fleabag, which had a long history and has been known as one of the best college improvisation groups in the U.S.
Patriots' Day is the essence of Boston, a Massachusetts-only holiday that seems like it was invented to celebrate Boston.
In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.
That competition grew through high school and you step outside more and it grew through college. Then you had regional style speak volumes through college. As you get older, and begin to travel and see more, that was the progression of style for me.
I went to school in Massachusetts at Hampshire College.
I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.
I got to play with my older brother in high school and college, and I played with my younger brother in high school and college, so I kind of get to do everything, so it was really pretty sweet.