I love drama - I would say more than I even love comedy - but I like in One Mississippi that I can go from a very moving moment to a Willy Wonka tube up my ass. I like the silliness as much as I like drama.
It was a free-for-all with music when I was growing up. My mother was a huge music fanatic so I was listening to everything from country to heavy metal to Indigo Girls to Elton John. I guess when I was really young I didn't like Willie Nelson, and she obviously loved him. Now I do too, I'm so thankful to her for playing his music nonstop.
I'm now a pretty good mix of my mother and my stepfather because I'm in general pretty mellow. I'm not hyper-emotional. But there's also this side of me - my mother was an artist and very funny and a dancer and very wild and into fashion. My stepfather traveled a lot, and I kind of took on a role of parenting my mother a lot of times, because she was pretty hard to handle. A bit of a pistol.
When I announced I had cancer on stage, it was my brain leaping to that insane moment of, "There's no way I could start a show saying, 'Hi, I have cancer!'" And also for me to have these scars, and then think, "Oh my gosh, what if I did stand-up and not even acknowledge that my shirt was off, or that I have scars.
Everybody, male or female, needs to possess qualities that they expect others to uphold. Being aware of yourself and your actions allows you to assess your shortcomings in an honest way.