I travel often, so my routine is always getting scrambled. But on a standard sort of day, I get up at 6, pack lunches, hustle the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the dungeon, as I call it: my cobwebby office in the basement.
When I was fourteen, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator.
In high school, I majored in brick masonry. We had the wood shop, the machine shop, so I know about all that. I wanted to build buildings when I graduated from high school. I do know my way around that stuff.
I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'
I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.
I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn't pay me enough at my first newspaper job to venture onto the grounds of South Boston High School when bricks were being thrown. Instead, I would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each day.
I remember when I was in school, they would ask, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' and then you'd have to draw a picture of it. I drew a picture of myself as a bride.
Well, in brief, I was discovered by a lady called Beth Boldt. She had also been a model. She used to take pictures of the girls she found, and she took a picture of me one day in my school uniform, and it all kind of started from there.
I was bullied every day at school because I carried a briefcase. I could have left it at home. But I thought it looked great! I didn't understand why anyone else didn't think so.
I used to carry a briefcase instead of a school bag when going to school because I was shy and introverted then. But over the years, especially Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) helped me overcome these insecurities and scale greater heights.
I sent away to America for 'The Inside Secrets of Wrestling' that Percy Pringle and Dennis Brent wrote, and Volume 1 told me to keep kayfabe of the book. So I used to keep it in a briefcase, and I'd go to school every day, and everyone would talk about wrestling, and they didn't know what was going on, but I knew what was going on.
I did, like, one or two plays in high school, but I don't think I realized I wanted to do comedy until I got to college, and I started doing improv and saw the Upright Citizens Brigade perform and did workshops with them.
I grew up as a British kid - I went to school in London, roamed the streets of London - but having these interactions with my roots and going back to Ghana, I'm like, 'Yeah this is sick.' I love my country and my people, and the energy and vibes that they bring back. So I want to rep that and be a part of it.
My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.
I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school.
During school, I'd advertise cars in the University of British Columbia newspaper.
I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
At school, we'd studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my dad take me to the British Museum as often as possible.
'Rocking With Leroy' used to come on when I would come in from school. It was a very, very big R&B broadcast of the day when I was a young girl. And I would come in and put my books down, lie down on the floor, and listen to 'Rocking With Leroy.'
