The first memory I have of wanting to do anything with creativity was watching The Lawrence Welk Show. There is a tap dancer on there. Young guy, Black, he was unbelievable. I told my mom, I want to be a tap dancer when I grew up.

It wasn't till high school when a touring company of The Guthrie Theater came through, and it was magic. It wasn't something I saw and went, "Oh, I got to be an actor,” but I was mesmerized. Then I forgot about it. For the rest of high school, I was funny.

I'd always been goofing around. I did impressions: Ed Sullivan and John Wayne. And Tiny Tim. I would do “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” with a ukulele. In high school, I found out that people were laughing at what I said, and I’d do more impressions. We'd put on a record of Elvis and I would do the whole thing. I got the class clown award. I think it was recognition that maybe I am funnier than just between my friends and me.

I went to college in Fargo. I saw a notice about Ted Mack, of The Original Amateur Hour, coming to campus, and I said, "God, I should do that." I don't know what possessed me. I liked performing, but it made me crazy nervous. I had a theater class, a lecture, and that's where I wrote the material for the first man on the moon, but it was John Wayne instead of Neil Armstrong, Walter Brennan, Ed Sullivan, all of them.

It was over 500 students watching that night. I remember waiting. I was way at the end. They had to sit through 13 acts of music. By the time they got to me, they were ready to laugh. And I won — $100. I put it in my shoe and hitchhiked home. [laughs] Then I was like, "Oh, I'm going to do this. This is what I'm going to do.”

So I end up getting a theater degree, barely, and then go to Washington, DC, where I hit the standup clubs. I was working in dangerous places down in southeast DC, like El Brookmans Comedy Club, which was a shit bar. Punk rock bands would play and then standup would do the breaks. That was hard.

I wasn't a confrontational comic. I was doing kind of Steve Martin-esque stuff. I started to get really good at it and had a pretty good following in DC and then ended up marrying my girlfriend. We moved to New York in ’83.

I studied acting with Wynn Handman. He ran the American Place Theater, which was the hotbed for off-Broadway early on in the late '60s and through the '80s. Sam Shepard, Eric Bogosian, all those guys. Anybody with an early voice, and those guys were writing their own pieces. I started writing my own material in his class ended up doing a monologues play with two other people, called Oddjobbers. That propelled me into getting an agent, and then theater started to bubble up.

At the same time I was doing that monologues play, ’88, I was doing a production of A Cup of Coffee, Preston Sturges's world premiere at SoHo Rep. Everything started to break open then. I was really pretty established in New York, and working a lot and doing a lot of money gigs with commercial stuff. I was working and everything was going really well up through '90. Then I decided I needed to go to LA to try to get some TV stuff. I had gone out earlier, but I came back and did a lot more work in New York, and then went again in '90.

I'm 17 years sober now. I don't care what you say, but that doesn't have to be whatever it is. I don't want to be dismissive of it or underplay what it's done for me. I think the other important element in my life now is so centered around Patti and Henry and Will.

If I have a moment during the day with the play I’m working on, I get euphoric with that. It'll just carry me through the rest of the day. Then the next day you're like, "Oh, shit. Now what do I do?” I typically write maybe two, three hours. Even when I was commuting to the city for auditions and doing theater, I would just go to coffee shops and write.

A buddy of mine, he's a playwright and an actor, was asked to do one of his plays at the Stissing Center and he said, "Let's have Mike and me come up and do these one-acts he'd been working on.” They're readings. The last full production I did was Cleveland Play House, 2013. A Christmas Story. I got to play the old man with the lamp and stuff. That was a great time.

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