That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes.
We all know him: everybody has an Archie Bunker in their family, so you love to laugh at him, and you never take it personally; everybody just has a ball laughing at him.
It's not new: In the '70s, Archie Bunker said terrible things on 'All in the Family,' but it was all in Carroll O'Connor's performance. You saw lack of intelligence, and you laughed.
What I learned from architectural drafting is that everything has to have a plan to work. You just can't wing it. I can't get all the materials I need for a house and just start building. Whether it's a career, family, life - you have to plan it out.
I remembered that my grandfather had spent his teenage years in Shanghai and that he went back after he finished medical school to work there in a hospital. So I went back into my family archives and was able to find out his exact address; it was a street that was in the French Concession.
While I've won five Junos, I've donated four of them to the National Archives in Ottawa. Which left my fifth Juno sitting, seemingly abandoned by its four family members, on my bookcase in my dining room.
Much more a skiing family than a hockey family, my dad wasn't a big fan of the arenas early in the morning on the weekends.
I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing.
The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.
Now people want what the movie was about, which is violent comedy. And that's really what The Aristocrats is based on - what will a family do out of desperation.
My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.
I was not interested in luxuries because I had an elegant life as a child. My family, very aristocratic, one of the richest in Colombia, educated me like a princess, in the English style.
When I chose to leave a career as a young lawyer in Washington to move to Arkansas to marry Bill and start a family, my friends asked, 'Are you out of your mind?'
The first trip I can remember would have to be to Marianna, Arkansas. My mother's parents are from there, and we'd go every year to visit the church where they were buried. We'd attend church service that day, put flowers around their tombstones, and visit with family and friends that still lived there.
An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.
I have many friends and family members who have served (or are currently serving) in our nation's Armed Forces. I have such a profound respect for what they do day in and day out.
My forebears were fantastically wealthy Armenians who came to England from India in the 19th century and did what foreign types do - they married into a penniless but well-bred local family.
Family relationships trigger childhood wounds, and those wounds often trump our rational thinking. We can't 'rationally' transcend the kind of primal pain that such relationships can arouse.
My wife once said that one of her great ambitions was to walk down the streets of Hong Kong with her children. So we all went to Asia on one occasion. Then she said she'd like to walk down the streets of Jerusalem with her children. So we arranged our family finances and all went to Jerusalem.
