by Alan Alda
Our whole company had to cope with the language, and everyone found the solution in his own way, but we had been in a foxhole together and we became a loyal team. We watched out for one another; we took the stage when it was ours and gave it back when it belonged to the other guy.
The first audience shocked us with their response. It was a bombastic evening—one of those nights where you wake up from the recurring dream of rehearsal to realize that you’re alive in a world you’ve created wholly out of imagination. On the other side of the membrane of your imaginary universe, people are whooping with laughter at your human frailties.
In one scene that night, I looked across a desk at Liev Schreiber, who was brilliantly playing Ricky Roma, and I saw a look in his eyes that I had seen somewhere before. I held his look. We were exchanging an awareness of what was happening, an acknowledgment of what a pleasure it was to be playing this scene and to know it was working. It was the same look my father and I used to exchange. Liev was young enough to be my son, and yet—through the comradeship of the theater—there, sitting across from me, was my father. I was glad to see him again.
chapter 22
SIMPLE, AFTER ALL
So, it turned out not to be all that difficult.
I found a way of caring without caring, and it let me take chances, and when the chances I took didn’t work out, it let me shrug off the mistakes and blind alleys as fun little diversions. True, things I didn’t know were precious when they were here are gone now. My parents have faded to that same distant place where the trains that clattered over the railroad tracks went, where the comics laughing late into the night went, and the chorus girls combing my hair—and where my first taste of any part of life—have gone. They’ve gone to that place where the harder I try to pull them back, the more they recede and the less real they seem.
And I wonder . . . is that it? Things come and go, they blow past me like a breeze across a field, and there’s nothing I can do about it?
Maybe that’s so. Maybe God is the ultimate bully who teases us with life, then pulls it out of reach. Maybe there’s nothing I can do but let life curl up and disappear like an old photograph.
Or maybe I can get it back. Maybe imagination gets it back. Perhaps play lets it breathe again. Someday, if in a moment of despair that voice speaks to me out of the whirlwind and says, “I will question you and you will answer me. Can you bring forth the creatures of the earth? And when their days are over, can you bring them back to life?” I’ll say yes.
Yes, I can.
It is kind of simple. Except that it can’t be put into words. And now that I’ve had my odd childhood, and become an actor, now that they invite me places to tell them what I think, to tell them what I’ve learned, what can I tell them?
“Perhaps you might say a few words to our students that they can carry with them all their lives?”
I look out at the kids. What can I say that would do them any good, if they don’t discover it for themselves?
Look, I want to tell them, do what you want.
Just live. Laugh a little.
But if you have to hear some advice, if you must have advice . . . whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t stuff your dog.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN ALDA played Hawkeye Pierce for eleven years in the television series M*A*S*H and has acted in, written, and directed many feature films. He has starred often on Broadway, and his avid interest in science has led to his hosting PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 and has been nominated for thirty-one (and has won five) Emmy Awards. He is married to the children’s book author and photographer Arlene Alda. They have three grown children and seven grandchildren.
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