“For better or for worse.” Well, no one has problems with the “for better” part. They just throw that in at the ceremony because they want to seem at least partly optimistic about what may be in store for the happy couple. Everybody who’s watching knows damn well it’s the “for worse” part that will cause the divorce, if it comes, swiftly or slowly, as the case may be.

The boundaries of relationship are defined by the sharing of pain. Marriages implode when a business goes bankrupt, when a partner gets sick, if a child dies. Suddenly the intimacy of the shared pain becomes too much for one or both to bear and the union must be dissolved. Remember Newty-Newt Gingrich dumped his wife and took a mistress when she got cancer? (I love to pick on the Republicans of course, but many a Democrat has deserted a spouse when the going got tough, remember J&E Edwards?)

Scott had a close friend who deserted him when he got sick. Suddenly Bobby just wasn’t around any more. The sicker Scott got, the more invisible Bobby got.

Scott was hurt by it, deeply, no question, though he rarely mentioned Bobby. He understood that Bobby lacked the willingness, or, perhaps, simply, the capacity, to share in his pain. The rest of Scott’s friends, all of whom were fiercely loyal and would have done anything for him, were witheringly critical of Bobby and spoke of him in tones ranging from disapproval to shame to condemnation. But not in front of Scott. Not about his friend.

It was tough for me to understand, because the sicker Scott got, the more loving he got, the more he opened his heart, and consequently, the more privileged I felt to be his caretaker. The tougher his day, the more treasures it seemed to hold for us, the more we appreciated our roles in each other’s lives. I felt so proud and happy to be The One making soup for him. (And I make fucking good Italian-boy soup.) I was the one who shared his greatest fears, his worst nightmares, and his most wretched fevers. I was the one who got to hold him if he broke down. And on the rare occasions when I broke down (the crying thing wasn’t usually my style, especially in front of him—typical man) he would hold me and stroke my head and say, “Let it out honey, go ahead and let it out.” And because of all the shared pain, I also got to be the one who shared his greatest joys: his sweetest kisses, his most grateful smiles (which lit up a room like fucking fireworks), and his most riotous laughter. For worse, or for better!

A few days before his death, Scott asked me to go over his will with him, as there were a few precious items he wanted to make certain there would be no hesitancy on my part to distribute according to his wishes. Chief among them, a beautiful 36” x 48” landscape that had been part of his grandmother’s art collection. It was a truly lovely depiction of a delicate waterfall splashing over a field of greens: forests, emeralds, chartreuses. It hung directly across from his bed. He fell asleep every night with that vibrant terra firma in his eyeline. It was to go to Bobby.

I wanted it to go to Irwin, and had lobbied Scott for that. Irwin had been loving, loyal, and present. No, Scott said, there was another painting for Irwin, (which I knew), a tiny little painting of a fishing boat in a New England harbour. The landscape was for Bobby.

Yes, I said. Yes. For Bobby. And Bobby received it.

I too have a close friend who has deserted me, whose limits for the sharing of my pain have fallen short of my expectations, and my friends and loyalists, like Scott's were, are appalled. But I am not the man Scott was. I am not as patient, not as forgiving, not as willing to accept the loss of a trust I wrongly believed would continue.

But I will get there. And I will get there because I am still, and especially, grateful, fourteen years after his death, to have Scott’s example to follow. That beautiful guy.

And far, far beyond the reconciling of this small disappointment in the greater scheme of things, I am grateful (stunned really is more accurate) by the unconditional affection and the loving support for my autonomy, and for my sanity, from the other fifty? sixty? friends and students and family, who seem to have either no limits, or an astonishing willingness to keep pushing their limits farther and farther away, stretching their boundaries to share my struggle, and to show me their love, regardless of how it may hurt.

You affirm everything I have believed is good and true about the nature of acceptance and the limitless possibilities of unconditional love. And that feels fucking good. Really and truly gooooooooood.

Well OK, it’s a little more complicated than that, but intense suffering is as much a staple of great comedy as great drama. Comedy thrives on serious conflict, and conflict results in pain. But how do you invite an audience to laugh at your pain? Your pain; that’s the key. First you make it authentic, and very, very personal, so the foundation of the work is the same as if you’re playing Hamlet. And then, it depends on the right attitude, the right rhythm, and hopefully some great, witty dialogue to ride on both.

In Midnight Run, Charles Grodin, hurt and frustrated with Robert DeNiro’s callous treatment, and indulging his own impulse to psychoanalyze, pointedly offers: “You know, you only have two emotions: silence and rage.” DeNiro, fuming, snaps back: “I’ve got two words for you. Shut the fuck up.”

These are some of my very favorite comedy performances in no particular order. Some of the very best, funniest moments in each happen when the character is in the most pain, caught between a rock and a really hard place, struggling in vain for deliverance:

1.  Bette Davis, All About Eve

2.  Cary Grant, Arsenic and Old Lace

3.  Diane Weist, Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway

4.  Madeline Kahn, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Paper Moon

5.  Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie, The Graduate

6.  Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman, Young Frankenstein

7.  Gary Shandling, The Larry Sanders Show

8.  Jim Carrey, Liar, Liar

9.  Judy Holiday, Born Yesterday

10. Dick Van Dyke, The Dick Van Dyke Show

11. Vivian Vance, I Love Lucy

12. Jackie Gleason, The Honeymooners

13. Diane Keaton, Manhattan, Annie Hall

14. Maggie Smith, A Room With A View, California Suite

15. Jennifer Tilly, Bullets Over Broadway

16. Penelope Cruz, Vicki Christina Barcelona

17. Margaret Rutheford, The Importance of Being Earnest, The V.I.P.s

18. Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night

19. Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, Terms of Endearment

20. Leslie Ann Warren, Victor/Victoria 

Note on 11: Watch Vivian Vance in the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy picks a birthday present for her because Fred isn’t up to the task, and gets her a pair of diamond-patterned hostess pants instead of the toaster Ethel badly, badly wanted. Thinking Fred picked out the hideous garment, her crushing disappointment quickly turns to incredulity, then to outrage, and then to absolute intolerance in a truly flawless bit of comic acting. Ms. Vance often makes Ms. Ball look like a hack, because everything she does is not only perfectly precise, but also honest, and organic. Unlike Lucy, she never makes faces to go for the cheap laugh.

[Oh! And by the way, I can’t believe I left James Gandolfini and Edie Falco in The Sopranos off my list of great drama performances. Continuing off the subject a moment: Here are a few Hideous Full of Shit Fakers, or My Very Least Favorite Actors Ever: 1.Julie Andrews 2.Kevin Kline 3.Kathleen Turner 4.Christopher Plummer 5.Helen Hayes 6. Kenneth Brannaugh]

Why do you have to break your own heart to be a great comic actor? Charlie Chaplin started the ball rolling. In order to get an audience to laugh at you, you have to make yourself truly vulnerable, which invariably means an acceptance of pain and loss. We almost certainly know the happy ending is coming (we’ve seen the previews), so we can laugh at the very same things that would not be in the least funny if death or disfiguration were the outcome instead of (99 times out of 100) love and marriage.

In addition to breaking your heart, you have to be willing to look like the fool as well. It’s impossible to play comedy without a willingness to reveal all the human foibles that we may want to try and hide from ourselves and others in our lives: vanity, selfishness, inappropriate lust, parsimony, greed, jealousy, arrogance —the list goes on and on and on (and on). Comedy especially requires a look at all the little, embarrassing, unattractive insecurities that really make us tick.

But again, as in drama, the audience is impressed by our bravery as actors, our willingness to reveal ourselves as the terribly flawed creatures we really are, risking humiliation while we seek to illuminate want and need, all the while having not just the audacity but the courage to ask for laughter as a kind of forgiveness for all of us, for being human. 

The only meaningful measure of pain is Intensity. It increases or decreases (and not always by the rules we might imagine to be in place, whether in ourselves or others) depending on several factors: the seriousness of the wound, the duration of the event, and the attitude and proximity of the afflicted to said event.

I’ve always maintained in my classes that the acceptance and integration of pain is what gives an actor credibility on a stage or in front of a camera. The weight of his presence for an audience is determined by how he carries loss. Actors who hide behind “the character” invariably withhold their own experience from us (as well as themselves), and then they “act” to cover up the hole left by the hidden information.

Exercise: Rank the following 10 events in order from least to most painful. (If they involve relationships with which you have not had first hand experience, use empathy to fill in the blanks.)

1.  Accidentally getting your foot caught in a wood-chipper that has no OFF switch.

2.  Getting diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer (when you’ve never smoked).

3.  Watching your son slip into heroin addition, then detox, relapse, detox, relapse.

4.  NOT getting the new recurring role on CSI Miami you have had 4 callbacks for.

5.  Watching your daughter battle anorexia with psychotherapy and drugs, but not eat any food.

6.  Watching your parent retreat deeper and deeper into full-blown dementia.

7.  Finding out in the 6^th month that the baby you are carrying has Down’s Syndrome.

8.  Watching the slaughter of thousands in Darfur on a closed-circuit BBC news feed.

9.  Having your 7 year-old kidnapped from a friend’s backyard birthday party.

10. Getting thrown from a horse and being left completely, permanently paralyzed (after having played Superman in the movies).

Not easy is it? It’s tough to measure and especially to compare pain. Actors are (supposed to be) people who enjoy feeling others’ pain. If you’re playing any character in Milk other than Harvey, eventually comes the scene where this transformational figure is gunned down in cold blood, and you have to deal with the loss. Lay people mainly worship actors for their willingness to live out a painful imaginary circumstance as if it were reality. As “regular” humans, they know they could never do it, so actors seem more than human to them, almost super-human. (And if they happen to be beautiful too, so much the better.)

Here are some genius dramatic performances (in no particular order) where the acceptance, exploration, and handling of pain and loss is at the core of the quality of the work:

 1.  Meryl Streep, A Cry in the Dark, Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, Kramer Vs. Kramer

2.  Robert DeNiro, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter

3.  Martin Landau, Ed Wood, Crimes and Misdemeanors

4.  Geraldine Page, Interiors, The Trip to Bountiful, Sweet Bird of Youth

5.  Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain

6.  Kim Stanley, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, The Goddess

7.  Vanessa Redgrave, Julia, Playing for Time, The Devils

8.  Jack Nicholson, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Five Easy Pieces

9.  Faye Dunaway, Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde

10.  Gregory Peck, To Kill A Mockingbird

11.  Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront

12.  Anna Magnani, The Rose Tattoo

13.  Paul Newman, Hud, The Verdict

14. Gena Rowlands, A Woman Under the Influence, Another Woman, An Early Frost

15.  Hillary Swank, Boys Don’t Cry

16.  Helen Mirren, The Queen, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The Passion of Ayn Rand

17.  Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal, Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Brown

18.  Chris Cooper, Adaptation, Capote

19.  Lillian Gish, The Wind, The Scarlett Letter, Orphans of the Storm

20.  Holly Hunter, The Piano, Thirteen 

I spoke with a hospice doctor several months ago on the phone (I never met the man) about my neck and back pain, and told him that it’s really beginning to get to me in a big way, especially since I have always seen myself as someone who can bear quite a bit of pain. I told him about breaking my hip in the early 90s and some other assorted physical circumstances where doctors seemed surprised and impressed by how much pain I was able to bear.

He surprised me by explaining that most people think what I thought, that certain people have high thresholds for pain and others have low ones, and then he went on to explain that statistics show that in the overwhelming majority of folks, the more pain they have had over time, the less they can seem to tolerate. He also went on to say that there seemed to be little difference in this reaching of critical mass between physical and emotional pain, and he asked me about what kind of emotional losses I had had in my life. I told him about the death of 3 of my 4 loves: Scott, Mark, Bob, and also of my mom and dad, etc. He got a bit quieter and his voice took on a gentleness it hadn’t had previously.

Then we talked about long-term pain management (a.k.a. palliative care) and he explained that American doctors are absolutely clueless on the subject, as they are trained only in the handling of acute pain (a.k.a. short-term), but not long term pain. It was a very enlightening conversation with an expert in a field which was completely unbeknownst to me heretofore. I came away feeling less like a pussy, which was a good thing. I may be a homo, but I’m still a man, and no man wants to feel like a pussy.

Back to the actor. If you can’t or won’t feel your own pain, then you can’t or won’t feel anyone else’s either. Nowhere is the line between the actor and the character finer than when dealing with loss.

In the great ancient Greek plays, the actor’s greatest challenge is often to portray the courageous handling of staggering, predestined loss. Oedipus realizes, in the climactic moment of the greatest of Sophocles’ dramas, that he was born to fuck his mother and to slay his father, both of which he has already done. Not really a happy moment for the poor guy. He lets out an animal wail of desperation that better raise the hairs on the back of the necks of the folks in the farthest, cheapest seats or the whole enterprise turns into a silly, melodramatic mess.

If you’re playing Oedipus, just try to fake that moment. You’ll sound like a huge, pathetic pussy.    

Charlotte’s sister died of breast cancer a year ago this coming August. She was at her sister’s bedside holding her hand when she died.

Tim’s mother caught him masturbating when he was twelve.  She told him never to do it again and to go to confession and to ask forgiveness from the priest, who represents God, or Tim’s penis would fall off, and then, when he died, he would go to hell.

Charlotte believes that “everything happens for a reason”. Tim is an Atheist who believes his mother’s religion is nonsense.

Though she has truly struggled mightily, Charlotte can find no reason for breast cancer.

Tim’s mother died after a long bout with Alzheimer’s and at her wake he could hear his own voice in his head, furiously shouting at her carefully arranged corpse, “If what you believed is true, you’re in hell you bitch!”

Charlotte began taking a popular anti-depressant about six months ago, after she saw a commercial for it on TV where a woman wearing an absolutely lovely corsage danced happily at her daughter’s wedding, and then asked her doctor to prescribe it for her.

On the way home from the funeral, Tim punched, in the face, a man who rear-ended him while he was waiting at a stoplight.

Charlotte’s husband complains often that the anti-depressant Charlotte takes is killing her interest in sex.

The man Tim punched is suing him for battery.

Charlotte’s doctor recently increased her dosage because she’s getting more and more depressed by suspicions that her husband is cheating on her.

Tim freaked out at work yesterday and hit himself over the head repeatedly with a heavy glass paperweight he received 7 years ago as “employee of the month”. Charlotte took every pill in her anti-depressant pill bottle one night last week after her husband came home at 3 am drunk and smelling of another woman.

Tim was rushed to the hospital with a concussion. Charlotte was hospitalized and is currently on “suicide watch” which, in part, means that her arms are strapped to the bed.

Two weeks after Tim was released from the hospital, his wife left him, and took Frenchie, his old English sheepdog, with her. Tim loved that dog.

Charlotte is haunted by waking dreams of her sister on her deathbed.  Her sleep is also haunted by dreams of her sister, mostly as a child, forcibly cutting her hair, and stealing her underwear.

Tim’s ex-wife is also named Charlotte.

These dreams are particularly disturbing because Charlotte wants to remember only kind things about her sister, not bad things.

Tim feels lingering guilt whenever he masturbates, even though he is now forty-seven years old.  He pretends to himself that the guilt is a result of what he thought about his mother in her coffin, but the guilt is really about his inability to have ever given Charlotte an orgasm in their 13 years of marriage.

Charlotte is dreaming right now. She is looking into a mirror, but instead of seeing herself, she is seeing an old sheepdog with a bad haircut.

Tim is dreaming too. His ex-wife is standing over him as if longing for him to give her oral sex, but Tim’s mouth is taped shut and his hands are strapped to the bed.

Charlotte is half-asleep, and playing with herself. It feels good. Surprisingly good. She is dreaming that an old sheepdog is lapping at her labia. She didn’t think she liked dogs, but she does, she does.

*     *     *     *     *

If you could play any character in the story, were it to be made into a major motion picture directed by Gus Van Sant, which character would you choose, and why?

Charlotte 1? Tim? Charlotte 2? Tim’s mother? The man who rear-ended Tim? Charlotte’s sister? Charlotte’s doctor? The woman in the anti-anxiety commercial who dances at her daughter’s wedding in a beautiful corsage? Charlotte’s husband? Charlotte’s husband’s mistress? The paramedics who rushed Tim and/or Charlotte to Emergency? The sheepdog?

Which character do you feel the most empathy for? Which character do you feel the most contempt for? Can you identify why?

Is it helpful to have less, or more information when judging these characters? Does detail tend to make you more or less sympathetic? Does any part of the story Anger you? Please you? Arouse you?

Can you identify only with the characters of your own gender, or do you see yourself as having an equal shot at any of the roles?

Are you wondering or worrying about my mental health? Or are you quite sure this is just a silly romp through familiar acting class imaginative improvisational territory designed for my own self-amusement?

After hearing the story of Charlotte and Tim, do you feel more or less satisfied with your own life?

What else but Love could you possibly argue for? Money? Sex? Power? Work? Career?

There’s no joy in any of them, unless they bring love. The only two that ever worked for me were Sex and Work. I loved sex when it was an expression of love (otherwise I was fairly indifferent, even with the now-famous hard-on), and I loved work when it was creative (read: an act of love).

The others just always seem like a means to some other end. So many people with money and power are unhappy. Certainly not a new idea, and certainly true.

Here are some love substitutes that invariably lead to unhappiness, usually by the well-worn route of self-delusion: Duty (read: I should, and if I don’t want to, I’ll pretend I do), Commitment (read: I must continue, as opposed to I want to continue, probably out of fear of re-negotiation), Possessiveness (read: You can’t love more than one person at a time, sexually or otherwise), Deception (read: If I let you see who I really am, you can’t possibly love me), Fear (read: I’ll end up alone if I don’t keep pretending to myself and/or you that this is actually love).

Why is Love the Big Kahuna? Because when there is love, everything else that is good and true follows after it.

Here are some Love clinger-afters: Trust, Empathy, Understanding, Growth, Forgiveness, Joy, and that lovely glowing skin everyone tries to sell you out of a bottle on late-night infomercials.

Here are some Duty clinger-afters: Resentment, Bitterness, Victimization.

Here are some Commitment clinger-afters: Indifference, Ritual, Boredom, Repression.

Here are some Possessiveness clinger-afters: Jealousy, Insecurity, Co-dependence.

Here are some Deception clinger-afters: Betrayal, Blindness, Denial.

And lastly, the Fear clinger-afters: Lack of Experience, Lack of Adventure, Lack of Life and Lack of Love.

VIC’s LOVE Q & A

Q: How do you create love in your life?   A: Give it away to others.

Q: What’s the difference between unconditional and conditional love?  A: This is a trick question: If it’s not unconditional, it’s not love. Conditional love isn’t love at all, it’s barter.

Q: So you’re saying the phrase “unconditional love”, or UL, is redundant.  A: Yep, I am.

Q: Why is it so hard for me to give unconditional love?  A: Probably because you never got any, so you have no one to model when attempting to give it. But don’t despair! Just because you didn’t get it doesn’t mean you can’t learn to give it.

Q: How do I learn to give love when I never got any myself?  A: Start by pretending you’re giving it to yourself. You want it bad, right? So, grab a big armful out of thin air, and throw it up above you, letting it flutter all over you like passionate confetti. Do this several times, perhaps many, many times, and then one time, when you’re just about to feel it come tickling down all over you, jump out da way, and grab the arm of someone standing near you, pulling that unsuspecting soul into the spot where the love is raining down.

For Extra credit: Watch your love rain all over them, and take as much joy in it as when it was raining on you. Rinse and Repeat.

Q: What if I give someone unconditional love, but then they treat me like shit?  A: Just keep giving them the love, but remove yourself when they are handing out their shit. You don’t have to accept their shit, you just have to keep giving out your love.  Remember this is not an exchange. Unconditional love is given freely, without caring what you get in return.

Q: But why would I give love to someone who gives me shit back? Don’t you have to be Jesus or Buddha or Mia Farrow or somebody like that to pull that shit off?  A: No, actually, you don’t. That’s a convenient excuse if you don’t really want to give UL. The act is of giving only, not of giving and getting back. If that feels to you as if you are getting cheated, or being taken advantage of, perhaps a career in finance may suit you better than that of lover. But if you keep giving, past the shit, you may notice the shit can start changing into something more like fertilizer, and as you keep giving the love, then the fertilizer may morph into top soil, and before you know it, there could be some Calla-Lilies beginning to bloom.

Q: OK, OK, but I’m an Actor. Can I give unconditional love? Or is narcissism the silent killer of UL?  A: Not at all. (You must be unintentionally modeling John Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby.) As an actor, start by trying to give your UL to the script and forget about the other actors for now. Figure out why the writer wrote it in the first place, where the passionate idea that drives the thing IS, and get behind it, no matter what your own, personal, possibly even petty reaction might be. Fill in all the ideas with your own experience of life, love, courage, sex, and fearless vitality.

Q: Isn’t all this talk about unconditional love really just a bunch a baloney?  A: No, asshole, it’s not.  Q: Well how come I’m not getting any then? Why are you calling me an asshole, you UL hypocrite?  A. My mistake, I’m sorry. I just get a kick out of the A-hole word. You look scared. Come over here. Relax a minute. I’m just going to put my arms around you.  Q: Why? I don’t want— A: Can I just try it?  Q: Well—

A holds Q. 

Loosely at first, so as not to exacerbate fear or suspicion.

Q begins to relax slightly, as A envelops Q with a hug learned and then perfected from her Aunt Fran on her 12^th birthday.

The Lights dim slowly, as Q slowly rests his head on A’s shoulder, humming softly, in spite of himself.

Governor Mark Sanford (R-South Carolina) is the latest high-profile politico to follow his cock to a remote location with a woman not his wife. The media is shocked! His speech about how darn sorry he is that he has “let down” his wife, his four sons, his friends, and his constituents sounded like every other speech you’ve ever heard from the same tired yet inevitable asshole. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to hear someone actually tell the truth about one of these garden-variety sexual debacles?  

How about this…..? 

“I was sick and tired and bored with the sex I was getting from my wife even though she is a loyal and lovely woman. I was craving danger, the smell and feel of a hot, wet, new female, and the kind of explosive orgasms that had long since become a dim memory in my marriage. Of course I’m sorry I got caught because if I hadn’t, I’d still be fucking her every which way but loose. When she had my cock in her mouth I couldn’t even remember I have four sons. The sexual drive in a man like me who is on the brink of becoming old is so deeply intertwined with my naturally narcissistic power-hungry personality and my waning testosterone levels that my dick has become far, far more important to me than God, Country or Family.” 

Refreshing huh? Don’t hold your breath. The truth is extinct, or at least on the heavily endangered list. 

Perhaps we should start a campaign to bring Truth back. It would be costly, but maybe, in the long run, worth it. Restoration of respect for The Truth would immediately resurrect The Theatre, (which has been dead for many, many years) and immediately destroy Religion, which is thriving on bigotry and war all over this bigoted, war-torn planet. (I don’t equate Religion with Faith by the way. Faith is about Hope. Religion is about Fear and Manipulation.) 

“Up With The Truth” would have to be a grass roots movement though. That would be pretty fuckin cool, doncha think? Each of us would have to start in our own small way, in our own little lives. Pretense would be banished in favor of authenticity, and blunt openness would overtake politeness. Very scary stuff. Think of all the clichés we rely upon every day that would suddenly be unavailable to us. No more could you answer the check-out clerk’s query of “How are you today?” with “Fine”. Instead you’d have to say, “Well, being a Percocet addict, and having had an extra one this morning because my lower back hurts like a motherfucker today, I’m actually even a bit foggier than usual, and a little crankypants too because Percocet prevents me from getting a hard-on. I would ask you how you are dear, but I truly don’t care, as I’m completely self-absorbed. Ciao!”  

Rude? Certainly. But a helluva lot more authentic than “Great!” 

That’s only the bottom rung of the ladder though. Telling the truth to your spouse? About everything? To your children? To your parents? The very idea is preposterous, frightening, impossible, no?  

But all of that prospective terror is a piece of proverbial cake compared to the true bottom line: Telling the truth to yourself. 

You’re thinking: He’s written about this before. Forgive me. Our human fascination with self-deception continues to fascinate me. Following are a few of my favorite truest quotes about Truth from some truly Googleable heavyweights.  

If you linger on each for just a few moments, I promise a door will open somewhere that will illuminate something you have long avoided or wrestled with, but have never seen or solved. Linger even longer, and that opened door can lead to a corridor that opens on a field of light. (Hey! I made that up! Pretty fuckin poetic huh? But I believe it to be true. Nothing is truly sadder than a closed door.) 

OK, here are my top 11 pics….. 

ONE. A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth.  (Henrick Ibsen) 

TWO. As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.  (Josh Billings) 

THREE. Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.  (Keith Miller) 

FOUR. There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself: an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.  (Antisthenes) 

FIVE. There is no poison on earth more potent, nor half so deadly, as a partial truth mixed with passion.  (Michael J. Tucker) 

SIX. In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.  (Willie Brown) 

SEVEN. What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth.  (Corin Nemec) 

EIGHT. We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.  (Pablo Picasso) 

NINE. I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.  (Jeanette Winterson) 

TEN. The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.  (Adolf Hitler) 

ELEVEN. During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.  (George Orwell)

Barak Obama wants to put the Latina Ms. Sotomayor on the Supreme Court not just because she has a dazzling resume and a legal mind like lightening. Apparently she also has a heart. The Republicans do not want anyone with a heart on the court. They would have cheered a nomination of The Tin Man before he met up with The Wizard. (Well, actually maybe not, for, as played by Jack Hailey Jr. in the MGM classic, The Tin Man is an obvious, effeminate homosexual.) The Republicans don’t want emotion to come into it. You don’t need your feelings to make laws that will govern human beings, dammitt.

In a way, I agree. Fair is Fair. What have your feelings to do with it? A man shouts “CUNT!” at a woman at the other end of the bar after she refuses the drink he sent her and she gets up, walks over to him, and hauls off and whacks him in the face with her fist. Many would say he had it coming. The problem is, she broke his jaw. He’s rushed to the hospital, and because of the way his jawbone was shattered (she was wearing a large diamond engagement ring on the fist she hit him with) his face is going to require several difficult surgeries, he can only eat through a straw, and there’s a good chance he may be permanently disfigured.

What is right? What should the law say? Should it be in any way based on how some element of this incident makes you feel?

I think the law should say: You cannot hit someone who calls you a name. Period. And my feelings are more sympathetic to the woman in this particular scenario. This guy is a total drunken asshole. But how you feel about men, women, bars, mating rituals, “cunt”, plastic surgery, etc. shouldn’t come into it. Emotion is the enemy of Reason, of Rightness.

When an actor is brilliant, emotion, if there is any, is a by-product of what he is doing. Not the other way around. The actress is not doing because of the way she feels. Just like in life. People who are inclined to behave according to how they feel end up in jail or a padded room. Behavior should result from reason, from choice, and should not be dictated by emotion.

When a person is brilliant, let’s use Barack O as an example, (and don’t get the impression I’m in love with the guy or some of his policies, I’m not). He is guided by a set of reasoned principles, a hugely complex collection of ways to determine the difference between Right and Wrong. And Science and Religion. And Life and Art. And on and on.  Emotion has nothing to do with it.

Bad actors always lead with their emotions. They decide how they will feel about each moment in the scene, or perhaps about the other actor, and then they adjust the lines to those feelings of sadness, anger, or joy. They are not led by Doing anything.

Bad people are also led by their emotions. They decide how they feel about something in their lives, or in the lives of others, and then allow that emotion to guide their behavior. (The guy who murdered the late-term abortion doctor is a perfect example.)

Let’s say a man is strongly attracted to his 12 year old daughter as her body develops. His emotion is lust. Happens every day in this country. Does he follow the feeling? Or does he accept the lust as real, though inappropriate, and hideously inconvenient, and then reason himself into counseling that will ultimately facilitate the healthy development of his little girl through his acceptance of self-restraint.

What he is doing is being a good father. What he is doing is suppressing his own emotion in order to protect both the physical and spiritual health of his little girl. Doing takes Courage. He can’t help that she turns him on. But he must channel that desire away from her and find a way to love her that will leave her undamaged by his neurosis. It won’t be easy. But he better fuckin do it anyway.

I believe courage is the single most important attribute for an actor. And it’s real close to the top of the list for a great person too. All of the most acutely painful moments of my life, my most deeply felt humiliations involved, somehow, a lack of courage. And all of my best moments, the ones where I surprised even myself with behavior that bordered on perfection, were, of course, courageous ones.

Maybe my best moment ever was the day Scott’s lungs collapsed for the second time. I was teaching class and someone interrupted with the news he had been rushed to the hospital. When I arrived, he had already been taken into Emergency, and the nurse would not let me in. She was firm. No admittance. My feelings were bursting inside me. Fear, anger, loss, self-recrimination. Terror, really. But my mind took hold. “Keep your eye on the ball, ignore your emotions, get into that room, and do it fast.” I sized her up in 2 seconds and launched into a quiet, almost cooing rendition of how much greater a chance this man I loved had of survival if I was to be allowed to stand next to him and hold his hand. I quickly explained that his fear of being alone while unable to breathe could induce a panic attack and that I would cause no disturbance or interference of any kind, I would hold his hand and that was all. I wanted to strangle this woman, but instead she saw behavior that respected her while asking for an exception to a rule that, in this case, needed, occasionally, to be breakable. She opened the doors, saying, “You know, people usually just scream at me but the way you explained…” and took me right to him. He was sitting in a wheelchair, in a corner, with a tube down his throat, gasping, covered with a blanket, with a look on his face that could break the heart of Satan, and in that moment I knew I had accomplished something terribly difficult that actually mattered.

I’m not going to tell you my worst moment. Well, not here and now anyway. I want to let the aura of Heroic Vic linger a moment.

The Republican lie about Ms. Sotomayor is not that she possesses empathy, but that she will allow it to overcome her reason. Especially if the plaintiff is not White. 

Our emotions can be thrilling to feel. The perfect karmic upside of my plan to depart this planet on my own terms has produced an unexpected but very welcome fringe benefit. The people in my life who are true and loyal and deep with me are truer, and more loyal, and deeper than ever. The ones who maintained a somewhat shallower relationship with me, have either shallowed further or entirely disappeared.  So all that is left is a kind of pure intimacy I have always craved, the intimacy of what is real, an almost deathbed vigil of truthfulness guarded by a “what the fuck” willingness to cast aside that which is false or petty.

What’s left is love. The real, unequivocal, unconditional variety, which on any given day now flares up and out of me freely. I am so grateful to be loved deeply. But I’m more grateful to love. To be able to feel that desire to hold another person, to listen to their worst anguish, or to laugh uncontrolled at the absurdity of their funniest gaffe. To feel a connection that transcends words, experience, judgment, emotion, a connection that exists even below the very bedrock of who we are to ourselves. A connection so pure and so deeply unavoidable that an intimacy junkie like me feels the drug has been pumped straight into the heart.

Dare to love someone you know (who is truly worth it) beyond unconditionally. It’s a great real-life exercise for actors and people precisely because it involves no imaginary circumstance. You. Pick someone to love without reservation, without judgment, without scrutiny. Love them more than yourself, let them off the hook more easily than you do yourself, lick them all over, metaphorically, like a mama cat with her kittens. (Or literally if that works for you both. Saliva can be a powerful agent of change.) If you get nothing back, keep licking. You’ll get it back from somewhere else. And even if you don’t, ummmm, that licking feels good because you do it freely, as grace is given by the divine.

It was only a complete lack of interest in my own asshole that kept me from AIDS.

Had I liked the idea of getting fucked, or the reality of it on the rare occasions I tried it when I was in love, I would have been dead long ago.

I had enormous interest though, in exploring my Swingin Dick Nixon, and so I went ahead with that. It started in junior high, I’d often go to the library with my mom, and I would tell her I had books to find, then make a beeline for whatever material I believed would have the best, clearest photos of attractive shirtless men. This was circa 1970, so the pickins were slim. We were not living in the wildly homoerotic America of 2010, where straight men relish portraying us in television comedy sketches to show the holdouts for The Flag, White presidents, and Marriage Between a Man and a Woman how ridiculous they are, and how foolish is their bigotry and fear. It was not the America of today where every inch of the male landscape has been recorded and used to sell or promote almost anything.

Exploitation of the male body for sexual titillation has reached the same level as that of women. Thank god the old 70’s feminists (who did the best they could against staggering odds) can no longer bitch about that. EQUAL PAY, ladies. That’s it. Christ, get on it already! Are you not clear enough that in America, when you have that, you have it all.

Anyway, there I was, alone in the back stacks, looking through old college yearbooks or instruction manuals for pictures of the swim team or how to play water polo. I couldn’t check the books out of course, so I would head to the john, and pull two or three good ones off in easily less than 10 minutes. Then I’d put the book back, go get some real books, find my mom, we’d check out, and drive home after a lovely, relaxing trip to this place of learning, truly an oasis of relief in the middle of Ohio, USA.

When I entered my high school girlfriend for the first time, I remember being disappointed at the sensations, but I was hard, so it was easy to fake. I gave up sex with women at the end of college after a thorough but certainly not extensive exploration, and just concentrated on satisfying myself with pictures of men because the orgasms were SO much better.

Actually I had sex with one woman since, that was about 10 years ago, with Megan Mullally, and we’d been pals since college, with a go at it back then too. The first time we did it, she blew me, and put an end forever to the popular fiction that men give better head than women. A few days later we got together again, and this time it was my turn to explore her Fandango with my mouth and fingers, as she was not yet ready for intercourse. Before we got going, she asked me who I had told about our previous encounter.

Nobody.

Megan: Why not?

I don’t know, it would feel too weird, like I was bragging about getting head from Karen Walker or something…

Megan: Well I told several girlfriends and I think you should tell anyone you want.

I laughed hard, that’s vintage Megan, said OK, and we went at it. I ended up with my smiling face between her legs, and I must attest I was a bit scared, it had been 20 years since I’d had an intimate conversation with the Lips that Never Speak. But my fears were soon dispelled by the responsiveness of her flesh and the appeal of her scent. Ok Megan, I have no one left to tell.

A man can’t fall in love with a woman (or a man) who doesn’t hold the promise of giving him explosive orgasms. Plural is crucial. What makes it explosive? Depends on where your own triggers are, but mechanically, the deciding factor is how excited (hard) you are, and then, how long you remain on the edge. I’m talking about men of course. I wouldn’t attempt a guess at the complexities of female orgasm. Especially not in the framework of our culture which destroys so many of the possibilities for women to explore themselves as pleasure receptors.

When a man is having an explosive orgasm he is absolutely aligned to the deepest part of himself and also to the universe.

For closeted gay men, even those that are closeted from themselves, which is the deepest and blackest level of the closet, there is an awareness, however fleeting: This is who I am. For a split second, when he’s shooting off, the guy is in touch with himself. It’s quite common for men in the closet not to masturbate at all, and then to have fits of uncontrolled sexuality in dangerous or at least unknown locations and circumstances. The ones that marry stay stuck where I was in high school. It doesn’t feel very good, but now, hey, there’s Viagra, so fooling a woman who wants to believe in the tooth fairy anyway (as so many do) is not all that tough if you’re clever enough. You can keep your box of magazines up in the attic where she never goes, or if she’s a home fix-it kind of gal, then perhaps rent a small storage locker at a nearby facility, and use it as I used the library washroom at age 13.

I was talking with an old friend who is a doctor the other day, who has many AIDS patients, and has talked with many men as their bodies were shutting down. I was telling him that my orgasms have become almost unbearably intense. For that little (or longer) time I spend each day wrestling with the bald Champ, the sensations are beyond staggering. He then told me of stories he has been told many times, some in first person, and some by surviving lovers, about the shocking force and intensity of the release under the body’s natural deadline.

And I thought of Scott, my sweetie, in the last ravages of AIDS, and the unbelievable (safe) sex we had as he faced his deadline. He was only capable of being sexual at that point once every two weeks or so, but when he was ready he would wave his throbber at me and I knew what was coming. There were a few times I thought my head might blow off, but I lived to tell the tale, and remained HIV negative.

The explosions weren’t as much the result of my particular, amazing, 100% all-beef thermometer as they were the result of how sexually aroused I was by the courage of his fight against the disease he told me he had on our second date. I loved him. That was the match that lit the fuse every time. And he wasn’t the last man I loved. I met Bob, under very unique circumstances, and we had an ongoing relationship that started in Chicago around 1996 and continued after I moved to LA, and after I returned to Ohio for 4 years to care for my dad. Bob died in 2003 from causes unrelated to AIDS. More about him to come.

The body knows itself.

I remember my sisters telling me that my Aunt Louise, in the last stages of stomach cancer, her tiny body drying up like a raindrop on a griddle, when they visited her in the nursing home near the end, was constantly fiddling with her privates. They were embarrassed and delighted at the same time, and fascinated by the body’s willingness to go for what it wants, brain be damned, no matter who happens to be watching.

In my case, you’re reading.

The argument against the Republicans is as simple as it can be.

They want to take choice away.

If you voted for McCain, fuck you. You lost.

For those of us on the left and in the center (read: sane) what does choice really mean? Is it always a good thing? Or only when we agree with it? Only when we understand it?

We’re big on understanding, but what if someone else’s choice comes right up against a paradigm we have? What if it’s a paradigm almost every single one of us shares? A paradigm so rooted in us that we start to wonder if we do believe in choice, or at least whether or not choice is a good thing to have.

The easiest choices to make are the ones that make themselves.

Well, no, that’s wrong, because it makes no sense. If these “instinct” choices make themselves, what we think about them simply tells us what our body’s opinion is. Perhaps some auto-mechanism deep inside us which contains all our dna and our experiences since birth, and all the physical experience of every pain, joy, and pang of sex we’ve ever had simply auto-chose from the available menu.

I marvel at how, as humans, we fuss and complain about the choices others make, I do it myself, all the time, and we are inclined especially to judge, with our own little auto-chip as the guide. 

The problem, of course, with my own little auto-chip is that is doesn’t contain any of the information necessary to understand the life of anyone but me. This is the key to what Republicans never learned and refuse to understand, and it is also the reason I spent my life analyzing the human condition, acting, directing, and teaching acting. It was the only thing that fascinated me. (See auto-chip.)

One of my two brothers-in-law is a Republican. He voted for McCain. And I love him. So go figure.

I will never forget him on the day of his son’s wedding. There was some disturbance a day or two before, from some guy, I can’t even remember what the issue was or if he was on the groom’s side or the bride’s, but the bride was afraid he might try to make some kind of scene at the church. (Straight people!) His son, my nephew, had stepped right up to the plate, contacted the offending party and laid it on the line that this day belonged to his bride and surely they could both agree on this as men. He prevailed, or so we all believed, but a series of calls had gone out between the adult males in the family and we were put on alert. When I got to the church, I saw my brother-in-law at the end of a long path coming towards me, and the stride of his gait told me he was ready to take this guy down. He did not have the smile on his face of a proud father, though he certainly was one. He led with his shoulders and upper arms, not with his characteristic, passive accommodation. (My paradigm for his manner was shattered.) I felt I was in the presence of a wrestler about to climb into the ring. As we talked and moved towards the church, the proud dad smile surfaced too. The asshole never showed up, so he never had to punch the guy in the face and drag him up the aisle. But his body was absolutely prepared to do just that.

Is that about choice? I don’t know, but that’s what I love about blogging. I just felt like telling him I love him in public.

Back to choice. If the choice you make is to dig the eyeballs out of puppies with a cocktail fork, then, personally, I think there should be a law to prevent you. But that’s just me. Perhaps you hate puppies because your mother tripped over Trixie when you were five, banged her head on the stove, and died of a horrible contusion right in front of your eyes. I get it. You have a different view. So you’re not going to support that law.

Or perhaps you are. Anyway.

I am a homosexual. I made a decision to insert my cock into the mouths and assholes of men that caused it to fill with blood, become erect, and erupt. I had no choice over which men, my big gorgeous cock pointed me in the right direction, and I obeyed. (I love talking about how hot my cock is. It remains the astonishing bit of absolute divine grace in my life.) Straight men understand this perfectly. Their cocks told them which women to pursue too. Another perfect example of the blindness and retardation of Republicans who think homos can choose women, when we can’t even choose the men we want!!!

The people who are furious at me for leaving aren’t talking to me much these days. They fear I am making the choice to go because I willfully refuse to accept the pain in my body, and to soldier on. I suppose they are right. That’s what humans are supposed to do. They are certain that greener pastures lie ahead.

What they do not know is that the choice I am making is between death and insanity, not death and life. Because death and life are the choices they have, they believe that I have the same two choices. But that’s a terrible mistake to make. My body simply will not accept any more pain, or sustain the level I am at for too much longer.

They are afraid of their anger at me, it is huge and frightens them because it is the forerunner of a terrible loss that will catapult them into grief. They are human. They have every right to be mad at me. Their feelings are natural, and result from their love for me. They feel betrayed by my departure. They must continue on after I’m gone, if they choose, and deal with the loss in whatever way they are able. This of course has nothing whatever to do with me. This is determined by each of their own little auto-chips, and each is filed under the auto-sub class: How I deal with Loss. Or Anger. Or change. Or whatever little auto-chip is running the show.

The people who accept my choice, are, thankfully, in the vast majority, and they are grieving as much, or more, than those who are struggling to remain in denial.  (If that’s not the biggest fucking bite in the shorts about the human condition, I don’t know what is.) My two sisters, Rochelle and Marge, and my astonishing friend Ann Marie, who is my legal wife as you know, are so unconditionally loving and supportive of me that it would make you weep if you heard our ongoing dialogues. I feel passionately that they will grieve less when I am gone, because they are doing it with me, which is why I have chosen this wildly unconventional departure, why I made the choice I have made. We are having wonderful talks where they listen and we laugh, sometimes more profoundly than we ever have, and they get mad, or they cry, (Women! Ya gotta love em!) and I listen, and we talk some more, spending healing time together, and I am sharing their grief at losing me. I am accepting their anger and their love and I am crying for them too, because I know I will leave a hole in their lives that no one else can fill.  But I know that Victor gone will hurt less than Victor in an asylum. And that is surely where I am headed if I allow this pain in my body to continue much longer.

I have seen the doctors. And they have seen me. (Gielgud, Arthur.)

My heart is breaking for the few people in my life who are struggling mightily but have not yet reached Acceptance. I believe their anger will become something much harder for them to manage when I am gone. I want so badly to be wrong about this, but fear I am not. I am not angry at them. I am searching for a way to help them, and this blog is a small part of that search.

I spent my life studying, and then teaching, Point of View. Acting schmacting. That you can’t teach.

What makes an actor great? A willingness, and then an ability to walk in someone else’s shoes. To walk in them. Not to think about walking in them, or to talk about walking in them, or even to understand the walk, but to walk it.

It’s so easy to pick on people for being self-deluded. It’s like picking on dogs for rubbing their assholes on the carpet. It feels good, so we do it.

Perhaps there’s no greater self-delusion than the belief that after death, the wrongs of this world will be righted by a god who obviously sees no need to do anything about them at the present time. Our need for comfort in a cruel world makes perfect sense. Practically everyone I know takes an anti-depressant. And most feel ashamed of it to some degree. But the rest of us are depressed too, even though we may not choose drugs to manage it. And we feel shame too. How can one live in a human body on this small planet we call Earth and not feel shame?

I loved playing a game (that I thought I invented) in college, called The Would You Rather Game. It’s played by giving someone a choice of two things that they either long for, or that they long to avoid, and then having them choose. (The standard reply from people who don’t like this game is “neither”.)

Would you rather have the power to cure all disease, or to end all hunger?

Would you rather spend a drunken, naked evening with Hillary Clinton or Oprah?

Would you rather fuck Barak Obama or Daniel Craig?

Would you rather have your 10 fingernails pulled out with pliers, or eat a quart of shit?

You get the idea.

The game can be made more textured of course by adding additional circumstances, or by negating certain assumptions, for instance: Can I have anesthesia while my fingernails are being yanked out? If so, what kind? Advil? Percocet? Heroin? Whose shit is it? My own? Dick Cheney’s? Can I hold my nose while I eat it? Can I drink something strong afterward to wash it down?

Isn’t life kind of like an ongoing Would You Rather Game? Except in life, you actually do the thing.

Would you rather stay in the crushingly dull marriage, or face life’s trials alone?

Would you rather buy the new furniture, or call the number on your tv screen and support the starving orphan?

Would you rather go without the condom and feel every nerve ending, or risk getting her pregnant?

The self-delusion comes in when we make one choice and pretend we’ve made another, or when we invent reasons for the choice we made that have nothing to do with why we actually made it, and then continue to make it everyday. Self-delusion means avoiding the truth, and when facing the truth leads to fear of consequences more painful than those caused by embracing a lie, then the game is on. 

I saw Elizabeth Edwards telling her story about her husband’s infidelity on tv the other day, and she was suddenly transformed from the fierce, intelligent woman I had always respected and admired, into a foolish, self-deluded object of ridicule.

She shared a bittersweet recollection of her desire for “just one gift” from her husband when he proposed, the one thing she asked him to promise her was that he would always be faithful.  I wonder why she didn’t ask him to eat only oatmeal for the rest of his life, or never to cut his hair, or only to sleep while standing up. It doesn’t really seem that absurd for a virginal young girl in love to make that request of her husband to be, or even for her young husband to be to think he’s telling the truth when he makes that particular promise. I’ve no doubt that when he’s 20 he fully intends to keep it. And women cheat too, it’s not about men vs. women, it’s about refusing to grow up. For Elizabeth Edwards, in her late 50s, still to believe in the tooth fairy? That’s willful denial of reality, or to re-interpret the words of Bill Clinton, it’s a refusal to see what IS is.

I sat there shaking my head watching E.E. while she calmly and in a ladylike manner so typical of her ilk, expressed her self-righteous rage at being betrayed. I wondered if she is also furious that it rains, and pissed off that when you drop something, it falls to the floor.

When her husband confessed to her that he had been unfaithful, he told her he had sex with this woman only once, and, for a long time she believed that.  Now, presumably, his story is that this other woman is the only other woman he’s ever had, and so now she believes that. And all of us watching are to believe that no one knows anything about whether John Edwards is the father of the child the woman birthed 9 months after their affair.

Yes, reality can be quite painful, but it also makes a certain kind of “realistic” sense. Mrs. Edwards was/is articulate, quiet, chubby, dying of cancer, and familiar.  The other woman was/is cynical, aggressive, skinny, bursting with anorexic “healthiness” and an unknown.

As Mark, a sexy, caustic, deceased love of mine, used to say—“Oh those wacky heterosexuals.”

It’s not just heterosexuals of course. I know several homosexual men living in the closet, and the closet has many levels. The bottom level, the deepest layer of the lie in other words, is the one that embraces complete self-delusion. This kind of homosexual does not acknowledge, even to himself, his attractions toward men. God only knows what he thinks about on the rare occasions when he ejaculates. As men, we know it’s impossible to get off without getting aroused, and to be aroused, there must be some communion with the arousing image or idea, even if it’s only in our heads for the last few moments before we squirt it off. The top layer of the closet (and there are several in between top and bottom) are the ones who have frequent sex with men (living on the “down low”) but pretend to their wives, their co-workers, their friends, that they’re straight.

Hey, whatever works. If something is painful we look for a way to sooth that pain, and we usually have a choice. Personally, I prefer taking my pain up front, usually from the acceptance of a difficult truth that I cannot control, and that makes me feel powerless to some degree, but if you’re the type of human being that likes to postpone, the road to denial is paved with our human need to avoid our fear and shame at being human.