Excerpt of Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda
(Page 3 of 4)
Printer Friendly Excerpt
Upstairs was where heaven was.
The chorus girls always brought me up to their dressing room. They talked with
me; they patted my cheek and combed my hair. They were affectionate. I was like
a pet. When they had to change costumes, they would say, “Okay, Allie, turn your
back now.” While they changed, I stood with my face against the wall where their
costumes were hanging. My face was buried in their silk clothes, and the smell
of their sweat and perfume filled my nostrils. I heard the sound of their
clothing sliding on and off their bodies. All of this was far more interesting
for a three-year-old than you might imagine.
But I wasn’t only the dancers’ pet; I was a plaything for the whole company.
When I was six months old, the comics thought it would be funny to bring me out
in a high chair in a schoolroom sketch. As they told me this story later, all
the great comics were in this sketch: Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, Rags Ragland. I
don’t know now if all these comics were actually in the same sketch; the story
must have grown with each telling. They said they put a school bell in front of
me on the high chair, and totally by accident, I would manage to bang on it
every time one of them was getting to a punch line. “You upstaged the greatest
comics in burlesque,” they told me.
When I was two, the company was playing a theater in Toronto. A photographer
from the Toronto Daily Star came backstage, and my father got the idea that if
he posed me in a way that made me look as if I were smoking a pipe, the paper
would be sure to print the picture and the burlesque company would get some
unusual publicity. They dressed me up in my woolen suit and posed me gravely
holding a pipe with tobacco in it. They seem to have invented a new name for me,
too. I was born Alphonso D’Abruzzo, but that day I was Alphonse Robert Alda,
“Ali” for short. The newspaper printed the picture and ran a story under it
that, sixty-seven years later, is a gold mine of information on how not to raise
a child.
child of two smokes pipe
once broke mother’s nose
Alphonse Robert Alda, at the age of two years and three months, finds solace
from worldly cares in a briar pipe.
I don’t remember my mother ever telling me I had broken her nose, so this may
have been invented to demonstrate how big and strong I was or maybe to account
for a slight bend in her nose she wasn’t fond of. As for smoking, according to
the myth dreamed up by my father, I had reached up and taken the pipe out of his
mouth a year earlier. My mother was quoted as saying they’d hoped I’d get sick
and never smoke again but that I liked it and had continued to smoke the pipe.
Then they invented a “specialist” from New York whom they said they had
consulted. “He told us,” my mother was quoted as saying, “provided moderation
was shown, the smoking might not do Ali as much harm as the psychological aspect
of denying him.” This bit of invented psychology looks even stranger when, later
in the article, she says: “We don’t believe in pampering children. All you have
to do to stop him if he starts to cry, which is seldom, is to tell him not to be
a baby.”
So, let’s review this. You’re two years old. You watch naked women shake their
tits five times a day. You never get to cry or act like a baby. But denying you
tobacco would be psychologically unhealthy.
At the end of the article, my mother tells the reporter how much I like to act.
“He wants to be an actor like his daddy,” she said. “Watch! Ali,” she asked,
“what would you do if a man were chasing you with a big stick?” The little
fellow spread himself against the wall, his face and eyes depicting horror and
fright.
Excerpted from Never Have Your Dog Stuffed
by Alan Alda Copyright © 2005 by Alan Alda. Excerpted by permission of Random
House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
