I have a small part, it’s true, but the company is really good and it is nice to work with such established people again. With all of the theater and film work I have done since moving to New York, there has been a sense of desperation to it, a sort of energized, exciting desperation to be sure, but no-one really seems to be on safe footing.

The show is called ‘A Soldier’s Play’ by Charles Fuller, and the Black Spectrum theater is putting it on. I auditioned because I wanted to do a show with people that I normally wouldn’t get to spend time with, and sure enough Jamaica, Queens is not a place I normally hang out.

The cast is really extraordinary. When I came in and auditioned, I saw the gym and the basketball court and all the kids and it felt more like a rec center or a Mormon church than a theater, so I didn’t take it that seriously. But every single person in the cast is either quite good (and incredibly talented), or amazing (and incredibly talented). If you are ever wondering which of your fellow castmates is the slow one and you can’t decide, you better check yourself.

Instead of it being a community theater, it is a theater wholly embraced by the community. Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis are presenting one show, and they are already starting to sell out the run. It’s a four hundred seat auditorium, nowhere near public transit, and they are selling out. Most of the cast is union, all of the facilities are top rate, and the talent that surrounds me at each rehearsal is incredible. This is not just a show that can get me warmed up for my next production and expand Gideon’s fan base. This is a show I would hope people would come see even if I wasn’t in it.

There are 12 men in this cast, and the only two women are the director and stage manager. The amazing thing is that, despite the fact that we are all loud and obnoxious theater people, the two ladies rule the roost with quiet dignity. Bette, the director, speaks just above a whisper, but she is so fantastically intelligent that we stop talking the second we see her mouth start to move.

There are small parts for three white actors, but we are in no way excluded from the ensemble as a whole. There is a sort of division, inately, between officers and enlisted men, but not between black and white. I go to the gym every day because I believe you should immerse yourself in situations where you are the below average person as much as possible, it’s the best way to expand yourself. And I wanted to join a black cast to expand myself as well. Stupid, it turns out, because these guys are just great actors, like me, and we are all just playing parts. It’s extremely gratifying.

Zooey is a great cat. He is my sister’s cat for all intents and purposes, so when I try to claim he is my cat, you should know that I am lying. My sister has taken care of that cat and loved him completely, and in whatever passes for his mind, you should know that he thinks of Michelle only, and that Michelle celebrates this amazing animal as only an owner would do.

But, y’know… he is sort of my cat.

The last cat I actually owned was named Nike, after a pair of shoes I had just purchased. Nike can be seen in the picture of Kije and Michelle. Nike was awesome, but as he got older, he started spending more and more time out of the house, out kicking ass and fighting dogs and stuff.

A quick aside about Nike. He is The Cat from the musical my mom and I wrote called “The Electric Cat”. If that sounds totally awesome and you want to hear more, feel free to send a check to Gideon Productions.

Anyway, when Nike died it coincided with yet another change of schools and another lost set of friends and girlfriends and the onset of my cat allergies. My mom and sister picked up this retarded Bill-The-Cat looking, rat-faced, homeless kitten, half to salve my broken heart and half because they knew it would make me crazy. I told them, flat out, I had no intention of spending any time with this ugly large headed cross-eyed cat, that I would not clean up after it, and it was not allowed in my room.

He immediately latched on to me and refused to leave my side. He would jump five feet in the air, even as a kitten, to sleep on my hive-ridden neck.

I mean, if you saw this cat a year ago, what you would see is a regular cat head perched atop a body that hovered right around twenty pounds, with a full gray and white lion’s mane of fur around his neck and long payos hanging from his stomach, but as a kitten he had short baby bird fur that always pointed sort of North-Northeast, and his head was far too large for his body. And he was cross-eyed. Completely. If cats actually put on Disney musicals, he would have been Quasimodo.

He loves people more than any other cat our family has owned. Michelle has kept him for years and years, and, most recently, decided to go ahead and change her life plans and get an apartment because he was stuck (with his buddy Fezzik) in a kennel. The only legacy I have is that somehow, Zooey is the only of Michelle’s animals that won’t hide the second someone comes in the room. But that was probably Michelle as well.

Zooey is dying as we speak. No-one is sure what he is dying of. He has dropped from almost twenty pounds to eight. But of course he purred through the tests, he purred through the prodding, he purred straight through his cries of pain when they took blood. This cat has been celebrated by friends of mine and friends of Michelle’s since I was in high school. I know if I called all of our combined ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, they wouldn’t give a crap about us, but they would all be really sad to hear that we are losing Zooey

Duane Read can kiss my ass.

A month or so ago I was having an allergy attack that made it almost impossible to breath. Duane Read refused to sell me an inhaler. Then today I bought DR brand Ranitidine, and when I opened the factory sealed box, it was empty. I opened it just after leaving the store, so they wouldn’t honor any kind of refund.

Anyhoo, time to rehash my birthday list. Because I got cast in a show yesterday, Jordana took me out and bought me a new Discman to celebrate. I also got an ear-mic to use with my cellphone, and the Discman came with a full car thingie, so you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. I also got awesome headphones.

I mean, the CD player isn’t great, but it’s awesome for 50 bucks or whatever we spent on it.

So, new list.

– Still Carolina shorts, I definitely need those. They are impossible to replace.

– A new digital camera, because I don’t think Steve will get me one unless I get him drunk first. He’s mad because he bought me a camera and I haven’t sent him a picture of Jordana naked yet.

– CDs or a bag would be nice. I want a bag that I can take to the gym, but will also double as an overnight bag that will fit a computer. I always end up taking two bags on a plane, and that’s just dumb.

– If you were going to get me a cool ass palm pilot, but then decided not to when you found out I didn’t lose mine, feel free to go ahead and get it for me. I will love you more if you buy me cool stuff, and less if you don’t. That’s how I work.

– New New Balance Running shoes. I tried running today in other shoes, and I finally just gave up.

– Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. I am about forty pages from the end, and it got stole.

– Double Stuff Oreos. Still missing.

I got cast in a show wherein I am one of three white guys. I will be performing at the Black Spectrum Performing Arts Center in Jamaica. I am, in a word, psyched. I am going to get to hang out with people that I would never have gotten a chance to before this. I have a bunch of auditions this week, but when they called I cancelled everything and told them I would do it. It might suck, my part might be small, but I will probably not get this chance again.

Jordana and I continued to celebrate well into the night last night. I mean, not all that well into the night. We celebrated for what I would consider to be a good while for a man my age who has not been, y’know, celebrating a lot lately. And since I am not really in the habit of celebrating myself, it was nice to be celebrated so aggressively by someone else.

Kansas lost to Syracuse last night. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, when it comes to my pool. Even my poor sweet dead dog didn’t win anything.

So, here is what you can get me for my birthday. Everything I lost in my bag. Including

– really comfortable Carolina blue shorts that I work out in, light enough to not suck but heavy enough so they don’t bunch up while I am running. (Actually these would be impossible to replace)

– my brand new New Balance tennis shoes, perfect for running, actually gave me a couple of extra miles that I couldn’t get out of my old shoes.

– A discman. Preferably one with the speakers that boom right into the back of your skull.

– A bunch of mix cds and regular cds with music that makes you feel nice and other music that makes you angry and want to dance.

– A bag.

– Those knee braces that help isolate your knee but not the expensive ones (unless you want to get me the expensive ones, I won’t complain).

– A digital camera, unless my phone call to Steve Alexander (wherein I said, “Hey, get me a new digital camera you asshole”) works.

– Cool slingback headphones that you can wear regardless of your hat.

– Random medicines that help alleviate pain and allergies.

And, although I didn’t lose it with the bag, I also lost an earpiece for my phone, a CD converter for my discman, and a bunch of double stuff oreos. The oreos were lost when I set the tupperware on the roof and then drove off, so I wouldn’t consider those compensatory, just, y’know, nice and yummy.

Children need to be prepared for the world, the world does not need to be child-proofed. That has always been my assertion, and I stand by that. People always claim that shit will be dangerous if it gets in the hands of children, to which I would argue that the same shit is dangerous in the hands of adult morons, which would describe 40% of the people I meet. I think all the legal ages should be dropped to 12. Hell, I lost my virginity at 13, got drunk for the first time a year earlier, got high when I was 14 and read “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “A Catcher In The Rye” in that same year. Everything since then has been downhill.

Despite my claim that we need to be prepared for the rigors of the world instead of sheltered from them, I also find nothing as disgusting as blaming the victim. When something cruel or terrible happens to someone, you have to be absolutely sure you understand what ‘negligence’ is. If you get hit by a car because you walk out in to the street focusing only on opening a roll of Wacky Wafers (this happened to me) then you are surely asking to be hit by a car.

Because a street has a use, that use is to facilitate the speed of cars. It isn’t for the opening of candy. I feel bad for little Sean, that he was hit by a car and never told anyone for fear that he would be in trouble. Had he reported it, the response would have been ‘What did you expect? You should not have been opening candy in the road!’ followed by a possible grounding or worse, years of mockery about not being able to walk down the road. The information, to avoid being hit, now learned far better than anyone could have told him, yet still repeated back to him as a sort of post-emptive parenting, would have been as bad as being hit.

Yesterday Jordana’s car was broken in to. It wasn’t jimmied or anything, someone took a rock and bashed in the window. We were parked on a freeway overpass with a constant stream of traffic two blocks from the Symphony hall and performing arts center, and in line with maybe two hundred other cars. We were on the overpass with cars on the freeway streaming underneath us. My bag was on the floor of the back seat tucked behind the passenger seat and my friend Matt threw his leather coat over my bag

The car had been rifled, the trunk and glovebox opened, and my bag and the coat were both taken. Matt and I lost a lot of stuff inside the coat and bag, including my digital camera and his brand new cell phone. As we studied the street, we saw it was littered with casualties, little graveyards of glass where other cars had been hit at other times over the years, with one brand new pile of glass three car lengths up the street from two minutes before or two minutes after ours.

When I called my mom, she said ‘Well, you should have known not to park in Baltimore. That place is terrible for crime.’ My only reply was, ‘Well, since I was going to Baltimore, the only real choice I had was to park in Baltimore.’ Jordana’s parents don’t want to file an insurance report because their premiums will go up and they will be forced to pay for a mistake they believe we made.

We were robbed, which is much worse than the suspicion now hanging around us that we could have avoided being robbed had we been more vigilant somehow. But we did not “get” our stuff stolen, we did not “have” our stuff stolen. The person who broke in to the car stole our stuff. We parked it in a busy place, we locked the car, we put our stuff on the floor, but even had we not, they went through the trunk via the back seat. The cop said that people hit cars without alarms, they will break your window to steal a quarter off the seat, and he told us not to feel like it was our fault.

I am nothing if not vigilant, especially now. I watch every single person walking by, I always have. After my dad left, when I was fifteen, I spent 12 years sleeping with a weapon next to the bed because I knew I was the only thing between whatever was out there and my sister or mom or family. But there is nothing more we could have done to prevent the break in, and I refuse to allow anyone to describe this as my negligence.

At 12:11 PM -0500 4/3/03, Dan Kois wrote:

1. What is your pet’s name?

Kije Von Williams, Aka Mr. Dog, Aka, Squeejee Frog, Aka Sir Poopsalot, AKA Mom’s Dog. More often ‘Mom’s Dog’ than anything else, because he was attached to my mom in the way that only a dog who never gets to see his master is. My mom has been homeless for the last fourteen years, and the dog, for the last ten years of his life, was more accustomed to hotel rooms and the back seats of rental cars than he was to any one specific room.

2. What is your pet’s breed?

Pure bred Yellow Labrador. And look what that got him, hip dysplasia, early onset cataracts and one of those maudlin regal disease deaths that goes on for too long and leads to embarrassing periods of kings unwilling to relinquish their thrones to their snotty children. Fortunately, Kije ruled exactly nothing, not his own backyard or section of bed or home, not even his own appetite.

3. What is your pet’s age?

I think he has currently reverted to his most perfect self, when he was about eight and a little fat and living in Chapel Hill, either with me or with Ian, or (for about four days) with a sorority that he ran away to and returned only because the girls walked him up McCauley and he was stupid enough to recognize Ian and run to him. He was wearing a Carolina blue kerchief ’round his neck.

4. Gender?

Disputed. Initially male but quickly derailed of any kind of gender training. He was the only male in his brood and had no idea that there was a way to function other than female. He was in his fifth or sixth year before he realized he could lift his leg while peeing.

5. Where does your pet spend most of its time?

While alive, Kije spent all of his time pining. He was not a satisfied animal. He pined for my mom whenever she wasn’t there. When he wasn’t eating Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, he was pining for… I mean, I would say he was pining for the taste of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, except for the fact that he would swallow whole slices of raisin bread without chewing or tasting anything so maybe he was just pining for the feel of white bread and raisins dropping down his gullet. After he had eaten the bread, he pined for the time just before, when there was no punishment imminent.

Physically, it’s impossible to say where he spent most of his time. He was always in motion, which for a large fat lazy dog is really extraordinary. Mostly he was being moved, either in a carrier or in a car or on a leash.

6. Where did you get your pet?

He was purchased at a farm in LA that grows dogs like him. It isn’t something any of us are particularly proud of, but the circumstances are pretty unique. We had not been allowed to have dogs growing up, my father was terrified of them and, mostly because of that, so was I. When my dad left my mom, it was decided that she should get a dog, a real statement of independence etc., but I was still terrified of dogs. The only dog I had ever been around was my friend Tom’s dog “Lady” who was a large yellow lab. So, despite the fact that my mom was making this grand gesture to help her deal with her divorce, she was actually, as she always has, doing something with her kids absolutely in the forefront of her mind.

When she got to the breeder, the black lab mom and the black lab dad had a litter of black lab puppies, except sleeping in the corner was this weird mistake, a sleeping yellow lab male puppy. My mom asked something of the breeder, and when Kije heard my mom’s voice he woke up, climbed out of the box and went to her. As if he had been waiting for her to come along. It was pretty much all he did for the rest of his life.

7. How did your pet fill out its bracket?

I asked Mac to come over because I wanted to help him fill out his bracket. I had done a lot of research this year, and I had a couple of hunches (including Maryland losing in the first round), and I *really* wanted Mac to win. He came over with some other friends and we were talking shit and suddenly the war started. We all watched the TV for a little while and couldn’t really look at the brackets.

Mac should be *kicking* himself now.

Once I realized that I couldn’t do anything for Mac I decided to enter my dog. That might sound disrespectful to Mac, but I think he sort of considers me his pet bulldog as well, so it all works out. I tried really hard to pick good stuff for Kije, because I really wanted him to win. It was less Kije’s pool than my homage to Kije, and what his pool would have been if he had been a guy and knew basketball and, y’know, wasn’t dead.

8. What is your pet’s favorite food?

Pepperidge Farm Raisin Bread, but that’s like asking Madonna what her favorite sexual position is. Kije wouldn’t eat lettuce, but he liked everything else. He would *chew* lettuce, certainly, but then let it drop out of his mouth like gum when he was done. He loved broccoli, he loved red bell peppers, and he had a fondness for cooked meat of any kind. He liked melons and he really liked grapes. But man, he loved bread.

We would put a loaf of bread on top of the refrigerator and leave. We would come home and Kije would be hiding in our bedroom, even though he *really* had to go outside, and in the middle of the kitchen floor there would be a plastic bag that had been surgically opened with one canine tooth running the length of the top without a single crumb of bread still existing in the bag.

9. What will your pet do with the prize money once it wins?

No-one anthropomorphizes their animals more than my family does. But when Kije died, he did it on September 17, 2001, and we all had the sense that he had waited until he wouldn’t hurt any of us when he went. We were all so worried about the thousands of people who had just died on 9-11 that he could just slip away without us weeping and wailing. My brother Steve (who had to bring him in to the vet because my mom, naturally, was in Eastern Europe) dropped us an email saying

“So many people have lost so much this week. Walking away from Kije’s still form, I couldn’t imagine the pain others must be feeling. Let’s all imagine that Kije is romping on a new, green field in Manhattan with 5,000 new friends.”

So I think if Kije won any money, he would probably want us to blow it on a bottle of wine (a cheap bottle at this point). Or probably, he would want us to buy a loaf of bread and eat it with my mom.

10. Have you seen your pet exhibit any new behavior since it entered the Pool?

He’s actually not been doing much since he died. We have his ashes, and the last time I saw them they were, no kidding, on Ian’s nightstand right next to his bed. It’s just a box, it isn’t a creepy urn or anything. But still, that’s weird, right?

11. Does your pet have anything he or she would like to say to the other pets in the Pool, or to the Pool at large?

The two questions Kije normally asked of everyone were the following, and in this order;

“Are you going to eat that?”

and

“Can I have it?

The two answers he expected, despite years and years of getting the opposite, were ‘no’ and ‘yes’, in that order. I have to assume that he would ask the other pets on the list the same thing. The advice I think he would give the pets from the great beyond? “Life is short. Don’t chew, just swallow.”

I don’t believe in God, and I think that is a real shortcoming on my part. It isn’t a matter of disagreeing with people who believe in God, it’s just that I simply can’t. They say there are no atheists in the trenches, but the times in my life when I have truly despaired, when my fear went beyond the rational and I found myself saying “Please” out loud, I never for a moment believed that I was asking something of a God, and I never expected any kind of deliverance. I simply had reverted to the most scared and desperate that my conscience could recall, and that was probably as an infant crying out for my parents. I am more trying to get my Dad to help me than I am believing that God will.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have stupid irrational things that I do believe in. I believe very strongly in cognitive resonance. I believe in it so much that I blame it for why I am incredibly bad in movies and at auditions. I can only really act when I am surrounded by an audience. Even if they hate me, I am suddenly listening and aware and alive. I am a really good actor, and I am goddam dreadful in movies. Seriously. My head looks like thirty human teeth swimming in an unset pudding covered in hair, and I act like Pee Wee Herman behind the desk. But in front of a theater audience, I am damn near superhuman.

This cognitive resonance inspires me also to believe that my rooting for a team will actually change the outcome of a game. I alone can’t, but if thousands and thousands of us are rooting for the same guys to win, then maybe something extraordinary will happen. For instance, maybe Shane Battier will get called for a foul that he would usually get away with. Maybe Brendan Haywood would knock down two free throws. Maybe the dookie’s shot would fall in, but it would leave his hand a few tenths of a second too late. If I scream and try hard enough, maybe Carolina will beat Maryland in the ACC tournament again next year.

But I don’t know how hard I will be pulling. I don’t know who will be on the bench coaching these kids that I love. Doherty was fired, despite my blog from last week. I believe that both cognitive resonance, the fact that so many people wanted him to fail, and plain old fashioned lack of popularity drove him out. He was a hard man to love, and that made me love him even more. He was a strict disciplinarian, and that is what I always felt I was missing. If everything they say about him is true, then he is still the coach I want.

He was mean to the kids. But he bled Carolina Blue. Some kids transferred, but it was half because they didn’t like Doherty and half because they knew no-one else did either. I know, I was there. I hated my director at Citrus, and the more shit I talked the more the higher-ups tacitly accepted it. He ended up hating me, and I learned one half of what I should have learned because I was hating instead of listening. I was wrong.

My father was mean to me as a kid, a real task master. But now, I come to him with my ideas, or he sees me in a show, and he thinks I am amazing. No-one is casting me, no-one is seeing my shows, but my Dad comes and tells me that I should focus on being an actor, that no matter what anyone says, he thinks I am brilliant. Matt Doherty came home to Chapel Hill and his father, Dean Smith, never had his back. If people thought I sucked, and my own family agreed, I would resign as well.

Look, he should have gone, and now that he’s gone we can get a coach with more experience. And my belief in Carolina, unlike my belief in God, is still there despite the lack of logic, despite the lack of proof, and despite this latest disappointment. But to think that those guys did what normal guys do just makes me sad. I want us to be better than everyone else, and when Dean and Gut were there I believed it.

One last thing about my dad and God. My dad used to tell us he was Jesus Christ. He would answer our small child disbelief with, ‘Prove it! Prove that I am not Jesus Christ!’ When I was in my early twenties and mad at my dad, I used that to prove what a bad guy he is, but now I find it so unbelievably delightful. I hope I do the same thing to my kids, although I doubt Jordana would let me get away with it.

Some people thought I looked a little fat in that picture of me at my job. Here is proof of how fat I am not.

This is Jordana’s reaction to my concept of “Not Fat”

I think if you look carefully at the picture of me, you can still see the scar on my lip from when I passed out in Brooklyn. Oy, what a night that was!

Listen, my coach got fired and everyone seems happy about it. I am crestfallen, pictures of me naked is the best I can do.

Superlatives are often the only comparison in my family. My friend Jonathan, who got his masters in poem writing, explained it best when he said, ‘There is no reason in being a good poet.’ That resonated with me. I don’t want to be a good anything, I want to be great or I guess I don’t really want to do it. There are exceptions, but that is true of a lot of things.

Four years ago today, or roughly today, I kissed Jordana for the first time. She was sleeping on the couch downstairs at my house on Beachwood Drive in Hollwood (why are there so many (blank)-woods in LA, a place without trees?) and I had theoretically gone to bed. I tossed for about five minutes and then I came back downstairs. I was sitting on the couch where she was sleeping and I asked her if I could kiss her. She laughed at me and said Sure, so I did.

We think it was the first of April. Either way, it’s nice to have a relationship based mostly on laughing start on April Fool’s Day.

Jordana is not the smartest person in the world. It’s hard for me to admit that because she is so much smarter than me, but I realize there are people who understand recipes and who got perfect scores on their SATs and can memorize whole plays in a glance. To be fair, she certainly remembers everything, every single detail of things, and she scored a 1070 when she took her SATs in seventh grade (although it was her mom who told me that, she thought it was funny). When it comes to following directions she is hopeless. But her grasp of the world is vast, she always knows Irving Berlin from Harold Arlen, she knows all three rivers that feed into the Elbe, she does math in her head as fast as I do. But I know she isn’t going to be offered a Nobel Prize in anything.

Jordana is also not the most beautiful girl in the world. Again, it’s hard for me to admit that because she is so incredibly beautiful compared to me. But she is a little too tall and she has the kind of broad strong looks that some men are not attracted to. I mean, she is definitely the most beautiful woman I have ever dated, legs-butt-breasts-eyes-neck, all that stuff is just unreal piece by piece. When I watch her watching a movie, or if I catch her changing, or especially when I see her laughing at our friends, I am amazed at the sheer physical beauty of her. But if you catch her dancing, or trying to play basketball, you wouldn’t consider her a paragon of feminine beauty. You might think she was a little awkward.

And it has always been hard for any of my brothers and sisters to be with someone who wasn’t an absolute, who didn’t have some kind of clear indication that they were better and more special than anyone else we could possibly be with. The woman I married when I was in my 20s was someone who was so obviously unlike anyone else, she was so clearly superlative in so many ways, it was easy for me to bring her in the fold, despite the fact that my family, each and every one of them, could barely tolerate her.

But there is a thing about Jordana that goes beyond her mind or her body, and I won’t be able to describe it here. All I can say about it is that she loves the people around her with the kind of abandon that is infectious. The cliché maintains that love begets love, and I have never understood it before now. I find that with her in my life, I have the obligation and the ability to be a better man, not just to her, but to everyone I know.

In the time that I have spent with her, I have lost the necessity for cruelty. I am still cruel, but now it is a choice, and one that I always regret immediately. I have also lost the necessity for dishonesty. I still lie sometimes, but mostly because it is funny or because I am about to admit I am lying. I have lost the impetus for dominance, I have lost the need to prove myself, I have lost that constant craving for acceptance and understanding and success. I feel like I have that all the time now, just in being with her.

The kind of happiness I have with Jordana requires more than I will possibly be able to write, it should be the only thing my blog is about. So, I’ll stop. I just want to say, I am so glad that I asked her if I could kiss her, and I am so glad she said yes.

I’ve been trying to do this for a while, so let me see if this works.

This is a picture of me at my job…