Valerie,

I wanted to respond with due care to your advice about tongue kissing on stage.

As you recall I played Dracula against Tiffany Cherevko playing Mina Harker. You remember Tiffany; a natural blonde with deep brown eyes and a fine figure. Tiffany was only my second stage kiss. I distinctly remember the first time Tiffany and I kissed in rehearsal. It was about four weeks into the rehearsal process, and we hadn’t staged or rehearsed the kiss even yet. In my mind, the kiss had become the Kiss… and now, at this particular rehearsal, now that it was time to actually Get It Together, it had become the ten-foot-tall flashing green neon THE KISS.

We’re sitting side by side, waiting for the director to ask us to run the scene. So I lean over to her and whisper, “Y’know… um… this time, I’d kinda like to try th’ kiss… y’know?”

She thinks and says, “M’kay.”

So we run the scene. I drag her to the bed, pull her down on top of it, and we! KISS!

And she gives this little airy soprano sigh.

I could write a couple book reports about that sigh.

So rehearsal’s on.  I have this cute blonde chick, who I apparently do not annoy with my kisses, we have this superhot bedroom scene, and we have eight weeks of shows ahead of us.

Back to your original comment.  So why didn’t I absolutely tongue this chick mercilessly on stage?

Answer’s simple.

The thought never once entered my mind.

Or, more precisely (and we’ll write this one in red ink)…

The thought never once entered Dracula’s mind.

When I kissed Marin playing the Wife, I was the Lover.  I was vengeful, I was into the husband’s shit, I was Bad. I was there to get it on in the Husband’s bed and drink his wine afterwards.  Bwah hah hah!  All your wife are belong to us!  Let’s get it ON, bitch!

When I kissed Tiffany playing Mina Harker, as much as I could be, I was Dracula.  Stick my tongue down her throat?  Defile this confection, this subtle willowy angel of spun sugar?  Perish the vile thought!  I will consume this delicacy, body and soul, WHOLE!

When I kissed Alex playing Lizzie Curry, I was the Rainmaker, the open-plain ranger with a dusty wagon and a harmonica tune for a home, and I was (for the first time in my cursed life) feeling the touch of an honest woman, opening like an Easter lily before me, as I contemplated the twisted reds and golds burning the edge of the earth.

And when I kissed Emilie playing Mary Follet, I was Jay, the husband with a white house in Tennessee, happy to be home and sober with my sweet embarrassed wife, this gentle godly thing that rises before dawn to make eggs and toast for ridiculous old drunken me.

Nope, no tongues there neither.¹

I finally figured out why I act.  I do it to get into someone else’s skin and live there for a while.  I discovered, somewhere around January 26, 2002 at 8:13 p.m., that it was more important for me to believe that I’m someone else, to truly feel alive in the life of another, than to get applause or money or fame or any of those other things that actors ostensibly want.  It’s the rush of pure, uncut creation, of feeling a new man’s heart beat, of crossing your eyes and seeing the three-dimensional image, of becoming and becoming and finally being that other person, as sure as you are you and I am me.

So for me… it ain’t about a quick-and-dirty makeout session or whatever the hell else us romantic leads are supposed to do!

Getting your ya-ya’s out is one thing.  Constructing a new person is another.

And that

(said John)

Is

That.

—

¹I have one distinct memory from a Sunday matinee of Rainmaker.  As Alex and I ran off into the wings after the notorious tack-room scene, one male audience member wondered aloud: “Did’ee slip ‘er the TONGUE?!”

The office was a subliminal soft purple. The fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed overhead. Each of the cops was about fifty pounds overweight. Mine was a large white guy with a military buzz cut and thick stubby fingers. The cop punched buttons on a large computer, circa 1985, as he talked on the phone. While he was talking he slid a form across the desk to me.

I filled out the police form, listing the following items: one Fujitsu laptop, three pairs of dress pants, a Kodak digital camera, a GPS unit, four shirts, a fuzzy blue bathrobe, a shaving kit, and four protein cookies.

The cop continued to talk on the phone. “Yeah. Yeah. So they took what? Your computer? Did you lock your car? So how’d they get in? Yeah? Okay, well, you can come on down to the station and fill out a form.” He hung up.

“Wow, I guess this happens a lot here in South Central,” I told him.

“Yeah. Crackheads. They break in at the convention center, steal whatever’s in the car, and sell it.”

“Do you guys ever find the stuff again?” I asked.

“No,” he said. I gave him the form and he stamped it.

All the same. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye out for my shaving kit. It’s black, about four inches by eight, and it has the initials JB on it.

Scripts up: Iraqi Abuse, Blood Bank, Hey Baby, and Senior Shopping Channel.

We scurried beneath the legs of the Eiffel Tower toward the Bateaux Parisiens. The sanitary woman behind the counter made a few decidedly French comments about our blue jeans and their dress code, so we offered to buy the most expensive seats on the boat. Eventually they took our euros and let us on. In every culture, money is always the ultimate arbiter of what we may and may not do.

As the glass-walled boat slid down the Seine, we ate smoked salmon, pate fois gras, steak with red wine sauce, four cheeses, and warm chocolate cake with mousse. Paris!

White wine, red wine, mimosas, Jack Daniels, Cointreau. Two hours into this three-hour tour, everybody on the boat was pretty well anaesthetized. Normally staid Japanese tourists were clapping in rhythm to the Russian violin. Then the keyboardist hit a switch, a canned rock drum kicked in, and I’ll be baised if they didn’t play “It’s Raining Men.”

Mr. Fantastic, you were right. Everywhere is like everywhere else.

The girl, no more than seven, grins idly and bites her fingernail. She turns toward the windows, each one two stories high, and gazes out at the garden below: a rich geometric pattern of marble statues, tulips, and lilacs. She realizes, subliminally, that she should be holding the hand of her friend. But her partner’s hand has already found hers, and they whisper a few low syllables to one another about the reflecting pools below.

“Julie!” says the teacher, sternly. The teacher puts her hand on the girl’s head and turns it, as if opening a large jar of peanut butter.

She says, in French: “So if you are talking, I suppose you already know everything I am saying, so can you can tell me about this picture?”

The girl gazes up past Marie Antoinette’s jewel boxes, under the grand and awful trompe l’oeil, to the dark figure of Louis XIV glowering down on us. I have been dead for hundreds of years, little girl, thought the painting of Louis XIV. And I do not appreciate your inattention.

The teacher sniffed, “No, I didn’t think so,” and the girl sighed.

We left the school tour in the palace and spent the afternoon walking through the fairyland gardens of Versailles. The bruised, blotchy clouds threatened us through our walk through the Hameau de la Reine, Marie Antoinette’s life-size doll house. But they only exploded into rain after we had boarded the RER into Paris.

Hyde Park, five minutes from the Underground, Saturday afternoon. The swans nip and chase one another on the reflecting pool. The shirtless guys underhand rugby balls at one another, grinning, leaning, swaggering. The downtown girls have traded their rain slickers for bikini tops. They ensconce themselves on tablecloths and beach towels, their skin so white in the warm sun as to almost appear blue.

London has on her freshest face for me today. Airplane to hotel to downtown in three hours flat. I blink, dazzled by the high-noon sun. My body thinks it’s four a.m.