I was at a friend's house the other night and we watched Charlie Rose's tv interview with the actor Peter O'Toole. Some of it was fascinating and other parts were boring. O'Toole has never been one of my favorite actors although I like and respect him; it's just he's never grabbed me emotionally the way Laurence Olivier or Ralph Richardson or Richard Burton have.

And as far as his appearance, well, he kind of reminded me of an aged horror movie host on late night tv. Although one of my friends, who is an artist, said O'Toole was smart to wear a red vest on the Rose show, because it brightened and flattered his strangely taut yet old face.

Anyway, O'Toole said something with which I heartily concur and is one of the central tenets of my own writing life, almost to the point of obsession. He recalled how one of his acting mentors told him, vis a vis O'Toole's performances as a developing young actor: "Don't broaden. Deepen!" I loved this statement because it is something that I practice myself in my writing and which it took me many years to learn.

It is easy to broaden, or puff up one's writing, or one's acting or painting or music, but the deepening is not only where the real stuff starts to emerge, but is also the purest pleasure of the artistic process. After I finish the first draft of a piece of writing, I love to go back and add details and expand, wading deeper and deeper until I find what is most interesting in the topic. I don't always succeed, and sometimes I write in a more shallow manner, but when something is really important to me, I use that deepening process and it is a kind of lovemaking to the words. I go deeper and deeper...come on, honey, come on...you can do it, you can let go, you can show me all of your beautiful self, the truth, the sweet uninhibited truth...right there on the screen, right there on the page...

Maybe if I wasn't so into writing, I would have more of a sex life?

So I felt the pleasure of kinship with this great actor as he spoke of his own creative process, and the simple motto which guides him: "Don't broaden. Deepen!"

I raise my pint of Guinness to ye, laddie.

I did break my vow of "lapstinence" (abstinence from lapdancing) tonight, but it was with someone totally out of left field, not the "pagan" looking Latina dancer I wrote about the other day.

The club was strangely very quiet, given that it's Friday night, and I got into conversation with an attractive girl I'd seen around but had never spoken to before. At first I declined a dance, but after ten minutes of a pleasant conversation I went for it, just one twenty-dollar song. I think she was a little miffed that I didn't go for two, but I knew there was no point to it. One was pleasant, two would have turned the evening into an investment.

I wonder why the club was so dead. Perhaps customers, anticipating tonight's snow and rain, decided to pass on the T&A. Or maybe they're saving their energy for an orgy of fun Sunday during the Super Bowl.

On my way home I stopped into an adult bookstore where there is a peepshow. I was just looking at the magazines, but I noticed that the girls working in the peeps were pretty attractive in a sleazy way. Several of them wore long colorful sarongs as they teetered on their high Lucite stripper heels from the dressing room over to their stations in the peepshow. But I don't enjoy peepshows where you stand in a cramped booth that smells of Lysol and feed money into a machine so you can watch the girl dance naked for a few expensive minutes.

I decided a nice dinner was more in order, so I left the adult bookstore and got myself the chicken oreganato special at a good coffee shop. The combination of a half-shot of Jameson at home, and two beers at the stripclub, made me feel as if my head were wrapped in cotton. Then I had a third of a glass of white wine with my dinner (it came with the special).

All in all, it wasn't much of a night out, and writing about it here is making me depressed.

I’ve never really learned to pace myself properly. I work intently and with great concentration on things, and then when I’m done, my mind shuts down. After four days of this (I worked on Sunday too), my brain is begging me to declare that it’s already the weekend, but of course it’s only Thursday. It's ridiculous, what’s the use of being a freelance worker if I can’t give myself a day off if I’ve earned it? But my Puritan-influenced ethic (because what does a Chicago-born Jewish boy of Rumanian-Russian descent know from Puritans?) tells me I should work today, sticking to the Monday through Friday grind so I can relax without guilt on the weekend.

A friend recently told me that he never really feels guilty about things. I couldn’t understand it or empathize with that confession. I don’t know what life would be like without a constant seasoning of feeling guilty about this or that. It motivates me, too: even this blog was partly born from guilt, from a guilt that I had not used my gift for writing to the maximum of its potential. I still think I have untapped potential, but this blog has made me feel I’ve satisfied a lot more than I had before I began it.

I tried a new Chinese restaurant yesterday for my take-out dinner. It had come with a recommendation from a gourmet-minded friend of mine, and the place certainly had glowing reviews pasted in its front window. The portions in my combination plate were plentiful, but there was one problem--hair in the food. You know, I can accept one hair. Sometimes it happens. I take it out and toss all the food it may have come into contact with it. But then I found another hair on the other side of the dish. That made me throw the whole thing out. It’s the even distribution of hair in the entree that got to me. What a drag, because what I ate of the entree tasted quite good. Now I don’t think I’ll be able to go back to this place again, no matter how laudatory its reviews.

So I ended up feasting on pretzels, Diet Pepsi, and watching Gina Lollobrigida. If only she could have come over to my house in her twenty-five year old form, and made me some lasagna...

I feel aimless today. I’ve made some phone calls to catch up with my friends after my stint of work, and I’ll see some friends this evening. But having finished this big project I’ve mentioned in previous entries, I feel temporarily without a sharp focus.

Adrift...

Well, I completed my three straight days of working in New Jersey at my freelance gig and now I can work in New York City well into next week. Finally I completed that big project I was alluding to, but it took up so much of my mental energy. I really enjoyed doing it and wanted it to turn out well.

When I got back to the city I went once again to relax at my favorite stripclub. At first I couldn't stop thinking about the project, even with T&A staring me in the face, and I was bored by all the dancers. Then again, they were boring not just in their familiarity but their lack of inventiveness. Sometimes they just walk aimlessly around the stage, instead of trying to entertain.

I was ready to nod off when I noticed a newcomer across the room, this one with a hint of the pagan about her. She was tall, lithe, with very long and shapely legs descending from the hem of her short dress; with golden bangles on her arms, and her dark hair pulled back to reveal large circular gold earrings. There was something of the ancient dancing girl about her, that's what I mean when I say she looked "pagan," and she attracted customers like bees to honey. I noticed how she spent a good bit of time talking to the guys before dancing for them, and without getting a lot of drinks or going into the champagne room. I like to see that in strippers. I hoped she would get onstage before I finished my beer so I could see her performance. I already had a bit of Jameson at home before I left and I didn't want more than one more Bud Lite as I had some things to do after dinner. Luckily, she did ascend the stage after writhing in three men's laps for a good number of songs, and I got to see that she was quite dazzling and had an easy sense of humor too. I approached her with a tip when she had just lowered her mini-dress to reveal her breasts, and she said, "Hmm, let me find my underwear for that," meaning her thong, where she would receive her tips. She had to tug the rest of the dress down further so her thong peeked through, and I inserted my modest tribute. When I gave her another tip, she took it between her breasts and said "Thank you, baby," with the lovely tones of a New York City Latina. Hmm...I will be sorely tempted to have a lapdance with this gal should she approach me at some point, despite my rigorous dedication to a program of "lapstinence" (just coined that word myself--means "abstinence from lapdancing"). When she received her tips, she dropped them in a pile on the floor of the stage, and it looked as if she had a small green garden down there. I finished my beer and left just after she finished her set. It was almost hard to breathe watching her...all right, I'm exaggerating a little with that last statement, but that's half the fun of reliving this stuff as I write.

I watched a Gina Lollobrigida movie from 1952 as I ate my Chinese take-out dinner. The film was entitled Wife for a Night, a very cute farce about a modest wife in nineteenth century Italy who has to pretend that she is a courtesan while the courtesan pretends to be the modest wife...the plot is too hard to explain, but it was funny and very good-hearted, displaying a wonderful acceptance of the foibles of men and women, a heavenly quality I find in the best farces. The actress Nadia Grey, who played the courtesan, was as sexy as Gina. But Gina...ohmigod, she was a beauty. And a very good actress too, not to speak of all the shots of her in a tight-fitting corset that showed off the most snowy white inviting cleavage...

Ironically, this warm-hearted comedy was updated to modern times and remade in Hollywood in 1964 as one of Billy Wilder's most caustic and cynical comedies, Kiss Me Stupid, which starred Dean Martin, Ray Walston, and Kim Novak, with Felicia Farr in the Gina role.

I looked Gina up on the Web and found a nice page devoted to her at a site called The Love Goddesses. Here's the link. It's a site that's right up my alley, as it discusses other actresses I like, especially the less remembered ones such as Martha Hyer and Elaine Stewart...so check it out if you're so inclined. I'm sure I'll be reading more of The Love Goddesses and referring to it here.

GinaLollobrigidaPageAtTheLoveGoddesses

I have been so busy in the last three days that I have fallen behind in answering telephone calls and emails from friends and associates. I make the time to blog a little every day no matter how busy I am, but I don't enjoy leisurely conversation when I'm not in a relaxed mode, and since right now I am trying to get some work done that is nearing a pressing deadline, I put conversations off unless they're urgent. I took on an extra project that has turned out to be a tremendous amount of work which I did not anticipate and it is draining me although it is turning out extremely well. So this is my way of telling my friends (who also read this blog) that I will be getting in touch with them in a day or two when I don't have to commute to and from my client's office in New Jersey and am rooted back on my terra firma of Manhattan and feel calm again.

In crunches like this, I do what is most necessary, and what I felt most imperatively when I got back after a stressful day of commuting and eyeball-straining work was to take one hour for a beer in the glittery solitude of my favorite stripclub. I read somewhere that the Spanish film director Luis Bunuel used to enjoy a martini every afternoon and space out to relax, and I sometimes think that some of my hours in stripclubs serve a similar function. I go to one particular club where most of the girls are so familiar they have lost much of their erotic charge for me, and I just kind of drink my Bud Lite and gaze at them and gaze away from them and zone out.

Happily this afternoon a pretty Latina sat down at my table, an unfamiliar face for a change, and even though I didn't get a dance from her we enjoyed a nice little conversation for about ten minutes. When she got onstage I was impressed by her lithe mastery of the pole; she was very petite, but very strong, and she did a movement around the pole on her wrist that was almost like a slow motion gliding twirl. It was quite beautiful and I complimented her on it as I slipped my humble donation into her garter. There was something wistful about this girl that was appealing, and even when she was doing her impressive moves with the pole, she retained that wistful quality in her dark eyes and broad smile.

Veronica, a veteran dancer I enjoy watching but who is almost never up front with the mostly cash customers because she's constantly in the champagne room with the credit card boys, got onstage tonight for a change and it was titillating to watch her strut her stuff. She always blows me kisses when I tip her, which turns me on. Maybe it reminds me of a movie goddess blowing kisses to an adoring fan. Well, I have been known to get looks of adoration in my eyes, which have been described by more than one woman as having a "puppy dog" quality, which may work both in my favor and to my detriment...

Anyway, I've been up since 5:30 this morning and I'm exhausted. So before I start rambling in a loose Freudian manner, I guess this blogger will call it a night.