Alan Alda lives life in the ‘now’

The Emmy Award-winning actor and writer promoted his new book at Hunterdon Medical Center’s Life Lessons.

By Mae Rhine, Managing Editor
   PERRYVILLE — Live in the “now.”
   That was the advice from Emmy Award-winning actor Alan Alda, who spoke Monday night at the Life Lessons program sponsored by Hunterdon Medical Center, Hunterdon HealthCare Partners and Friends’ Health Connection.
   Referring loosely to the words of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180), Mr. Alda stressed people need to make the most of their lives.
   ”Our experience of now is just about five seconds long,” he said. “Anything more is just a memory.”
   Mr. Alda, best known for his Emmy Award-winning portrayal of surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the television show, “M*A*S*H*”, was the keynote speaker at the program, which was held at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse in Perryville and attended by more than 500.
   Mr. Alda was promoting his second book, “Things I Overhead While Talking to Myself,” which he described as picking up where his first book, “Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and Other Things I’ve Learned,” left off.
   The 71-year-old Leonia, N.J., resident said he learned the lesson of “living in the now” after a life-threatening experience four years ago.
   He was on a mountaintop in Chile, interviewing scientists for “Scientific American Frontiers,” a television version of Scientific American magazine he hosted from 1993 to 2005.
   ”I got this pain in my gut,” Mr. Alda recalled. “I was doubled over.”
   But he finished the interviews even as his face “got greener and greener.”
   As luck would have it, there was a medical facility nearby that Mr. Alda guessed had “not done much” for some time.
   When the doctor saw Mr. Alda, “He asked ‘How are you,” and I’m all doubled over,” the actor said, drawing laughs from the audience. “I said I think it’s appendicitis, and he said ‘I think so, too.’ I wasn’t reassured.
   ”There was an ambulance, I think from 1942, like the ones we had on “M*A*S*H*. They couldn’t get it started. I’m in the back, screaming in pain.”
   The old jalopy finally started, and Mr. Alda was taken for an hour and a half ride down the hill.
   He was stunned to find the hospital had an expert in intestinal surgery who, pretty quickly, assessed the problem.
   About a yard of Mr. Alda’s intestines had died, and the rest was dying rapidly.
   ”He leaned into my face and said they’d have to cut out the bad part and sew the two good parts together,” Mr. Alda said. “I said, ‘you mean an end-to-end anastomosis?’ He said, “How did you know that?’ I said I did many of them on M*A*S*H*.”
   The doctor then said he had all the equipment necessary, but asked Mr. Alda if he wanted to be flown to a bigger facility.
   ”He said we can fly you out, but our airport’s fogged in, and you may die before you get there,” Mr. Alda said. “I said, “Give me the knife. I’ll do it.’”
   He added, “The way the story ended is I lived!”
   When he returned home, he said, “I was real happy to be alive. I wanted to get everything I could out of life.”
   He said he stopped New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine in a restaurant and asked him if he went through a similar life reassessment after being critically injured in a car crash on the Garden State Parkway in April.
   Mr. Alda said the governor said simply, “Every day.”
   After his own experience, Mr. Alda said he spent some time thinking about many of the things he said during speeches he was asked to give over the years.
   ”Everyone should have values and meaning in their lives,” he said. “So, at 2 a.m., it’s dark, and I’m thinking, and a voice in the back of my head said, ‘So have you lived a life of meaning?’ I said, “Are you kidding?” referring to all he’s accomplished as an actor, director and writer and producer for many decades.
   But it made him think, and that’s when he discovered it’s all about the ‘now,” not just what a person has accomplished so far.
   ”It’s tough to know what values are and live by them,” Mr. Alda said. “I don’t go fishing. I don’t like to kill them. But I eat them. I’m a hypocrite. But someone said to me the nice thing about being a hypocrite is you get to hang onto your values!”
   Mr. Alda said being a celebrity means being asked to “speak at places you have no business being at.”
   He recalled being asked to talk to students of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
   ”I played a doctor on TV so I think I was there because they thought I knew something about medicine,” he said with a smile. “I know nothing about medicine. Maybe they thought they had taught them everything they knew about being doctors so they brought in someone to teach them how to act like one.”
   He added, “I did have a personal connection. I did have expertise as a patient. I told them to think of us as people.”
   He said he was encouraged that “these young doctors wanted to hear that.”
   Another time he was asked to speak at Monticello about Thomas Jefferson in front of an audience of historians.
   ”I wanted to say something none of them had heard before that had the virtue of bring the truth,” he said. “I read every book with Jefferson in the title — and they had not only read them, they’d written some of them!”
   Mr. Alda said he went to China, determined to find something about Jefferson the historians didn’t know.
   ”Not a damn person (there) had heard of him,” he said.
   Finally, he met a professor who had taught himself biology, which was against the law. The educator was researching how to hybridize rice in order to increase production to feed more people.
   ”You could go to jail for that,” Mr. Alda said. “He was risking his life.”
   The man succeeded, and Mr. Alda compared him to Jefferson, who found a type of rice in the Piedmont section of Italy that yielded more of the crop than the type of rice grown in the swampy areas of Virginia. But it was illegal then to take it out of the country, so Jefferson, too, risked jail and his life, filling his pockets with the grain to bring back to his people, Mr. Alda said. That’s the story he told the historians.
   ”They’d never heard of it, and I was a hit,” he said.
   He also cited another example of being asked to lecture during rounds at a psychiatric hospital in front of psychiatrists.
   ”I should have said, ‘I should have my head examined to do that,’” he said.
   What he did do was talk about how celebrities are perceived and how people act when they’re near them.
   ”There’s a feeling we have super powers,” Mr. Alda said. “I got a letter from a kid who said he was thinking about committing suicide.”
   He said he worked on a reply for a week to 10 days before he realized his response “may be too late” to help the boy.
   He then developed a general letter he could personalize because he received similar letters from others contemplating suicide.
   ”That was stupid,” Mr. Alda said. “I send a form letter to people thinking of killing themselves. Maybe I shouldn’t have addressed it, “Dear occupant.”
   He “got better,” he said, and some people replied he actually had helped them.
   He cited other examples of people thinking celebrities are some sort of superhuman beings.
   One time, a bridge was blocked because it was in danger of collapsing. He drove up, and a policeman stopped him.
   ”I rolled down the window and he said, “Oh, it’s you, go ahead!”
   Another time, police informed Mr. Alda that a woman had escaped from a mental facility, got a gun and was headed to Hollywood to kill him and Clint Eastwood for some imagined wrong she felt the actors had done to her.
   ”I said it wasn’t me, it was Clint!” Mr. Alda said.
   Turning serious, the actor said the talks he’s given over the years as well as the sum of all these experiences he’s had has helped make him the person he is today.
   But, for him, it wasn’t enough.
   ”It doesn’t do it for me,” he said. “It wasn’t what I accomplished. It was when I was doing it” that it had meaning.
   Mr. Alda referred to physicist Richard Feynman, who contributed to the creation of the atomic bomb. Once he saw what destruction it created, he became very depressed.
   Later, he was teaching at Cornell and became fascinated as he watched a child throw a plate in the air, Mr. Alda said. The plate was spinning and wobbling at the same time.
   ”He wondered if there was a relationship between the spinning and the wobble and spent months doing calculations,” Mr. Alda said.
   When asked what meaning it had, the physicist replied, “I was just fun,” Mr. Alda said.
   ”That sense of curiosity stayed with him and kept him alive,” he said.
   With that in mind, Mr. Alda said, “It doesn’t interest me what people think of me after I’m gone. Some celebrities want to be remembered with statues in the park on a horse. That doesn’t even give the pigeons meaning. All we have is now. I try to move along with the now.”