Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and Other Things I've Learned, by Alan Alda

Last weekend as I wandered through a bookstore, I saw a very familiar face on a bookshelf. It was the face of a person that I'd grown up with and who, as a child, was a mysterious influence in some ways. It was Alan Alda peering out from the bookcase.

Evenings on a floor in Dayton, Ohio came flooding back. A living room in suburbia in the 1970s, the comfortably brown couch placed flush against the cork wall. My father's recliner in the corner, and the old television - the old one with the a huge screen, sitting on the ground as those old clunky 1970s televisions were intended to (I could have conversations with Sesame Street characters once they didn't get to close to the screen). My little table set up in front of the television as 'Suicide is Painless' played, my parents seated behind me and giving me final instructions to eat the TV dinner before the show started. On odd occasions, when Hawkeye Pierce had me in stitches with his antics, I would have to be instructed during commercial breaks that I should finish my dinner. All channels in the 1970s were sponsored by my parents, even HBO, and they used them for announcements on what I should be doing. "Finish eating". "Go to bed". "Go to your room". "Go play outside."

In later years, I would find that most of my laughing was a result of my parents laughing, and that was ok. I wasn't old enough to understand some of the humor involved but I was convinced that if my parents thought it was funny that it probably was funny. This was corrected in later years, but at the time Alan Alda was really a big part of growing up. No matter what I did, Alan Alda was there every evening and the house would warm with laughter which a single digit kid only understood part of. I didn't 'get' the other characters as well as I did Hawkeye back then. Radar seemed like someone my age, and there was nothing particularly funny about being my age. Klinger was strange, but he reminded me of some of the women I saw in the Sunday appearances at a place of worship. But I liked Hawkeye. He always won somehow, even when things were bad - and as a kid you sort of need that. He also challenged authority and he was smart. Plus he kissed all the nurses and spent lots of mysterious time with them which my parents were ominously silent about. Hawkeye replaced Kermit the Frog for me. Kermit got pigs. Hawkeye did a little better in that department.

Kids at school said that they were 'doing it'. It looked easy enough to 'do it'. I mean, if Frank Burns could do it with Hot Lips, I would have this 'doing it' thing licked. My girlfriend at the time, Jenny, was willing to experiment. Fortunately, she never wanted me to be Frank Burns. I got to be Hawkeye up in that tree house. After a few kisses, we were confident we had the 'doing it' thing licked. Being 8 was never better

All of this came flooding back with a simple image of Alan Alda on the cover of a book. How could I not buy it, read it, relive a fun part of my own childhood? So I bought the book and realized how little I knew about Alan Alda, and how much that there is to know about this man. What I saw in the 1970s was nothing compared to the character behind the character.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned was impossible to put down. It probably helped that I could 'hear' Alan Alda writing it with his characteristic rhythm and the wit which I had always attributed to the characters he has played instead of the writer.

He takes the reader through a child's eye view of burlesque from the side stage which is funny and revealing, laid out as if airing some laundry which desperately needs to dry. The anecdotes of this period also lay the foundation for the rest of his life as he writes it - from his mother trying to stab his father when he was 6 to the scent of women as they went offstage. The contrasts leap out as he grows, the way in which he and his father competed as actors became more pronounced while for a brief period the burlesque ladies were replaced with nuns.

All the way to a hotel in the West Indies in 2006 - and he described a bird cage I saw on an island myself - Alan Alda lays it all out in a way which is not only fun and wistfully serious, but which has a certain wisdom and soul to it that one can only have through living through challenges - be they polio, a mental illness, or surgery in Chile to save his life.

The only way to explain this book is to read it. This provides a distinct problem when writing a review. I wrestled with writing this review for some time because of it; it's a really good book and one which I would highly recommend not just to the Alan Alda fans out there but anyone interested in acting, comedy or writing in a conversational style. It also seems to be a good book on Life in general, not preachy but written with the amusement we probably should have when we look back at our past. And the bit about having a dog stuffed? You have to read the book.

This book gets a KnowProSE.com 9/10. I would have given it a 10, but I'm biased. Without Hawkeye Pierce, I may have wasted a lot of my life kissing angry pigs. I think I may have gotten a few along the way, but they were pretty easy to identify after the first week or year.