(A September 2007 Interview with Tony Bray)

There's a wonderful "MASH" episode called "Comrades in Arms" that shows Hawkeye and Margaret sharing a kiss while the bombs fall all around them. It's my favorite episode, not because the characters merged, but because it's so true to life. I've been in a flood and a tornado. When the end is near, people try to find some slice of humanity to keep going, to survive. Fear shouldn't win out in the end. Survival should. Hawkeye and Margaret dealt with their dangerous situation by helping each other, by being human beings in an almost impossible situation who did whatever it took to overcome adversity. That's why I loved and still love "MASH." It brought out the best the human experience has to offer on a weekly basis even though it was about the worst human experience of all ... war.

Alan Alda called me last week to discuss his new book, "Things I Overhead While Talking To Myself." His last book, "Never Have Your Dog Stuffed," was a New York Times bestseller. Alan's newest entry in the world of literature should be one too. It's a wonderful read that picks up where his last book ended. The star almost lost his life while filming an episode for his PBS series "Scientific American Frontiers." He knows how important each hour in his life is now and uses the new book to explore the advice he has given to family members, friends, students and other people during his stay on this planet.

Chapter nine, "The Meaning of Life in a Glass of Water," is about the time Alan visited Ground Zero in New York City after the 9/11 attacks. The writing style made me feel like I was there with him, experiencing the pain and the overwhelming sense of loss, wanting to do something, anything that would help the heroic rescue workers who were searching for possible survivors.

Chapter two, "Lingering at the Door," deals with the birth and growth of his daughter Eve, who entered this world before the author was a success, during a time when Alan looked for work as an actor while he marveled at the new person in his life. It reminded me of my own two daughters' adventures and misadventures that still continue today. The proud father spoke at his daughter's commencement ceremonies at Connecticut College. That outstanding, moving speech is included in the chapter and is a must read for all new parents. He ends the chapter with the following advice about children: "Our job is not to shape them and badger them, but to love them. Simply love them. Love them. Love them."

My Q&A session with Alan follows. Information on his books follows the interview. He is so giving, so honest, that he made me feel like we were old friends talking on his front porch while sipping cool drinks in the shade. I'll never forget the experience.

The Q&A Session Between Alan Alda and Tony Bray:

Tony: I like the part in your book about you scaring yourself over acting assignments.

Alan: That's true. The funny thing is that I actually do benefit from scaring myself. When actors give interviews they say, "it was a challenging part." I've used that word too, but when you scare yourself, you go into a role and don't know if you can come out alive.

Tony: The only fear in writing to me is if I will have enough time to finish.

Alan: That's right. The process of getting it to where it starts to flow is the most interesting part to me. Until you have that flow, none of the bad stuff is going to come out, nor the good stuff. You have to let it come out, good and bad. And nothing is bad because it leads to the next thing. It takes me about three weeks, if I haven't written in a while, to get the flow going on anything

Tony: I hope the readers do understand the fear thing because it's a marvelous feeling

Alan: It's really not quite fear. It must be like what somebody feels when doing a high wire act and going up an extra ten stories. There's a little tingle you feel. It's exhilarating. It's how you know you're alive in a way.

Tony: You were a lucky camper when you got sick in Chile. It's a miracle that you got the right doctor.

Alan: There are very highly trained doctors there. The fact that he was there in the middle of the night in this emergency room, and that he wasn't some other doctor not qualified in the intestinal blockage that I had, proves I was extremely lucky in that regard.

Tony: You knew about the procedure because of your work on "MAS*H."

Alan: Well, I knew about the operation. Once he told me what he was going to do, I recognized immediately what that was.

Tony: Did knowing what it was lessen your fear of the surgery?

Alan: That's the thing that surprised me more than anything ... I was not afraid and I think of myself as easily scared. I just said, "let's do it, start cutting." I thought, "I might not wake up from this, so I better dictate a few words to my wife, my children, and grandchildren." I called over a friend of mine who was producing the PBS science show. I asked him if he would just pass on a message. He emailed it to me later, after I woke up. It was the most pedestrian stuff, but I was just trying to take care of business before I checked out in case I didn't come back. It really surprised me that I wasn't scared at all. I didn't give a thought to that. I just wanted to get the thing underway.

Tony: The fact that you used the word "email" proves that our learning process never ends. Imagine how different both of our lives might be if we had the internet as children.

Alan: Yesterday, a friend said, "did you hear what Mother Teresa said?" It was a surprising thing that she said. Today, we didn't see it in the paper, so I said, "I'll go check the internet and see." There's no end to what you can find.

Tony: I was moved by your chapter about New York after the 9/11 attacks. Not many people would have been compassionate enough in the horror of the moment to remember the chocolates.

Alan: Oh, that was easy to do. I was desperate to do something. I really loved that piece on the Onion where the woman bakes a cake. Even though they meant that to be satirical, it was so touching because that was what we all felt.

Tony: You even knew where the company could store the chocolate without it melting in the heat. Did you know about that cold storage before 9/11?

Alan: It wasn't cold storage. It was just a shed that I had passed, or maybe that's where we gathered. I can't remember. We might have gathered there to go down to Ground Zero that night. I knew that there was a spot there along the harbor where a truck could pull in and get out of the sun. It wasn't even cold storage, but it would just protect it a little bit from the heat of the sun. It was just putting together all the stuff that I could. The company was happy to send the chocolate, but they didn't want it to melt.

Tony: That makes sense. I hear the right wing all the time bashing Hollywood type folks. Yet if you look at that simple act that you did or all the work De Niro did ...

Alan: He did work hard.

Tony: I don't see how they can keep bashing people.

Alan: When the left was in the ascendancy, they were bashing the right. I really don't think it's helpful for anybody. The one political thing I allow myself to say lately is that I wish we would all just listen to each other. The country needs it. We can't afford cheap politics. We really need to try to solve our problems because we have plenty of problems. The energy we could spent solving our problems is wasted when it's used to get power over one another.

Tony: You do have a political type statement in the book where you write that doctors who run HMOs might not like the waiting room in heaven. I have a question though. Where did the HMOs come from? Were we all asleep at the wheel?

Alan: Isn't that amazing. I don't know how that happened either. Years before that, I had a doctor friend telling me that medicine was going to hell and I really didn't get what he was talking about. Now it's really awful. There are a lot of people just not getting cared for.

Tony: The day the insurance company hijacked it is the day it went south. I have no idea when it's going to get back.

On a totally separate note, I can't imagine eating with an axe stuck in your head. Being in movies that require someone to put an axe in your head must be fun.

Alan: Of course it was only half an axe. The half that was supposed to be in my brain wasn't there. That to me was a perfect example of the craziness of creating an illusion in the theater arts film. It was just nutty.

Tony: You starred in a series about the Korean war. We're in a war now, maybe over oil.

Alan: They are predicting in the future that wars will be over water.

Tony: Brad Pitt and George Clooney have been preaching about water for over a year.

Alan: Instead of putting money into the war that we have now, if they clean up the water instead, they could maybe avoid a war in the future ... but we don't think that far ahead.

Tony: In many nations, babies die from diseases they got from their water. This Earth is so rich. There are so many poor people.

Alan: It's heartbreaking

Tony: If I don't ask a "MAS*H" question, my readers are going to get mad.

Alan: Let's do it.

Tony: You did an extraordinary job on the show, with writing, directing, and acting. You mentioned in your book that you've gotten many letters because of the episode dealing with suicide. Did you ever get a letter that you actually couldn't find the words to answer it properly?

Alan: I had trouble figuring out what to say to the first person that wrote me saying that she was thinking of suicide, but after that, I can't remember anything that I couldn't answer. I did feel kind of uncomfortable when I had to finally write a kind of form letter. I made it as personal as I could, but it still was a letter that wasn't precisely answering the person who had written it. But it was really a necessary thing to do because of the time and volume.

Tony: Writing a letter to someone thinking about suicide has to be a great challenge, even to a fine writer like yourself.

Alan: It's a scary moment. You wonder, "what if I say the wrong thing? What if I sound cold?" That's one of the things I didn't like about the idea of making a letter that would work for a number of people. I really wanted it to sound like a personal response to the person. You don't want to get something that sounds cold and formal. I tried to make it so that it could be tailored quickly to each person, but it still was a strange bizarre feeling to not be answering the person directly. It just wasn't possible. There weren't enough hours in the day to do it.

Tony: Was any one episode more important to you?

Alan: TV Guide asked me that right after the series went off the air. I couldn't answer it because they kind of fell into three categories. The top category, which tried to do things, tried to tell stories in a completely different way.

Tony: Like the interviewer

Alan: The point of view where the camera was the soldier. There must have been a dozen shows in which we did it very differently and they are in a special category. But I can't pick one that I like more than the others.

Then there were the shows that were good strong solid shows. There was a third category where we didn't do our best. Sometimes we had real clinkers in them. Wayne Rogers and I always had a reference point. There was a show early on which we played a trick on Frank Burns and painted a jeep with gold paint. We would say after that, "where did these guys get gold paint in Korea?" It was a lapse. It was early in the show, but it was the kind of thing I think that everybody writing for the show got over afterwards. They didn't reach for preposterous things like that. If something came up in the script that we didn't think was all that believable, we would say, "this looks like a gold jeep here." So it became a good short-hand for us.

Tony: You wrote that one way the regular cast got through the long days was with humor, like the times some of you would tape medical instruments to actors' backs to see how many could be attached before they realized it.

Alan: I don't know what the record was, but I do remember one of the actors having something like ten or twelve hanging from him. He didn't know it until he walked away and felt them clanging against his leg. He was had.

Tony: That's hilarious

Alan: It's funny, we had the same problems that the real doctors had of having very absorbing delicate things to do that took all our concentration, sometimes under physical conditions that weren't comfortable. It was hot and we had no sleep. We needed a way to let off steam. We wound up letting off steam very much the way the doctors did in the real situation.

Tony: You also wrote that blood and surgery was not your thing, but that you can handle it now.

Alan: I must say I got used to it doing the PBS science show. I once interviewed a woman while she was having a brain operation. I thought, "if I can do that, I can pretty much talk to anybody about anything." Part of her skull, the equivalent of a skull cap, had been taken off her head. Part off her skull had been removed, sawed off, and the surgeon was poking with his finger in her brain asking her where do you feel that because he wanted to make sure when he cut out the tumor -- I think it was a tumor -- that he wouldn't be cutting out stuff that she needed to feel things. So she'd say, "I feel that in my toes." Apparently you can poke somebody in the brain and they don't feel it. He wasn't giving her a headache by doing it.

Tony: There's a scene in "Hannibal" with Hopkins and Ray Liotta where Lecter sawed off the top his head and had him sitting at a dinner table. He was slowly eating his brain, and he was alive.

Alan: I don't even like to hear you talk about it!

Tony: Just the fact you did the brain interview proves that you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Alan: I was back behind her head looking down into her brain with the doctor and I had to go around to the other side of her where she was wide awake. I had to talk to her for the camera. As I walked around, I thought to myself, "I am not going to ask her what the local news people are constantly asking people who just saw their relative hit by a truck ... how do you feel about this? I'm going to try to find something else to talk about." I don't know what I said to her, but I didn't ask, "how do you feel?"

Tony: I would have been out on my back on the floor.

Alan: In one operation, I watched a little girl -- she was eight years old -- and I remember looking for a spot on the floor where I could pass out safely. I thought I was going to pass out. It was a very serious, delicate operation on this kid and the fact that she was so helpless and a little kid really was hard for me to watch.

One of the things we had to do on "MAS*H" was learn how to do what doctors have to do, just approach it as if it's a job, as if it's a mechanical task and doesn't involve another human's emotions and you're not taking responsibility for their lives.

Tony: You and the "MAS*H" crew did it perfectly. I think your publicist is going to get mad at me. I've kept you longer than thirty minutes

Alan: It's been nice talking with you. Thanks for the time.

Tony: Good luck with the book. It's a great read.

Alan: Thank you.