#never have your dog stuffed and other books i've liveblogged

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He is just like me for real and I don't know how to feel about it.

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How is Alan Alda alive? a compilation pt 1/2

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My main comment on chapter 2 is I think he should have stuck with the name Alphonse Alda. Anyway, chapter 2 is riveting and makes me interested in burlesque. I'm not going to comment on all the stories because you need to just read the book, but the one where his dad told reporters his two-year-old smoked a pipe in order to get free publicity for his burlesque show is one of my favorites. I have a lot of questions for Robert Alda based on this book.

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okay everyone let's try to figure out what episode of M*A*S*H this is that exists only in Alan Alda's mind and sounds like it's halfway between Bless You, Hawkeye and The Life You Save

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Chapter 20 is about his near-death experience in Chile, and there's a lot, but one of my favorite parts is this:

because my response to the first paragraph was also "oh, an end-to-end anastomosis!"

While recovering he comes up with a new system to learn languages and develops a brief parasocial relationship with a baseball player and honestly a lot of this part is pretty relatable to me, a person who went insane after spending one night in the hospital. His surgeon showing him the pictures from his surgery is also very similar to my experience. The descriptions of the post-close-brush-with-death mania are quite something. A really great chapter, really you should just read it.

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Chapter 14 is a lot about M*A*S*H. The armoire dream bit with Wayne Rogers is in here. In this book, Alan claims he and Mike Farrell were competing to see who could learn to stand on their hands first. In The Last Days of M*A*S*H, he says during the last week of filming Mike tried to learn to stand on his hands. I had forgotten about the "sitting in a circle to complain" tradition the cast had early on. Fascinating. He talks about wanting to direct, and he says he followed the directors around (which is also what Jonathan Frakes did on Star Trek: The Next Generation ten years later) and the mental image is very amusing to me.

The fact that he was pitching shows to the networks while on M*A*S*H is just insane to me. Like why would you want to do that much work?

This part makes me go oh, so that's where Hawkeye walking on the furniture came from.

The image of Alan Alda taking swigs directly from a bottle of champagne by himself and then ending up hungover while filming the next morning is too good not to include.

Once again the episode he describes as his first time directing is Bulletin Board, despite him being credited as the director of Mail Call the previous season. The image of Alan Alda skipping through LAX is also delightful. The door/noor story is in here, but it doesn't specify what the typo actually was, which in some ways makes it funnier.

Did he perhaps consider that the fresh flowers were helping to attract rodents and other pests?

This chapter also features the classic "using hit TV show M*A*S*H as family therapy."

Then it gets into his dad's death and it's really sad!!!

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This one deserves its own post I think

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Photo insert! If you want to see all of them you'll need to read the book, but here's my favorite:

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Chapter 8 is called The Muse from the Bronx and as soon as I saw that I went Arlene :)

There is some excellent romance with Arlene but this is also the chapter with Alan Alda's experience in the real army and boy is that delight.

There is no way the casting directors for M*A*S*H knew about this, but:

In this car crash he scuffed up his face and arm on the concrete and then claims no one noticed he was gone and I have Questions.

There are so many delights in this chapter, like telling the army "see you in three weeks :)" Also some religious stress.

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I wasn't going to post too many excerpts but?????

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Okay I promised I would liveblog Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and what I'm discovering is it's incredibly hard to do, because literally every part of this book is a highlight. You just have to read the book.

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Something about this story about Alan breaking his mother's heart by figuring out Santa wasn't real when he was eight is a Lot and then he goes on to talk about innocence and boy. Boy. It's a Lot. There's just a hell of a lot going on in chapter 4. Being beaten up at school. Leaving a dead owl on the kitchen table for a week. Feeding his tutor a goldfish. This paragraph that really got to me for some reason:

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Okay one more post there's an about the author section which is extremely funny for a celebrity autobiography.

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Hell of a lot in chapter 5 that I'm not going to get into (read the book) but this is also the chapter where he writes a musical with his friends and the bullies who had been leaving homophobic slurs on his desk and threatening to beat him up all wanted to be in it. This is basically a disney channel original movie. Also I wish we had the book and lyrics for the musical.

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The first time I read this book I told my mom "I'm reading Alan Alda's memoir" and she casually replied "I think I saw him the other day" and it transpired she had seen an Alan Alda lookalike in the Hannaford parking lot and I don't really think either of us left that conversation entirely convinced it wasn't him.