The first but less amusing scandal involves Larry Hagman, Dallas' J.R. Ewing, but also I Dream of Jeannie's Maj. Anthony Nelson, not to mention the director of the Blob sequel Beware! The Blob from 1972. Citigroup has been ordered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to pay Mr. Hagman $1.1 million, plus $10 million to his favorite charities, in addition to nearly $500,000 in legal costs. Mr. Hagman's complaint against Citi, connected to life-insurance and "unspecified securities," had alleged breach of fiduciary duty, civil fraud and failure to supervise.

The story of Larry Wilcox, or Officer Jon Baker of ChiPs, did not end as happily for the actor. As documented by Dealbook's Thomas Kaplan, who deserves a lot of credit for getting the phrase "garishly snazzy" into his write-up, Mr. Wilcox has been accused by the SEC of paying kickbacks to manipulate penny stocks. Specifically, he is said to have given $16,000 to a man in exchange for his purchase of 1.6 million shares in the actor's UC Hub Group. That man turned out to be an F.B.I. agent.

Ominously, UC Hub was an outfit dedicated to the television business, but also mining and energy.

With their ocean views and fancy-pants cuisines, these celeb-packed hostelries make an intriguing spring-vacation option for people of all persuasions. If only they weren’t so darn expensive! (A month-long stay at Promises will set you back $48,000.)

If you are looking for a well-priced-but-improbable vacation destination, I highly recommend the Dallas Park Central Westin hotel. No snickering! If the Westin is good enough for me and Wayne Newton, it’s certainly good enough for you.

In the last year—since Barneys opened a giant store at the NorthPark Mall in Dallas—I have spent a disproportionate amount of time staying at the Westin. This dreary concrete structure overlooking the freeway has become my home away from home.

Last week, while Ann Coulter was hurling the word “faggot” in John Edwards’ general direction, I was hosting a fashion show in a tent in NorthPark’s parking lot. My job was to commentate the spring looks as the gals and blokes trotted down the runway. This was not as easy and faggoty as it sounds. My pre-show efforts to finesse my script were compromised by the delayed-flight arrivals of those mannequins imported from New York. Frantically scribbling my commentary while last-minute fittings were still taking place, I had no time to gather their names. This left me with no choice other than to assign fake monikers. I gave all the white Nordic girls names like Taneesha and Shaneequa. All the black gals got Euro-trash, aristo-sounding names like Fabuleena and Fallopia. To the male models, I assigned more straightforward names like Irving and Igor.

My little ruse raised intermittent chuckles. A significant proportion of the audience under-reacted to the proposition that a blond, square-jawed lad in a Jil Sander suit might actually be named Mahatma.

Meanwhile, back at the Westin, it was cowboys-a-go-go. This most recent trip was enlivened by the presence of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Texas electrical engineers—Wrangler-wearing linemen—who were gathered for their annual conference. Every public area of the hotel was swarming with tobacco-chewing dudes in cowboy hats. I have never seen so many giant belt buckles in my life. It was a totally freaky scene, an alternative Brokeback universe, minus the faggotry.

Other than finding the elevator awash with Budweiser bottles every morning, there was no downside to this super-butch invasion. The linemen seemed like decent chaps, so much so that I spent a great deal of energy encouraging the single gals in the New York Barneys contingent to hurl themselves into this mosh pit of swaggering Marlboro heterosexuality.

One morning, while waiting to pick up my embarrassingly faggoty egg-whites-only breakfast at the make-it-while-you-wait omelet bar, I was approached by a lineman dude who asked me why my face looked “so darn familiar.” I told him that I was a regular on VH1 and that he may well recognize me from I Love the 80s. He confessed that he was a big fan of “all that kinda sheeyit.” Delighting in this bit of D-list recognition, I began to beam smugly. Sensing, no doubt, that I needed to be brought back down to earth, the lineman added, “But y’all are not the only celebrity at the Westin. Wayne Newton. Yup! We seen him twice.”

Having put me in my place, this friendly gent then went on to confess that he was very ashamed of some of the styles he had adopted in the 80’s, specifically a knee-length oversized Wham! T-shirt. One of my female colleagues then coquettishly asked him if he had ever owned a pink Marithé et François Girbaud blouson jacket. “What in the heeeyal is thayat?” he replied, grabbing his 10-egg omelet and lumbering back to the safety of his buddies.

Despite the anthropological fascinations of the Westin, the local socialites do not seem quite as enthralled by its charms as yours truly. One of the standard questions when I arrive in Dallas is always “Where are y’all staying while y’all are in town?” When I reply that we are happily ensconced at the Westin, the faces of the Dallas ladies tend to crumple into a wincing Cubist configuration of horror and sympathy. I always find myself leaping to the defense of the Westin and encouraging them to partake of the majesty of the omelet bar.

I seriously doubt if the Betty Ford Clinic has an omelet bar. This is the one rehab facility I am not dying to visit. Apparently, the food is “cafeteria style,” and part of the therapy includes toilet scrubbing. And, most importantly, Britney is not staying there. She’s over at Promises.

PS: I tried to buy a copy of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret at the Dallas Fort Worth airport bookstore, wanting to find out what all the hoopla was about. When I asked for it, the bookstore ladies burst into gales of derisive, satanic laughter and shook their heads. Their reaction was very creepy. Is there a special way you have to ask for it? Is it one of those not-for-faggots books?

There’s no point in denying that Ford was a traditionalist. Nearly 70 years on, Stagecoach still gives you the feeling that you are seeing movie conventions minted fresh: There’s the Indian attack on the stage, the cavalry riding to the rescue, the two rivals meeting for a gunfight in the deserted main street. The cast, playing a roster of archetypes—the whore with the heart of gold; the drunken but still-capable doctor; the rogue trying to redeem himself; the rich villain; the good man turned outlaw by circumstance—rise above themselves, bringing caricature the sort of richness you associate with Dickens.

As the craft and excitement of Stagecoach prove, tradition needn’t be stifling, and to John Ford American tradition meant individualism. The enemies of that individualism are conformity, moralism, the corruptions that power can’t resist. And all of those things appear whenever people organize themselves into groups. In Stagecoach, the characters who are supposed to be the founders of a new ordered society are threatened by the very thing they are working to achieve.

In the first five minutes alone, there is no respectable institution—law, religion, business—that Ford doesn’t regard with deep suspicion. We see Dallas (Claire Trevor), the local prostitute forced out of town by the women’s “Law and Order League.” They of course have no right to bully her, but when Dallas implores the town sheriff to do something, he tells her to go quietly. He’s not about to make trouble by standing up for a whore. When Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), who’s also being given the bum’s rush, gallantly takes Dallas’ arm, they are herded to the stagecoach followed by their tormentors while a drunken version of “Shall We Gather at the River?” plays on the soundtrack, turning the scene into a parody of a temperance march. When the stagecoach driver Buck (the wonderful Andy Devine, whose scratchy-squeaky voice suggests a balloon rubbed with steel wool) hears that the Ringo Kid (the impossibly charming young John Wayne in the movie—his 80th—that finally made him a star) has busted out of prison, his reaction is “Good for him!” When the banker Gatewood (Berton Churchill) takes delivery of the Wells Fargo payroll, he pontificates that what’s good for the banks is good for America—before absconding with the bundle.

These are Ford’s representatives of America sallying forth into the wilderness: a whore, a drunk and an outlaw. The only respectable member, the banker Gatewood, is a thief escaping with stolen loot. Except for the whiskey drummer Peacock (played by Donald Meek, and to the name born), a man so mild and respectable he’s constantly mistaken for a clergyman, the other respectable members of the caravan act to uphold a vision of America in which some people belong and some don’t. Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt), the wife of a cavalry officer, traveling in considerable discomfort because she’s pregnant, continually rebuffs Dallas’ attempts at kindness. The former Confederate soldier Hatfield (John Carradine, probably never as handsome as he is here), hopes that offering Mrs. Mallory his protection will bring back the honor he’s lost by falling into a life of gambling. And though that profession should make him at home with whores, drunks and outlaws, he acts as if it were a supreme insult to Mrs. Mallory to be keeping their company.

I don’t wish to reduce Stagecoach to a civics lesson like the phony High Noon. As an adventure tale, the movie is thrilling. The centerpiece, the attack on the stage by marauding Apaches, is highlighted by the breathtaking stunt work of Yakima Canutt, a reminder of the artistry that’s been lost in the age of computer-generated imagery. But Stagecoach is a vision of democracy as well, and one that’s both stirred by the idea of how democracy levels the playing field and tough-minded enough to know that the judgmentalism Americans are prone to will do everything it can to create a land where the folks who live on the hill look down at those in the valley.

The recent premiere of the third season of Deadwood has prompted a lot of dumb talk about the traditions of the western, most of it, as the critic Dave Kehr observed on his blog, from people who don’t appear to have seen many westerns. These writers really believe that westerns are all black hats vs. white hats, good women vs. whores, cowboys vs. Indians. So when they see a western where violence is treated less than triumphantly—where moral ambiguity is present—all they can do is proclaim it an “anti-western,” as Alessandra Stanley recently called Deadwood in The Times.

In the great westerns, the stirring and the heroic have always existed alongside the evil and the craven. We are looking at them in a country in its birth pangs, capable of going in either direction.

So the idea of the “anti-western” is inherently ahistorical. It denies the subtleties in the great Ford and Hawks westerns, the adult pessimism that Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann brought to the genre in the 50’s, and just how much the presumed father of the anti-western, Sam Peckinpah, owed to the traditions that had preceded him. What’s seen as a break with tradition is really a mirror of the journey undertaken by the genre’s heroes: the push to go further afield, knowing all the while that they can never fully escape what they are leaving behind. For Americans, the western is, as Huck Finn says of civilization, a place we all been before.

[Stagecoach, Two-Disc Special Edition; Warner Home Video; $26.98.]

- Jason Horowitz

That’s the kind of challenge to conventional wisdom that Bernard-Henri Lévy has mounted since his book, Barbarism with a Human Face, created an international sensation almost three decades ago. “BHL” is a cultural icon in France. An activist-philosopher-filmmaker-journalist, author of 30 books, a liberal critical of the left with access to power, Mr. Lévy, according to Vanity Fair, is “somewhere between gadfly and tribal sage, Superman and prophet.” The perfect choice to take the temperature of democracy in America in the 21st century.

American Vertigo takes its title from the “wavering of points of reference and certainties” that Mr. Lévy has detected in a nation increasingly unsure of itself—“less confident of the very values, that is to say, the myths, that founded it.” The wavering is most evident in the cities of the United States: in Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit, whose white inhabitants have left, “forgetting to close the door behind them”; in Los Angeles, a city with no center, no border, no historical neighborhood, no pulsating heart; and in New Orleans, where neither music nor dance can dispel the “haunted, slightly morbid” feeling “that “someday the water will win out.” Only in Seattle, the city he’d choose to live in, does Mr. Lévy find a place where he can recover his lost bearings.

This perceptive, pugnacious, passionate book—exquisitely written—also reveals Mr. Lévy’s love affair with the United States. “In the sheer fact of being American,” he writes, “there is a gentleness, a lightness, an element of freedom and, in a word, of civilization, that makes this country one of the few countries in the world where, despite everything, you can still breathe freely today.”

It’s tough love, of course. In visits to a lap dancer, a Chicago mega-church and the Great Western Gun Show in Dallas (where a vendor will not sell Osama bin Laden memorabilia because it “wouldn’t have the aesthetic quality of these Nazi artifacts”), Mr. Lévy learns that if America is magnificent, it is also mad, “greedy and modest, at home in the world and self-obsessed, puritan and outrageous.”

America’s greatest shame is in its poverty and prisons. In Harlem, Boston and Washington, and just outside the marked perimeters of Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Mr. Lévy saw “battered human wrecks” living in dumpsters. They seemed to have “cut loose the moorings that tied them to the American Way of Life.” A tad behind Russia as the world champion of imprisonment, the U.S. condemns to invisibility another huge population, its poor people, “who are turning into zombies, troglodytes—a physician would say ‘foreign bodies.’” Whatever the justifications for it, Mr. Lévy writes, the “detention center” at Guantánamo “is a miniature, a condensation, of the entire American prison system.”

Tocqueville worried about a “tyranny of the majority”; Mr. Lévy worries that minority groups are becoming “a dominant component in American discourse and institutional practices.” Americans should not mourn a model—the melting pot—that never existed. Nor should they forget “the vigor and fervor of patriotic sentiment” among the nation’s hyphenates. But, he warns, Balkanization “carries in its wake, by mimicry, thanks to the familiar mechanism of rivalry for victim status,” the demands of other groups, like the Hispanics, who “have no metaphysical wrong to deplore, no transhistoric outrage that demands expiation, but … covet a piece of the identity pie as well.” If “dignity and legitimacy” continue to be bestowed on “this masquerade of Untouchables,” then the institutional edifice built at Philadelphia in 1787 might come “crashing down, once and for all.”

Mr. Lévy’s disdain for identity politics begins to betray his dependence on neoconservative discourse. His assessment of American foreign policy lays it bare. To be sure, Mr. Lévy often sounds like an unabashed liberal. He sees George W. Bush as “a provincial narcissist and a frustrated dilettante, a bad businessman and an overgrown daddy’s boy,” “lover of backfiring cars and drinking bouts with his buddies”—“born to lose”—who somehow mustered the discipline to capture the Presidency. He issues an acid indictment of America’s war on terrorism, at home and abroad, and of the ways in which the administration is playing “faster and looser” with international law, criminal courts and the Kyoto Protocol.

But he defends the war on Iraq as morally right, even if the U.S. “aimed at the wrong target at the wrong time.” The choices Mr. Lévy presents are filched from Dick Cheney’s play book: Would we rather return to an era when the United States cozied up to every tyrant who opposed the Soviet Union? Is it not better to capture “Chemical Ali,” architect of the poison-gas attack on the citizens of Jalabja, than to invite the Kurds and Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then abandon them? Mr. Lévy reproaches the neocons for backing Bush’s domestic agenda; he wishes an authentic liberal, faithful to the Enlightenment and revolted by Abu Ghraib, headed the State Department; but he won’t morph conservatives “into paragons of immorality and vice.”

Mr. Lévy’s heroes—his friends, the people he identifies with—include Barack Obama (“The first black man to understand that you should stop playing on guilt and play on seduction instead”), Hillary Clinton and Norman Mailer. But the serious conversations in American Vertigo, the conversations about philosophy and policy, are with conservatives such as Richard Perle, Samuel Huntington (the Cassandra of “the clash of civilizations”) and Francis Fukuyama (oracle of “the end of history”). As for his time on the left bank, Mr. Lévy spends it mostly with Woody Allen, Sharon Stone and Warren Beatty (about whom he goes into “ludicrous ecstasies”).

At the opening of the Presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., Mr. Lévy noted that Bill Clinton looked frail and fragile, his voice thin, his step awkward, his gaze melancholy. By contrast, the Bushes, père et fils, appeared robust, strutting their stuff in “insolent health, seemingly modest but actually triumphant smiles, thick brown or navy-blue wool coats, belted carefully at the waist, upturned at the throat.” Equally fragile, it seems, is the liberalism in American Vertigo, as it reacts to the agenda-setting, shock-and-awe thunder on the right.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Roger Staubach, the Hall of Fame quarterback and rising GOP star, now runs a Dallas company that manages property. According to figures we were shown from the State Comptroller's office, his company has a $731,000 contract with the New York State Office of General Services to manage unnamed state leases.

And, yes, Staubach also chipped in $25,000 to Pataki's reelection campaign in 2002.

It was time for bold actions, a time when the common good required tough decisions from a man who had never held elective office before. Mr. Bloomberg made those tough decisions. One of them was the regrettable but necessary 18.5 percent increase in property taxes. Needless to say, the tax hike didn't make many friends for the Mayor, but it was the right thing to do. There was every reason to believe that voters would come to see it the Mayor's way by next year, when Mr. Bloomberg is up for re-election.

But the Mayor has turned tail and fled. He isn't going to fight the good fight. Instead, he has announced with much fanfare that he is going to

offer property-tax rebates leading into next year's election. Homeowners will be getting $400 checks in the mail. Hooray!

What an unfortunate turn of events. The Mayor's move is completely transparent-like many a workaday politician, Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy votes. And the tab will be expensive. The city will lose $250 million in needed revenues as a result of the Mayor's giveaway. The city needs money for cops, schools, clean streets and to pay down its debt. How will the Mayor make up for that loss?

In exchange for a shot of popular good will, Mr. Bloomberg has damaged his own arguments for increased aid from Washington and Albany. The city is not a popular place in either capital, and New York's enemies will say-with some justification-that if the Mayor is giving away $250 million, why should they grant his requests for more aid?

It would seem that Mr. Bloomberg has decided to follow the lead of George W. Bush, whose reckless fiscal policies are responsible for huge deficits. That's not the Michael Bloomberg who ran for office in 2001. The Mayor should reassert himself. He should make sure that this bad deal goes down as an aberration, rather than the beginning of a dangerous pattern of pandering.

'What Am I Supposed to Know About Taxes?'-The Reverend Al Sharpton

Having spent his entire career as a charlatan, with a history of unpaid taxes, questionable finances and a penchant for encouraging anti-Semitism, one might have thought Al Sharpton would have cleaned up his act in his current bid for President-at least for the sake of public appearance. But as The New York Times reported recently on its front page, Mr. Sharpton's campaign finances are-yet again-evidence of a slick

operator who thinks he is above the law, a tax evader who plays the race card whenever anyone dares call attention to his greedy narcissism.

The Times reports that Mr. Sharpton's recent campaign report is filled with "potential violations," some of which may be illegal, such as not reporting the use of free cars. And while most candidates choose to stay in budget hotels, Mr. Sharpton's campaign has spent thousands of dollars so he can sleep in luxury: over $7,000 for three days at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles; over $3,000 for one night for himself and a few aides at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas. The Times also notes that Mr. Sharpton's campaign is paying thousands of dollars in airfare and hotels so that his personal filmmaker, Eddie Harris, can document his every move. Mr. Sharpton is a smooth talker who has mastered the one-liner, but his appetite for luxury hotels and limousines is not matched by a capacity to pay bills. Needless to say, the Federal Election Commission finds all of this quite interesting.

Aside from the obvious hubris, Mr. Sharpton's choice of hotels also indicates plain old stupidity: His campaign is struggling to raise money and has yet to qualify for federal matching funds. To blow thousands of dollars on fancy hotel rooms is not the act of a man who takes his own

candidacy seriously, but rather the behavior of a man who's using a fake campaign to get publicity and soak up perks.

Again, no one should be surprised. Mr. Sharpton is currently being audited by the I.R.S.-that auditor will surely deserve a medal-and the history of his National Action Network is a case study in chicanery. The network owes money in unpaid debts all over town-$30,000 to 1-800-Limo-Center, $16,000 for a conference at the Millennium Hotel, $15,000 to New York State for unpaid unemployment insurance. Mr. Sharpton's entertainment-promotion company, Raw Talent Inc., was disbanded in 2002 for not paying taxes for a nine-year period. Of course, having himself been indicted for tax fraud, Mr. Sharpton can't be expected to hold his companies to a higher standard. And wasn't it just the damnedest thing when some of his financial records were destroyed in that fire a while back?

But on the campaign trail, Mr. Sharpton-who has actually compared himself to Nelson Mandela-has cowed the politically correct journalist pack. Why has no one asked him to repudiate the hate-filled messages of Louis Farrakhan? Why has he not been asked why he's never distanced himself from the late Khalid Muhammad, who called Jewish people "the bloodsuckers of the black community"?

Fortunately, despite his racial grandstanding, Mr. Sharpton does not speak for black America. Congressman Charles Rangel has endorsed Wesley Clark; City Councilman Bill Perkins has endorsed Howard Dean, as have other prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus like Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Only in his own mind does Al Sharpton stand for something.

The Best Place to Retire

New York has always been regarded as the best place to work in the world. But when the time comes to retire, the conventional wisdom has said to head south, to warmer climes and greener fairways. But the secret is getting out: New York is a terrific place to retire. As Janet Hays writes in her book, Retire in New York City-Even If You're Not Rich , the city is almost tailor-made for the retiree.

No mindless condo life in Boca or Pinehurst for us, the senses dulled by air-conditioning and dinner theater. In New York, a retiree can actually live a full, intellectually stimulating life. Museums, concerts, Broadway-all discounted for those over 65!-not to mention restaurants where you can eat dinner later than 5 p.m. And of course you don't need a car, elevators obviate the need for stairs, grocery stores deliver, and the world's best doctors are just a taxi ride away. Most importantly, you're surrounded by friends and former colleagues, smart people who wouldn't dream of allowing their golden years to become one long golf game.

For those who want to fade away, Florida is swell. For those who find nothing as relaxing as a good fight over the tomatoes at Fairway, New York will allow you to grow old gracefully.

You don't know me, but I wanted to tell you how very gifted you are and, if I may, offer a little advice. Let me say, firstly, that any young director at the start of their career who can stage As You Like It as wittily as you and the recent Debbie Does Dallas is absolutely the director for me.

All shows are the same show in the impure essentials. What was within your terrific Debbie -fun, speed, discipline, sex, identity problems-is found within the double and triple identities, the comedy and farce of sexual roles, the heaven and hell of love, of your As you Like It at the Public. I see you also designed the costumes for the Shakespeare and adapted Debbie from the hallowed original movie. How great to be intoxicated by the possibilities of all forms of theater. Keep going, whatever you do. We're on your side.

The big surprise of your Debbie Does Dallas for me was that you actually turned it into the world's first production of a saucy Mother Courage . I wrote at the time that you had unearthed an exemplary Brechtian morality tale of opportunism and survival on the body-strewn battlefield of the American sex wars. People thought I was joking. I was. And I wasn't. My point is that where another director might easily have been camp or cheap, you made it fun by secretly taking it seriously.

To use only six actors in As You Like It is delightfully nuts, of course. (And dangerous.) But then, the core of the play is all about illusion and role-playing. Once again, I admired the assurance and comic timing of the troupe-the discipline and glue you brought to the knockabout scenes. Did you know, by the way, that in the all-male As You Like It directed by Clifford Williams in the 1960's, the young Anthony Hopkins played Audrey, the country girl? There you are! As you like it; as it pleases you. Whatever!

I learned two astonishing things from your production. It's possible for an actor to do a back flip into his own hat-and live ! And, as if that weren't miracle enough, a hat-or even an apple-can conjure a character from thin air, provided we allow "imaginary forces to work," as someone named Shakespeare once advised.

My own mentor is Peter Brook, and his mentor is Shakespeare. No matter what kind of show Mr. Brook has directed over the years-highbrow or lowbrow, Broadway or the Mahabharata -sooner or later, Mr. Brook always returns to his Shakespearean touchstone. You have something in common with him: call it an apparent theater of naïveté. For in your As You Like It , the hat held up onstage conjures the illusion of the man who wears it, while the apple thrown from one actor to another is enough to create the character who eats it. As Rosalind says to us in her Epilogue, "My way is to conjure you."

It's a surprising Epilogue, and Rosalind is actually surprised to be giving it. In this play about free will and some melancholy, the implied message in Shakespeare's teasing, joyful afterthought is that now that everything's been resolved, the romances worked out, the couplings made, it's time for us all to go home and fuck our brains out.

I know why you trimmed the text, but what happened to the songs? ("Come hither, come hither, come hither.") Shakespeare's lyrics can be as suggestive as Cole Porter's, and sad as death. Gotta have the songs. To my regret, a lyrical As You Like It was mostly absent. It could be due to your originally staging the production outdoors. Broad comedy plays well in the open; lyricism likes a roof. You're still playing outdoors at the Public, in a sense. You're in a forest. (The Forest of Arden!) But when it comes to Shakespeare's poetry and all the fears that confront the inexperienced performer, remember the golden rule: Let the line color the actor, never the other way round.

I read in the Playbill that you recently worked as Sir Peter Hall's assistant director on Troilus and Cressida . Have you recovered? Years ago, I was his assistant director at the National in England and must say I was mostly bored off my head. Never be an assistant! Direct instead, as you know. I learned that I don't have the patience to be a director. But the time with Peter Hall in the womb of the rehearsal room was immensely valuable. With the script before him on a lectern, marking out the rhythm and beat of a line like a conductor, he's a supreme example of a British director who still believes passionately in the word -in the power and beauty of Shakespeare's language.

A thought about those eunuchs in a whorehouse, the critics. Try not to treat critics as the enemy. It's a paranoid waste of time. The ones I read are mostly dead. G.B. Shaw's essays perk me up, although I often find I disagree with them. I agree with Ken Tynan almost too much; Jan Kott is still an essential guide. Hazlitt's On Actors and Acting is masterly. If you haven't yet read the renowned Hazlitt essay, it will give you an even more perverse, unshakable love for a life in the theater. I return quite frequently to reading Jean Genet's Reflections on the Theatre as an essential reminder of the enormous care and detail that ought to go into staging a play. Genet's gracious notes to Roger Blin during the months of rehearsal in Paris of his epic The Screens are a timeless model. (Blin was also Beckett's principal director.) Genet, the famous renegade dramatist, writes to him at one point:

"At first no one knows anything. The actors have little knowledge, but the man who is teaching them must know nothing and learn everything, about himself and his art, as he teaches them. It will be a discovery for them but also for him."

Try not to please audiences too much. Better to challenge them instead. They need guidance, too, or they will lead you by the nose. Yet the in-house theater critic is the audience. Watch the audience during your shows.

Success is good. Lots of money, also, and land, and country houses. Try to travel. Theater people never seem to go anywhere. They don't even go to the theater. If Broadway success comes your way, grab it, and go on making your own theater. Avoid Broadway-itis at all cost. Broadway-itis is currently killing the work of too many directors masquerading as independent artists.

"The right to fail" is a credo only an Englishman could invent. For only the English know how to fail well. It was George Devine's proud, daring credo when he founded the Royal Court Theatre as its artistic director, and it amounts to an un-American activity. Mundane success and the box-office bottom line aren't really the point.

One day, when Beckett was watching an actor struggling during a rehearsal of one of his plays, he was heard to advise him gently, "Try to fail better."

All artists worth a dime fail. The only test is how close they can get to the summit of their imagination.

There's only good work, yes? Even for its own sake, even in a city where conventional success in the theater is worshipped, in the end there's only good and fine work. Because you believe in it, because you have no choice.

But I didn't intend to go on like this. I embrace your talent and welcome you to the theater with open arms.

Best wishes,

John Heilpern

The classic American fable has always been perceived as living proof that dreams can come true. As before, cheerleader captain Debbie and her fellow cheerleaders and sluts with their inviting, slightly unblemished thighs sell their bodies to buy her a plane ticket so Debbie can join the Dallas Cowgirls. But Ms. Schmidt has also shrewdly mined the original text for its hidden emotional undertow, as Trevor Nunn did with the unknown dark horizon of Oklahoma! The fascinating outcome is the world's first production of a saucy Mother Courage .

As the tragic heroine is forced to shtup her way to Dallas, the imaginary cart she drags behind her is clearly the weight of capitalist exploitation. Ms. Schmidt's Brechtian approach has unearthed an exemplary morality tale of opportunism and survival on the body-strewn battlefield of the American sex wars. Debbie realizes this for herself when, in an epiphany of self-knowledge, she exclaims: "I can't believe I have all this money and all it cost me was my soul."

Food for thought there. Note the pure Brechtian use of the intimate stage with its supertitles-"The Locker Room," "The Practice Field"-announcing each scene while simultaneously distancing us from it. Note also the Brechtian use of symbolic props (candles, bananas), as well as the alienation acting technique of everyone in the talented, winking cast, which is led by Sherie Rene Scott as Debbie, the role originated on film by Bambi Woods. You may remember Ms. Scott as the shopaholic Amneris, daughter of the Pharaoh, in Aida . A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. But the lovely, game Ms. Scott was great fun in Aida, too.

Sometimes the cast gets the giggles, and I don't blame them. You would, too, if you were performing in Debbie Does Dallas . Sex isn't designed to work onstage, of course. It's difficult enough offstage. The show therefore makes the right choice by wittily-and dopily-satirizing the twilight zone of cheerleading Americana and its timeless, hormonal connection to the frolicsome, towel-flipping sports jocks of the locker room. At my school in England, library duties and buggery were more the widespread norm, and to the outsider, American sexuality can seem awesomely bizarre. What kind of Puritan country, I wonder, would invent cheerleaders in nubile-little-schoolgirl uniforms, flashing their elastic panty line of desire to one and all?

A free country, yessiree. Debbie's country.

Alfie's Oscar Complex

My difficulty with the small, muffled musical A Man of No Importance at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, Lincoln Center, is that it talks of "poetry and art in the air"-and in the air they stay. A cloud of respectable good intentions hovers over this story about a gay bus conductor who comes out of the closet. The director is Joe Mantello, whose previous production, Take Me Out, was about a gay baseball star who comes out of the closet.

Quiet, safe worthiness and sanctimony are never exciting components in a musical, particularly one that pretends to flights of Wildean fancy. As John Lahr puts it, "Modesty in a musical is about as welcome as primness in a whore." A Man of No Importance , starring the excellent Roger Rees-and created by composer Stephen Flaherty, lyricist Lynn Ahrens and playwright Terrence McNally-is unusual, alas, only in its recessive nature. It will never set the world on fire. But its gifted creative team have actually produced a contradiction in terms: a self-effacing musical about an empty shell.

Based on the minor 1994 film starring Albert Finney, A Man of No Importance intends to make a bigger statement than it achieves about the transforming power of theater and art on the repressed, timid life of an anonymous, middle-aged Irishman named Alfie. What it really does is settle for a minor showbiz fable that's meant to tug at our heartstrings. Set in Dublin in the early 60's, it can therefore be adorably "quaint" and "eccentric" when it needs be, which is often. Its bachelor hero, Alfie the bus conductor, lives with his spinster sister, Lily (the great Faith Prince, of all un-spinsterish people), and entertains his enchanted bus passengers by day with readings of Oscar Wilde.

As Oscar himself once said: "Well, why not?" Alfie has an Oscar complex. In the lonely evenings, he's busily directing Salome with his lovably inept amateur theatrical group at the church hall. And he's also haunted by Oscar's ghost, who turns up from time to time in his usual velvet cloak, bringing temptation Alfie's way with ominous stuff like: "There is no hell but this, Alfie Byrne, a body without a soul; or a soul without a body."

Why, it almost might be Oscar speaking. But not really. Mr. McNally's stab at epigrams (plus direct quotations from Oscar) try to give the musical its artistic gloss and air of good taste. But it's all too self-conscious to rouse us much, like Alfie's maudlin, introverted big song, "Man in the Mirror," a downer in search of drama:

Where is my golden love?

Where but in musty plays?

Who is this man in the thickening body

Riding a bus

To the end of his days?

Not to worry. All will turn out well, though the diocese bans Salome for indecency and a pretty newcomer in town turns out, unsurprisingly, to be pregnant. She was meant for Alfie. But Alfie comes out of the closet-finally!-and his loving older sis is briefly upset. ("We sat across this table and lived a lie!") The lovable Irish Catholic community then abandons Alfie. But everyone returns nobly to stand by him for the finale. They're not really bigots, you see. They just seemed that way. It isn't showbiz without easy sentiment. But it isn't art, either. Take the shameless number entitled "The Cuddles Mary Gave," sung by the complacent widower known as Baldy over his poor wife's grave:

She made the soda bread of angels

And the house was always clean

And the way she pressed a collar,

I looked fit to meet a queen.

But if ever there's one memory I'd save,

Well, it's the cuddles Mary gave.

Is that the sound of Oscar throwing up, or is it Mary?

How many times had I gone there anxiety-ridden, looking weird and unbalanced and emerged all healthy, renewed and triumphant? How many lousy days and hangovers were cured by a quick $40 trip? Sushisay was my sanctuary, my therapist, my drug, my woman, my weekly self-indulgence.

It worked every time.

The Lady Owner-I never knew anyone's name there, it was all very anonymous-told me on Oct. 23 that she was moving back to Japan, where she owns another Sushisay. I'd had some run-ins with her early on in my relationship with her restaurant, but we'd made peace. The first incident occurred after I was led one day to the sushi bar, to sit right between two loudmouth idiot businessmen who were barking "What's that?" to the friendly, elegant chefs. It was the last thing I needed in the world. Besides, there were numerous tables open and four unoccupied chairs in a row at the sushi bar. I protested. The Lady Owner's smiley reaction was essentially, No, sorry, take it or leave it, we don't need your business, we're Sushisay, we're No. 1.

So I stormed out, vowed to never return, and began a search around town for an equally good place. Two months later I was back, like a dog returning to its own vomit …. well, more like a human returning to the greatest seafood the city had to offer: striped bass, octopus, red snapper, tilefish, raw squid legs, monkfish liver, clam muscle, fluke, sardine, cockle, gizzard shad, and oh that fatty tuna, eel, sea urchin … everything so fresh.

But I'd made the mistake of going back there with an excitable young woman I know, Sarie. I'd brought a few women to Sushisay before, but I mostly ate solo. For one thing, it was cheaper. One piece of yummy endangered bluefin tuna goes-went for-$10.

Sarie and I had no reservation but it was after 9 p.m., not too many people there. So where did the Lady Owner seat us? At a little table super-close to one with six dudes. We protested. Lady Owner smiled, shook her head: Sorry! I complained that I ate there twice a week. Sorry! We bolted.

After a three-month search, I was back again. Lady Owner smiled at me knowingly: I knew you'd be back. I looked sheepish: It's O.K. if I eat here, right? It was, and everything went smoothly for a full year.

On the last day of Sushisay, I got there at 1:30. Timed it right. I was still worried they'd sandwich me at the sushi bar. If they had, would I have thrown a fit? Maybe. I sat at a good table. The waiter handed me a hot towel (love that) and asked if I wanted my usual green tea, cranberry juice and water.

I'd had the salmon caviar the last time, so I went with the tuna tartare to start off. Mmmm, so nice and fluffy. I dumped a mess of soy sauce in the bowl, turning it half into soup. I got the miso soup with mushrooms, too.

Soon enough, perhaps too soon (were they rushing me?), my Special Deluxe Bento arrived. The head chef's selection of sushi, sashimi and appetizers is-was-arranged in a beautiful lacquered box. Like a doll's house with four rooms of tasty delights. I wanted to save the piece of uni but couldn't wait. I picked it up and let that slimy orange stuff glide down my throat. Next up, a piece of tuna. Soft, fresh, nice-smelling tuna. The wasabi got to me. I sneezed and blew my nose into a napkin. Then another nice sinus-clearing sneeze.

All of a sudden, a busboy asked if I was finished. I hate that. I'd ordered another hot sake and wanted to relax. Apparently they wanted me out of there.

To my left I spotted the Lady Owner, who was making the rounds, saying goodbye to good customers. "We've had such good times here," said a plump British lady.

Then the Lady Owner started coming my way and … walked by me! To talk to a table of friggin' three to my right! Yeah, she'd spoken to me the last time, gave me the heads-up Sushisay was closing, but I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. Then another busboy tried to take my lacquered box.

Could I just sit there in peace and say a proper farewell? After all, I'd easily spent thousands of dollars there. The bill came. I don't want to say how much it was. All right, it was $69.28 plus tip.

I'd had enough.

Fuck you, Sushisay. Go away. Go back to Japan and stay there. P.J. Clarke's is opening back up. They got a great spinach salad with bacon there. Chicken pot pie. I don't need you any more.

THE GOOD GIRL

A few years ago, Mary Catherine Garrison's father, John, received the phone call that every actress' parent dreads.

"I've just signed a nudity contract," Ms. Garrison told her father, a history teacher. She'd been cast as a troubled young woman in the Nicolas Cage thriller 8MM , and she was explaining "why nudity was an important part of the role."

John Garrison said nothing. But the next day, in his Southern drawl, he left a brief message on Ms. Garrison's machine.

"Mary Catherine," Mr. Garrison said, "I was thinkin'. Shakespeare didn't make anyone get naked. Think about that."

Clearly, Ms. Garrison didn't think too hard. Not only did she do 8MM, the Louisiana-raised blonde-génue is currently stealing the show in the Off Broadway musical version of Debbie Does Dallas as Lisa, the world's most lovable nymphomaniac high-school cheerleader.

Ms. Garrison, 28, doesn't get naked in Debbie, but she does spend a lot of time rubbing her privates, dry-humping in wild twosomes, threesomes and foursomes, and a lot of other stuff Shakespeare didn't make anyone do, either.

And it's not just a job. For Ms. Garrison, performing as a sex-crazed adolescent has (and Dad might wanna close his eyes here, too) provided a personal liberation, too.

"Has it changed my sex life?" the sprite-ish Ms. Garrison asked the other day. "Completely! Complee-eetely ! In the best way. I feel totally unapologetic now. I have the feeling I had when I was 16-like I can do whatever I want and I don't have to feel bad about it. I'm feeling cocky about it!"

Raised Baptist, Ms. Garrison said she was more demure in high school than Lisa-but she wasn't a saint. "I remember the first time I felt sexy," she said. "I was 16, and I was going to a creative-arts high school, and there was a boy in the art program-he was dumb as a box of hair-and I said to myself, 'I'm gonna get him.' I got him in a matter of days. I remember sitting on the back of his motorcycle and thinking, 'I can do anything.' It was a very powerful feeling.

"Those were the days when I wore a one-piece unitard with cowboy boots," Ms. Garrison said.

After receiving a theater-arts degree from Indiana's University of Evansville, Ms. Garrison headed to U.C. San Diego for graduate theater training. Her big break (she thought) came in 1999 in 8MM . The forgettable movie centered around snuff films, and the slashing made its way into the editing room as well. "I had to call home and say, 'Mom, I was cut from movie-except for the scene that has me going down on James Gandolfini,'" Ms. Garrison said.

Ms. Garrison also goes down in Debbie Does Dallas, this time under a white towel upon actor Jon Patrick Walker-who, for authenticity's sake, is performing sans skivvies. How's Mr. Walker's Mr. Walker? "The first time I saw it was during a live performance in front of an audience," Ms. Garrison said. "I immediately started laughing hysterically-and then so did Jon."

Ms. Garrison saw the 1979 film Debbie Does Dallas only a couple of weeks ago. "It was depressing shit," she said. "They didn't wax or tan back then. It wasn't sexy at all. At one point there's this doggie-style scene, and the girl has a huge black bruise on her butt. You'd think they'd have had a makeup person for that. And later there's this one cum shot where this girl gets it in the eye, and they just leave the camera focused on her. They just leave it on her! So she improvises and uses the guy's penis to clean off her face. Poor girl."

Even with all its humping and innuendo, the musical Debbie is nowhere near as hard-core as the movie; if anything makes the audience horny, it's Ms. Garrison's constant nether-stroking.

"A couple of men have commented on how I touch myself during the show," Ms. Garrison said. "I do that in subway stations now. I don't even think about it. I'll be waiting for the subway, and I'll be rubbing on myself without realizing it. That's so dangerous in New York City."

-Noelle Hancock

-George Gurley