It's All In the Playing by Shirley Maclaine Read Free Book Online Page B

about Clint Eastwood? The character shouldn’t have many lines.”
    Mort hugged Sachi, wished her happy birthday, and told her to stay out of miniskirts on Sunset Boulevard. Stan said he was going home to tell his wife he was really an Egyptian pharaoh, while Harold stared into his teacup, probably thinking about Ruth Gordon.
    Bob Butler walked around muttering, “I’ll sign anything.”
    I went to the window and looked out over the waves below. I took a deep breath and tried to assimilate the implications of what I was doing in making Out on a Limb for public scrutiny.
    Regardless of how artfully we crafted the story and the shooting, would basic human skeptical prejudice overwhelm the potential of moving an audience? People were touched by what they could identify with. How many could identify with disembodied spiritual entities who helped “Shirley” along her spiritual path? How many even cared about spiritual questions anyway?
    For me personally, the existence of disembodied spiritual guides proved that we never die, that we just change form and go into other dimensions; that all souls exist somewhere guiding and helping others. That made sense to me both scientifically and spiritually. I knew many others who felt the same way. But on a mass-consciousness level—to which television speaks? I wasn’t so sure.
    I opened the sliding glass door and walked out onto the balcony. And what about the critics? Most people seemed to think television critics didn’t matter much anyway. But how would those arbiters of public taste feel about exposing their own attitudes and beliefs when it came to reviewing a real person’s autobiographical spiritual experience? Sixty-seven percent of the American public—according to recent polls—have had an “otherworldly” experience themselves. If the critics hadn’t, how could they evaluate whether I had crafted it artistically or not? There would be no basis for identification, only abasis for ridicule. And if a critic had had a spiritual experience, would he be afraid of expressing it in his review?
    I thought of how I would review a show based on material that I believed was twilight-zone mumbo jumbo. I concluded that I would dismiss it as frivolous and silly if I had never thought about such things. However, if I had my own entrenched religious beliefs relating to spiritual matters, and found metaphysics offensive, I would probably find it impossible to separate being offended from artistic objectivity. And finally, if I was a left-brained, eloquently cynical skeptic who was convinced that God and Cosmic Justice were myths and that man was involved in a spiral of tragically negative proportions, ready to blow himself up out of conflict and despair, I would probably attack a karmically spiritual point of view with violent anger because it would offer an explanation of the human condition that would leave me without an identity—an identity defined by limitations and anger and despair rather than by idealistic hope and positive individual responsibility based on the law of cause and effect (karma).
    I looked for a long time at the ocean. Did any of my qualms really matter? Was I going to keep who I was in a closet? Did it matter what anybody else thought? Conviction and personal principle weren’t based on public or critical acceptance.
    I leaned over the balcony, and as I focused on the foam-capped waves of the rising tide below, I heard myself say: “You’ve lived your life in public. Why stop now?” I walked back inside.

Chapter 4
       T he following week we did a rehearsal with Kevin and his entities. I had given Kevin the screenplay so he could learn his lines. The entities, Tom and John, would scan Kevin’s subconscious so that they could study their lines also.
    Colin and I met Kevin at my apartment in Malibu.
    Kevin put Colin and me through a meditation that entailed isolated focusing of the seven chakkras (energy centers along the spine). With each focusing we