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After George
"Seinfeld" star Jason Alexander
moves behind the camera with
the coming-of-age film "Just Looking."
WE CUT OUR LOX
BY HAND!
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
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, ason Alexander is having a
"George" moment. "I don't fast
on Yom Kippur, but then I do
this," he says, looking heaven-
ward and "mock cringing."
"No offense!" he blurts.
It's a scene right out of Seinfeld, but
then again, the 41-year-old actor shares
more than a few neuroses with the hap-
less shlep he portrayed for nine years on
TV.
Forget Alexander ever playing a tradi-
tional leading man: "I'm short and
bald," he says. Never mind the millions
he made on Seinfeld: He's still convinced
he could end up penniless.
Then there's the fallout from playing
George Costanza, one of the most popu-
lar characters ever on television. "I can't
push George away, because it's like push-
ing a mountain away," Alexander con-
fides. "If I were to walk onstage as
Hamlet, everyone would go, Took, it's
George
So the Emmy-nominated actor has a
ruse to help George fade from public
memory: He's diversifying. Since Seinfeld
went off the air, he's starred in Lee
Kalcheim's Defiled at the Geffen
Playhouse in Los Angeles; he's played
Boris Badenov in the film Rocky and
Bullwinkle; and his production compa-
ny, AngelArk Inc., has signed a deal with
Fox-TV
Alexander also is stepping behind the
camera, of late as director of the come-
dy-drama Just Looking, which opens
today at the Maple Art Theatre in
Bloomfield Township.
Set in 1955, it's the tale of a Bronx
Jewish boy named Lenny (Ryan
Merriman). The 14-year-old is obsessed
with witnessing "an act of love" on his
summer vacation. For Alexander, it's a
familiar milieu, one that takes him back
to his childhood in middle-class Jewish-
Italian neighborhoods in New Jersey.
Alexander, ne Jay Greenspan, says he
was a fat kid who used comedy to put
off his tormentors at school. "It was a
preemptive strike against cruelty,"
.
explains the actor, who memorized every
comedy album in his parents' home.
His Woody Allen and Jackie Mason
impressions mollified the bullies. "But I
didn't look at it as performing," says
Alexander, who won a 1989 Tony for his
role in Jerome Robbins' Broadway. "It was
just survival."
At 13, he discovered the theater, and
knew he had found his calling. He felt
powerful onstage, he says, at a time
when he felt powerless everywhere else
in life. He took tap dancing lessons from
two 80-year-old ex-Ziegfeld girls — four
towns away so his classmates wouldn't
find out and taunt him.
By junior high, he had a manager, a
union card and a stage name (Alexander
is his father's first name).
The actor's sexual coming-of-age,
meanwhile, was far more dramatic than
fictional Lenny's in Just Looking. "I didn't
quite have his period of innocence,
Alexander says, ruefully "I actually had
my first experience at 13 with an actress
who was in her 30s in the wings of a
theater during the rehearsal of a show."
The show ended, and so did the rela-
tionship. "Then I had this 4'/2-year hia-
tus [from sex]," the director recalls. "I
went around to every girl I knew, trying
to sell her on thisgreat thing I'd found,
but I couldn't close the deal."
Alexander says he toned down the
originally titillating Just Looking script so
the protagonist could enjoy some of the
childhood innocence he missed. Then
he has another George moment: "I just
think about my poor parents going, 'We
knew we shouldn't have let him do the-
ater. r "
Also at 13, Alexander completed his
bar mitzvah, turned to his parents and
said, "Are we done?"
His Jewish education had been less
than inspiring. "What had been offered
me as religious training was a lot ofform
and no content," he says. "I could read
Hebrew right to left, left to right, upside
down, no vowels, but I didn't know
what one word meant."
Over the years, Alexander remained a
strictly cultural Jew — until he and his
wife, Daena, accepted an invitation to
"