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NOW APPEARING AT THE PIANO BAR: • JOHN PERRY Thurs.7:00 - 11:00 • Fri. & Sat., 7:30 Midnight OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK • 248-626-2630 41Q8 WEST MAPLE • BLOOMFIELD HILLS 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Uno'8 Chicago bar Grill 1 /2 OFF r Any Menu Item when a 2nd menu item of equal or greater value is purchased L 10/27 2000 102 Not good with any other offer Expires December 31. 2000 Valid Anytime • Dine in Only 6745 ORCHARD LAKE RD. Across from Americana West (248) 737-7242 , 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 "