If you want to LIVE your dream, you have to live the WAY you dream. How can someone relate to someone else, on an ongoing basis, who cannot relate one thing to another, to begin with? I had a long profile here once, explaining EVERYTHING about why relationships fail and succeed, which I think led women to think I talk that much, as well. The idea was just to lay down the ground rules. For instance, almost always within three minutes of telling me something someone doesn't like, they do the EQUIVALENT thing, not thinking twice about how THAT affects ME the way what I did affects THEM. Easy to SAY you NEVER do what I did, if you just don't SEE when you do. The HUGE lesson of television is that EVERY relationship provides grounds for divorce EVERY week, if you can't see what YOU'RE doing for what it is. You're looking at ME all the time, so of course it's MUCH easier to see MY faults than your own. That's why Shakespeare is SO cool. ALL the comedies are about THIS mistake, which one of them teaches the other to overcome. The greatest athletes and musicians are continually learning to play better. But if you don't know how to play at all, NO number of dates will enable you to.

I just did my first stand-up act, and the one theme running through all the others was being miserable in love or unable to find it at all. HERE'S the DEAL, Kiddio: you GET it to the degree you can FANTASIZE it. Listen to all the greats, like Lilly Tomlin. They ROLE PLAY. The amazing love story you seek is a function of enabling some guy to be your waiter, cook, manicurist, bellhop, maitre 'd, etc., ALL of whom of course aren't looking for a TIP; they secretly want Ms. Lovely to drag them in teh room, but in a hotel, you don't do that. At HOME, however, with your one & only, you CAN. If you CAN'T, well then you're forever trying to find a good time at a show, a restaurant, a cruise, but it all becomes hollow eventually because you're STUCK with the same old same old, however much the scenery and menu change. Every boy had an aunt who looked like you, who they dreamed of. Aunt GaGa, I'm all grown UP now ... We're ALL Rick in Casablanca, the sherriff in High Noon, Dr. Zhivago, if YOU'Re willing to be Lara, Ilse, and Grace kelly, ON DEMAND. You DON'T need common "interests." Name ONE great tv or film couple who had ANY. THEY were their ONE common interest!

Play (ahem) CATCH? Make (ahem) MUSIC? I don't pretend to have a "voice' like those obnoxious karioke Sinatra impersonators, BUT when I knocked out "It's Only make-Believe" at the old O.B.I., the dj, who REALLY could sing, patted me on the back and said it was the first song ever sung there, HE did it, and I did it justice. I stopped in at the ballroom at the Ronkonkoma Holiday Inn one summer evening, and the band had left because of an electrical storm, and a young couple were there, who were getting married the next day, so I took the stage and did Dion's version of "When You Wish Upon A Star," which jazzed the crowd of drunks enough that I went on with Jackie Wilson, Platters, even Johnny Mathis stuff. Soooo, I would HOPE that some occasional BACK-UP wouldn't be TOO MUCH to ASK! It blows my mind when people tell me they can't sing, like people saying they can't dance. How on earth can you do (ahem!)you know WHAT if you can't make or follow music? Amazingly, people do THAT as dispassionately as they sing and dance! THINK ABOUT IT! If you can't let it all out on a dance floor or street corner, how on earth are you gonna let it out with your clothes off?