Just a Moment, Please

Spalding Gray has been missing since Saturday, which doesn't look good for the writer-actor-performance artist. He is best known for his wryly funny, neurotic monologues, which go on at book length and always seem to revolve around his search for "the perfect moment." Some of them have been filmed, such as Swimming to Cambodia, and I have two of them in book form. In recent years, he has suffered from depression and flirted with suicide. I do hope he turns up -- alive. In the meantime, here are a few of his bon mots:

"I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America -- New York City . . . It was tolerant. It was a place that tolerated differences and could incorporate them and embrace them, which was what America was supposed to be about and wasn't. So it was the melting pot that was a puree rather than individual vegetables. I think of New York as a puree and the rest of the United States as vegetable soup."

"Now Athol Fugard seemed to like hearing my stories, and also, he had just given up drinking so he was buying me drinks and kind of living vicariously through me. 'Spalding! I am going to have an orange and you will have yourself some beer. Now. What's been going on? Tell me all about your day.' And I told him. I told him about the Perfect Moment in the Indian Ocean and he said, 'Spalding. The sea's a lovely lady when you play in her, but if you play with her she's a bitch.' "

"I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God."

A friend of Gray's comments on his disappearance.