I never saw Theodore after that. I couldn't bear it. My visits with him were draining, like watching 3000 years worth of crumbling pyramids in an instant. I tried to keep track of him, from afar. He had advice for the lovelorn column for Mean Magazine. That meant that somebody must be visiting him, to read him letters and record his responses, right? Good, good. I asked Richard for Theodore's number again, in April of 2000, but never called it.

I even thought about writing this appreciation, even though I barely knew Theodore (and I thought about writing this parenthetical comment, to explain that I thought about writing that I thought about writing this appreciation (and this one as well (and this one, on and on, into the dark pit of nothingness at the center of existence))) and didn't know much about his life, other than what he told me.

He told me that Gil Hodges' widow often saw Gil's ghost, and that he hoped people had breasts and buttocks and cocks in heaven. He distrusted his senses and their limitations, even before they began to betray them. Once, he saw Woody Allen on TV, in some film he couldn't remember, and saw the most exquisite moment of acting at Allen's character looked on at a wedding he wasn't a part of. A look, not a pose or an expression, captured the essence of experience in a way that no other actor he could. Theodore didn't like his role in The Last Unicorn, because he couldn't be himself. He didn't hope to die on stage, but he wouldn't have minded if that's how it happened. He never voted, except in Screen Actors' Guild elections. He hoped that one day someone would do something with a short film in the German Expressionist style he had made 45 years ago, Midnight Café. And he was disappointed that I didn’t share his enthusiasm for dancing till one's legs rotted off, for truly living only when one was mere steps from the mouth of the grave.