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‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour

a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six

impossible things before breakfast.’”

— from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,

by Lewis Carroll

The Lion and the Fox

A man was walking through the woods outside his home one day when he came across a hungry fox who seemed to be at death’s door. Because he was a kind man, he thought to bring it some food, but before he could go back to his home, he heard a fearsome roar and hid behind a tree. In seconds, a mountain lion appeared, dragging the carcass of its freshly caught prey. The lion ate its fill and then wandered off, leaving the remains for the grateful fox.

The man was overwhelmed by this example of an abundant and benevolent universe and decided that he wouldn’t return to his home or his job. Instead of working hard to provide for himself, he would follow the example of the fox and allow the universe to provide for him.

Needless to say, the fox wandered off, and as days turned to weeks, the man himself was hungry and at death’s door. Despite his best efforts to retain his faith, he was becoming desperate. In a rare moment of inner quiet, he heard the still, small voice of his own wisdom:“Why have you sought to emulate the fox instead of the lion?”

With that, the man returned home and ate his fill.

The Power of Make-Believe

I began acting when I was 6 years old; at the age of 12, I played Hamlet. But the experience that really launched my quest for understanding the human psyche didn’t come until I was 15. I was playing Pepe, one of the Puerto Rican gang members, in a youth-theater production of West Side Story.

Now there’s a musical number fairly early on in the show called “Dance at the Gym.” And this was the first chance we Puerto Ricans really got to strut our stuff. The choreography was sexy, very Latin, and noisy—lots of shouting of “Ay, Caramba” and “Chee, Chee, Chee” and other approximations of what a bunch of small-town white kids imagined Puerto Rican gang members would say.

This was my favorite part of the show, and this particular night we really got into it. We danced until the sweat was pouring, and the lights were hot and the girls were hot and the music was hot and it felt like the whole theater was burning up.

We were all riding that passion and feeling those really intense feelings, and then we got into the scene called the Rumble. Well, we’d done this dozens of times before. The Americans taunted us; we taunted them; there was a lot of macho dancing (this time with switchblades); and in the end, Bernardo stabbed Riff and we all ran like hell. Only this time, something different happened.

One of the American gang members, a big blond guy named Snowball, was looking at me, and he started calling out, “Ay, Caramba” and “Chee, Chee, Chee,” and making fun of the way we’d been dancing in the previous scene. And all of a sudden I went from hot to furious. Not pretend, not acting—genuinely furious.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been made fun of for your race, appearance, gender, or sexuality, but I was so filled with anger at that moment that I wanted to leap across the stage and kill him.

Fortunately for both of us, there was a curious part of me that was observing the whole scene and offered up some useful counterarguments. First, I’m not Puerto Rican. Second, the actor playing Snowball was actually a good friend I hung out with offstage. Third, we weren’t on the mean streets of New York City—we were in a theater in a small town in Massachusetts, doing a play in front of a few hundred people.

Yet the anger I felt when the person he was pretending to be insulted the person I was pretending to be was redhot and real.

What I came to realize that night is that if you “make believe” something long enough (like being a Puerto Rican gang member), it becomes real to you—you begin to think and feel and act as if it’s really true. Otherwise I would never have been upset about being teased for being Puerto Rican. (Let’s