I do, too.

DougR: Woops! Another misunderstanding. It was Heston I was referring to as being in "Hamlet." He played a small role, the "player king," the one who gives the speech about Hecuba, and about whom Hamlet remarks in astonishment, "What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?" (If you don't know the play, I won't hold it against you.)

Heston surprised me, too, just as the player king surprised Hamlet, because I had never thought of him before as a particularly good actor, having seen him only in such things as "The Ten Commandments" and "Planet of the Apes."

(Apropos of nothing, when I run "Charlton Heston" through my spell-checker, it suggests "Charlatan Festoon.")

Mousethief: I am open-minded enough to believe there is more than one way to recover from alcoholism. But serious drinking leaves its mark on you. Someone who has been a drunk for several years can't simply quit drinking and then pretend it's as if nothing had happened, that he's exactly where he would have been had he never taken the first drink. It often takes a lot of counseling, consciousness-raising, guided self-examination, whatever you want to call it, to undo the damage alcohol has done, or at least to make up for lost time. I would be VERY skeptical of anyone who says, "a 12-step program is unnecessary" without explaining "unnecessary for whom?" or saying what they would put in its place.

If certain terms like "dry drunk" or "denial" seem like meaningless jargon to you, I suspect it's because you haven't seen the reality that lies behind the jargon.

Anyone interested in learning more: See if you can get hold of a video called "I'll Quit Tomorrow" published by the Johnson Institute Foundation. (It appears the JIF is no longer offering this video for sale. I don't know why. They do offer a book version, which is also good, but the video makes its point much more dramatically. Probably a lot of libraries still have the video.)