Once you're sort of pigeonholed into something, it's quite difficult to get out of it. I have no aversion to playing a gay character again, but it would definitely have to be the right role.
When I was 5 and my sister was 3, we went on a family trip, and she ate cheese off the floor at an airport. My mother, a germaphobe, got very upset. My sister, of course, got a stomach virus, and ever since then, I have an aversion to cheese.
Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task - say, solving math problems - men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.
The funniest thing is not who influenced me positively, but who influenced me negatively. I had such an aversion to what Busby Berkeley did; in my early formative years, I thought it was terrible. Now, I think it's wonderful. But then, I wanted to do anything but what Busby Berkeley did.
The diet is a twisted, noxious thing, all tortured abstinence and short-term fraud. I speak from bitter experience. As a restaurant critic, I eat to live and live to eat. And having a toxic aversion to exercise, there is little to prevent the inevitable bulging of my gut. Hence the need for the occasional diet.
Freck: What do you think about the New Path?
Barris: While it doesn't matter what I think, I kinda have to tip my hat to any entity that can bring so much integrity to evil. I mean, imagine this: a seemingly voluntary, privatized gulag which has managed to eliminate the meddling middlemen of public accountability and free will and wrap it up in a little bow
and give it to the public like a gift. I mean, come on this is...
[he makes exploding sounds and gestures]
Barris: ... this is awe-inspiring stuff.
Freck: I heard you have to go cold turkey.
Barris: Cold turkey doesn't even apply to Substance D. Unlike the legacy of inherited predisposition to addictive behaviors or
substances, this needs no genetic assistance. There's no weekend warriors on the D. You're either on it... or you haven't tried it.
Freck: Well, I like it.
Barris: Yeah. How many caps do you take per day?
Freck: Hmmm... very difficult to determine. But not that many.
Barris: Well, like the old-school
pharmacopoeia, a tolerance develops, you know. These visions of bugs, they're just garden-variety psychosis, but a clear indication that you've hurdled over the initial fun and euphoric phase and passed on... to the next phase. News from the guinea pig grapevine suggests that whatever it is, we won't know until it's way too late, you see? You see that we're all canaries in the coal mine on this
one?
Freck: Mm. I do think I have another source. That Donna chick.
Barris: Bob's girl?
Freck: Yeah.
Barris: Yeah, "his girl," although I know for a fact he never gets in her pants.
Freck: Really?
Barris: Yeah.
Freck: But he...
talks like he does.
Barris: Oh, yeah. That's Bob Arctor. He talks like he does many things. It's not the same, my friend, it's not the same thing. Donna has an aversion to bodily contact. I mean, junkies lose their interest in sex, you realize, due to organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And I have observed in her an inordinate failure of sexual arousal not just toward
Bob Arctor, but to... other males as well.
Freck: I can't believe she doesn't put out.
Barris: Well, she would... if she were handled right. For instance, I could show you how to sleep with her for less than three dollars.
Freck: I don't wanna sleep with her. I wanna buy from her.
Barris: Donna does
coke, all right?
Freck: Three dollars doesn't get you a line of coke.
Barris: Ah-ah. That's where you're wrong, pal.