Who Is Jane Galt?

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Ayn Rand's novels have been a major influence on my philosophy and my life. The e-mail address I have used for over twenty years and is the one best known to my friends is based on something taken from Atlas Shrugged. I used to have a license plate frame on my car that read “I'd Rather Be In Galt's Gulch”. This was not literally true, I would have left Galt's Gulch pretty quickly, heartbroken that it was “close, but no cigar”. But I hoped that the message would provoke others who might be interested in the same ideas to start conversations with me. But no one ever did...

While I don't today endorse or agree with everything Rand believed, and find some of her ideas as well as the activities of many of her acolytes highly problematic, I feel that she identified some very important things in the social arena. Her political and economic ideas are not well developed, and in many cases dangerous if taken literally, which many of her followers do. She is really a social theorist, and she identified, perhaps for the first time, a critical problem that we need to solve.

For thousands of years now we have expected the best leaders, whether in politics, in business, in social movements or in sports, to act with dispassionate dedication to the good of the body they are leading. We expect the leader to sacrifice personal passion in carrying out their duties. But this creates leaders who live in a chronic state of emotional sacrifice.

A sacrifice is only healthy if it is a one-time event, a period of pain that passes, not an ongoing state of being. We've configured our society in such a way that in many walks of life—motherhood, politics, business, war—we expect the leader to forego personal fulfillment as a way of life. Ayn Rand identified that this is a problem that has a cancerous impact on society. Leaders must also be allowed to live fulfilling personal lives.

Ayn Rand proposed a solution, but I don't think her proposed solution is very good, though there are many planks of it I would keep. But her books grab people because she identified something that had gone unexpressed. But she has in some respects become a dangerous figure because of this, as it gives rise to a cult-like following that latches on to her terrible ideas along with her good ones.

We often can't understand people in the business realm or the political realm, because we all tend to hide not just the details of our sexuality, but the details of our romantic emotions. This gives rise to the phenomenon that many of the leaders in the public realm are operating on secret personal motives, not political ones. I believe Ayn Rand is one such figure.

Ayn Rand always denied that Frank Lloyd Wright was the model for Howard Roark, and when I first read The Fountainhead and then saw that she denied it, that might have been an early little event that ensured I would never see Rand as a God. I recognized it as a curious mystery that I needed to solve because there are two Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Wichita, and just standing looking at them, it is obvious to any person who applies her principles of objective thinking that when Rand said Roark wasn't based on Wright, she was lying.

Roark is obviously based on Frank Lloyd Wright. There were a lot of other prominent architects at the time, yes. But the way the buildings in the book are described, his public quotes on his philosophy of building, and what has been reported about Wright's truculence with his clients, at least that much is taken from him. Maybe his hair wasn't orange. Perhaps it seemed so obvious to me and wasn't so obvious to others because my father was a building contractor, and I studied more about Frank Lloyd Wright than I did about Ayn Rand.  Maybe there were not so many others who knew enough about Frank Lloyd Wright to know it.  But when its so obvious, at least to someone who really knows Wright's life and work, why would she deny it?

Isn't it obvious that Ayn Rand would be in love with Frank Lloyd Wright? She knew him, came to gatherings at his house. But he didn't like her, and according to some, felt that she had what amounted to a creepy obsession with him. He thought of her, perhaps not like a stalker, but as a hanger-on who was tolerated but not really wanted.

Nonetheless, at her request, he designed a house for her. I've seen one sketch of it somewhere in an obscure Wright book the name of which I don't remember, and it would have been one of his best, like Fallingwater by the ocean. I don't know if full plans exist somewhere, but I would love to try to have that house built.

The famous story is that Frank Lloyd Wright told Ayn Rand how much the house would cost, about $40,000 if I remember correctly. During her lifetime, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged did well, but she wasn't making James Patterson money. She couldn't afford it. She asked him to lower the price for her (totally in line with her principles, right?), but he reportedly told her, “Go make more money, little girl.”

I don't know if Howard Roark is like that because Frank Lloyd Wright was like that, or if Frank Lloyd Wright was sarcastically saying to her, “This is what the version of me you created would say to you.” This seems to correspond to when Ayn Rand's public behavior sort of went off the rails. The fact that she never produced another novel after Atlas Shrugged is cited as her living her John Galt principle and being on strike. But I think she was in so much emotional turmoil over what happened with Frank Lloyd Wright that she couldn't write.

Look, Ayn Rand was not an attractive woman by ordinary standards, and Frank Lloyd Wright was something of a ladies' man. I think Ayn Rand was living the last several decades of her life in a crippled state of unrequited love mourning, probably watching one beautiful Wright building after another go up, and crying clutching that sketch of her house at night thinking those buildings would stand forever and no one would remember her writing. But in her state of being emotionally hurt, she said abhorrent things that her followers then ran with, like her statement in an interview that European settlers were justified in seizing the continent from Native Americans because “they weren't doing anything with it anyway.”

And its funny, as much as I loved Rand's books, I don't think people realized how much I disliked Rand's characters. I could live with John Galt because he didn't have much personality, but he wasn't personally interesting to me. I wouldn't have gone out with Dominique Francon if she was the last woman on earth. Howard Roark wasn't authentic, he was just an asshole. All his emotions bottled up, capable of achieving fulfillment through work but incapable of recreation. Peter Keating was not a true friend to Howard Roark, but Howard Roark wasn't a true friend to Peter Keating either.

What if Roark had said, “Peter, you don't have to be the best architect to be a great architect. You know I'm better but come work for me and we'll be a team. You know how good I am, and I know all the connections you have, so we'll never be out of work.  I'll be responsible for the building designs, but you're a good draftsman, and you can run the drafting department and go out and persuade the clients. They'll accept my style of work coming from you, and we'll call it Keating & Roark so that when you see one of my buildings, you call tell people 'It's ours' and you'll be telling the truth, and they'll assume you're in charge because your name is first.”

That's what a woman would do. But Roark wasn't enough of a creative problem solver in the human world to recognize that he could figure out a way to catch more flies with honey, and get up more of his buildings, exactly as he wanted them built, by figuring out the right way to use Peter Keating as an ally. Keating & Roark would have been something even greater than “Howard Roark, Architect” was.

I didn't see any of Rand's heroes as someone I would have wanted to hang out with except two, Dagny Taggart and Francisco D'anconia. And this was one of the main things I didn't like about Atlas Shrugged. If Dagny was the girl I wanted, she would have wanted Francisco, not John Galt. And it would have been a much better book if that happened and we had to see how John Galt would respond to that. Would he stand by his plan if he didn't get the girl, if he had to watch Dagny walking down the streets of Galt's Gulch holding hands with Francisco every day?

To me, Dagny and Francisco's romance was the kind I wanted, and the end of the book was a betrayal of it by a writer who called herself romantic. Francisco was the only one of Rand's male characters who really had a sense of humor, even though he was serious. The only one who knew how to have a good time, even though he was working. He was the only one who was at least plausibly not White, although I guess you could say that the description of John Galt is vague as to his ethnicity as everything about him is vague.

But there was a power in Galt's vagueness. This is why John Galt is not really a human character, he is more of a Messianic figure for atheists. Just like people waiting for Jesus to come back, I was waiting for this mysterious figure to emerge from the shadows in my life and give me all the answers, and invite me to build something with him. But I couldn't see far enough to see a woman in this role, and even though she was a woman herself, Rand couldn't either.

And we know this because in all her books, the female protagonists are looking for a man leader-figure. It is actually one of her little-read early novels Anthem that I like the best in terms of the emotional interactions between the characters, but it is essentially written in broken English. We remake movies but it is taboo to think of rewriting a book.  I would love to do a re-write of Anthem because I think it is a story that would appeal to the audiences that hate Rand, and help them understand a bit better where she was coming from.  I believe it would make an excellent movie as well.

One of Rand's spectacular accomplishments that should be lauded by everyone regardless of their thoughts on her ideology, or her status as a literary figure, or her public behavior, it that is remarkable that someone who was not a native English speaker could write two books that I think it is fair to say have become a part of the canon of English-language literature. The improvement of her writing just from a linguistic perspective between Anthem and Atlas Shrugged is remarkable. But yet, in that time her ideas on gender seemed to have regressed.

From a gender perspective, John Galt could be seen as the embodiment of the cry of a lonely, overworked woman who feels her burden is too heavy, dying for a man to rescue her. John Galt as a character can be summarized by the line from the legendary soap commercials that became a catchphrase because it expressed how we all feel sometimes: “Calgon, take me way!”

I was looking for a rescuer in love who I assumed would be a woman. I was looking for a rescuer in the world at large that I assumed would be a man. But I never thought, never dared to dream that it might be possible for me to have the leader I was searching for in both realms of my life in one woman. I had felt the promise of it once, but when that didn't work out, I went on with the assumption that it was too tough a role for one person.

I never really thought about any actresses as potential leaders in my life, though there were a few—only a few—that I would have been interested in trying to connect with had I run into them somewhere in public. I was a writer interested in breaking in to Hollywood, but when I would see actresses out in places, I wouldn't talk to them, because there is an important image of them that we never see.

One of the unique and underappreciated aspects of being an actor in these days and times is that you are also a business executive by the inherent nature of the job. Take the Avengers movies which feature, as they used to say in the old days of Hollywood, a cast of thousands. The Avengers universe movies have earned, collectively, billions of dollars, about $10 billion I would guess off-hand, and it is mostly a similar cast and crew.  It's one long on-going project.

There are I would guess maybe two thousand people who were a part of the project to create each individual movie, probably at least half of them having worked on them all. Avengers Endgame was made in probably about eighteen months including preparation, and it has earned well over two billion dollars, perhaps three by now, in just several weeks. This is what the tech moguls that are mega-billionaires in stock valuation are dying to figure out how to do!

So when you see these actors earning multi-million dollar salaries and think they are overpaid, it just shows that we are a society of ignorant haters. They are moguls that are making the economy move. They are actually taking less of the money, because the producers who fund the movie are taking more of the risk. A movie is a rare industrial commodity in that you can spend $200 million to make it, and get virtually no return if it tanks at the box office. In any other industrial realm, you're going to have a product you can sell at a loss and recoup at least a good portion of your investment. So the movie producers as well are prime drivers of economic activity.

We never see the image of a beautiful young Hollywood actress, maybe only in her early twenties, already a multimillionaire, wearing a business suit with her hair up and no makeup on, sitting around a table discussing the creation of a multi-billion dollar product with billionaire men twice her age and they came to her because they need her, not the other way around. We never see the image of the action movie star, as someone who controls a brand as large and as valuable as a soda brand, more likely to be found holding a two-inch thick financial report instead of a machine gun.

We don't see this because they have refused to be boxed into a life where they are not allowed to live, so we see them doing the things they do to enjoy life, and we criticize and mock them for it. We think they are all out an expensive nightclubs and restaurants all the time, or just running around sleeping with each other. And that they are all drug addicts and alcoholics and party animals.

We think this because they make the sacrifice of allowing the world to intrude on their private lives, so we see it when they make mistakes. If a young actor or actress has a drinking problem and goes to rehab, we paint actors as irresponsible. But wait, isn't going to rehab what you're supposed to do?  But if a brilliant young broker on Wall Street who had already made millions for his firm had a substance problem, we would think of it as a relatively minor vice. But young Lindsay Lohan and Robert Downey Jr. were driving way more economic activity than a young lion on Wall Street.  Look at how much money the Ironman movies have made, and all he's done in recent years, and add up how much sending him to prison for that bullshit reason cost this society.

A lot of the negative perceptions of Hollywood actors comes directly from the fact that there are a great many Jews working in Hollywood and we still struggle with antisemitism in America, even though Jews have contributed so much to this society.  We say “Jews control Hollywood” but we never stop to acknowledge that Hollywood is by far the most diverse industry in America. This is in part because we don't see it as an industry because we don't recognize the skill, talent and sheer work that go into making a movie, or recording an album, or performing a sport at the highest level. So we don't think about these entertainers as prime movers in important industries.

But what other industry has created more Black multimillionaires than Hollywood, except the music industry and sports which also have historically had a heavy Jewish influence? In what other industry do you find so many people from backgrounds of deep poverty like Tobey Maguire, earning multi-million dollar salaries and respected as industry leaders? But its also an industry that is egalitarian because you have Rooney Mara, who is from a billionaire family that does or did own the New York Giants and I imagine a great many other things. She could go sit behind a desk and get paid to not do much, but she's there in Hollywood, working.

Hollywood has people from all backgrounds, from all over the country, urban and rural, liberal and contrary to what you think there are many conservatives in Hollywood, but you must be open-minded and tolerant. Jim Caviezel is a devout Catholic, and a great actor.  He doesn't work a lot because he won't do roles that go against his spiritual beliefs.  But Hollywood welcomes him to to work when he sees something right for him.  In the Passion of the Christ, was the perfect man for that role, because he gave away so much that he could have earned and won, if he was willing to make out with a woman who wasn't his wife.  But for him, that is wrong, so he won't do it.  But he misses out on even more chances, because he may not get considered for a movie with no sex, because it takes away the filmmakers flexibility to add a sex scene that they think the movie can do without, but they have to see how the actors do in their roles, and might need to add it back in later, and its far easier to change horses midstream than to change actors mid-shoot.

Hollywood has promoted a much greater depth of diversity than the corporate world, because the corporate world too often thinks in only four colors—Black, White, Latino and Asian.  Hollywood needs to cast Native Americans, East Indians, Arabs, Africans, people from small isolated tribes.

Hollywood also provided a lot of work for Eastern Europeans who we assume are privileged because they look “White” but the economies of many Eastern European countries are suffering and so are the people.  This is why I believe we should stop saying "people of color" as if White people are colorless.  Otherwise, impoverished and neglected White people become invisible.  Actually, we should stop calling people “White” period.  If you saw a person who was actually white, you'd freak out and think it was an alien invasion.

Hollywood also recognizes the need to distinguish between Japanese people and Chinese people and recognize that the cultures are very different,  as are all the individual Asian cultures.  If two companies are both ten percent Asian and in one case they are all Chinese and in the other case they are all Japanese, those are going to be two very different companies. We've been at war with Japan and an ally with China, a rival with China and ally with Japan. We had our longest war in Vietnam, and another in Korea.  But yet, most Americans can't distinguish in which of those countries a person has their roots if we meet an Asian-American or an Asian immigrant in the streets, even though each typically looks distinctively different.

We criticized Hollywood for a lack of diversity in the Eighties and they responded by going beyond the call of duty, even though they already had more diversity than most industries back then. Hollywood has immigrants from literally all other the world, from the poorest countries in West Africa and Asia to the richest countries in Europe. They have work for them because Hollywood portrays the world in its films. In some cases, Hollywood movies are more diverse than real life now, and that is a bad sign for the way our society is moving.

Hollywood has always created opportunities for the disabled. We only saw one side of the fact that Little People for example, were often depicted in comic roles. The other side was that the actor had an opportunity to get well paying work while they might have been totally shut out of other fields because they were different, and their other options might have been the carnival or playing a leprechaun at St Patrick's Day and waiting for Christmas to play an elf. But progress continued until today when Peter Dinklage can play serious characters in serious roles and be respected as not only an important actor, but someone to make people reexamine how they see people like him that they encounter in their daily lives.

But we forget that Sylvester Stallone has a disability.  He took the speech impediment that he suffers from and turned it into the signature voice of a tough guy that we all imitate in this culture.  I don't know how much money Marlee Matlin has made in her career, but pretty good work for a hearing-impaired woman.  And I can't even imagine how good she must be to be able to be even a serviceable actress, much less a good one, with that disability given all the ways in which sound cues are essential to acting.

Nobody would think of Megan Fox as disabled, but I bet it isn't as easy for her to open jars or complete a lot of ordinary tasks because her thumbs are different.  Imagine Megan as a busy mother fumbling with the straps on her baby's carseat and you see her in a different light than the public portrayal of her as a self-centered entitled bitch.  And if you're late to work because of something like that, maybe your boss will yell at you.  If she's late, someone might lose a million dollars.  That's how expensive time on a movie set is.

You say she's rich, she should be able to get a custom seat.  But stop and think.  She wasn't born a mother.  Just like anyone, she was busy figuring out all the tasks of motherhood and probably wouldn't have thought about the fact that a carseat might be a challenge.  So that FIRST time she realized she couldn't do a simple thing everyone does as easily, that was unforeseeable.  But you never know when this is going to pop up, because that particular thing is a problem only for you.  And that's what a disability does, it fills your life with unforeseeable challenges that only you, or a small number of people share.

I don't know that this particular thing happened.  She may be able to do carseats fine, but I know enough about physics and biology to know that there would be something, probably many things, that she would encounter that would be a problem.  There are trick bottle caps with tabs that it is literally impossible by the laws of physics for her to work them.

When they design a child safety cap, they factor in the shapes of children's hands to try to make it that it requires the application of pressure that is not physically possible for them.  But Megan's thumbs are more like the shape of a child's, and she is a small woman, so when these engineers are trying to figure out how to make a cap so that a child can't open it, they are unavoidably also making it so Megan can't open it.

But what I noticed is that when I watch disabled people, the tricks they devise to do simple things that we do easily are often better than the conventional way of doing things.  Disabled people are forced to become creators, and working to overcome their inability to do things the "normal" way, they come up with a better way.  This is why we need them, in our workplaces, in our political discourse, and in our daily lives.

I was going to say there are not enough disabled women working in Hollywood, but then I remember something sad about our culture.  We wouldn't know how many disabled women are working in Hollywood, because this culture views a disability as diminishing, or in some cases completely negating a woman's beauty, so a woman has more incentive to hide any way in which she is different.  This has to change.  Several of the hottest women I've seen in my life were disabled, and if anyone questions me on that, I've got a memory where I can remember enough detail to identify them and find them if they just want to be famous.  Everybody might not think they're beautiful, but I do.  And there are some traits that are unusual, that might even technically be considered disabilities, that I actually find more beautiful in a woman.

Hollywood also creates work for older people, who we treat in a shameful way in this society. It is the only job I can think of where you practically always have the ability to work no matter your age, because Hollywood has characters of every age.  There may be more or less work during different times, but when you see an old woman dying in the bed in a hospital in a movie, that is an actress, maybe one who was the beautiful star in an obscure old movie that didn't catch on, so nobody remembers her name, but she's still working.

Hollywood employs armies of consultants from various fields. Technicians of every stripe that work behind the scenes.  It is really America's only industry where there is work for any type of person, even though there areonly a relatively mall number of jobs to be filled.  But in that small little troupe, you will find everything that we are. Hollywood is America.  Hollywood is the world.

And here is one great thing about actors, a truly admirable thing that we don't see because we don't recognize them as business moguls. I would guess that most of the biggest star actors who names you know are worth well over $100 million, many of them are now close to being billionaires. They deserve it. Movies make BILLIONS and they are the ones who bring you out to see them.  But more than that, they are a part of the fabric of our culture.

But nobody ever stops to consider when watching a movie that they are watching mega-millionaires doing a job that is very difficult mentally and physically, that involves critical high-level business decisions, difficult economic decisions macro and micro, but still involves long days of film shooting in often harsh outdoor environments.  Some of them have enough money to never work again and still indulge in the most absurd luxury that might strike their fancy. But yet, they come to work every day and show us our own lives, and not only that, the lives of people in the oppressive past or the feared bleak future.  And because they are so good at their job that the technical difficulty of what they do is obscured, we can't see how hard they are working.

Why would they do that? Why would they sacrifice so much to depict our daily struggles on screen? Because they care about us, even though we treat them like they are not even human beings.  There are over two million people in prison in America, most of them poor or people of color.  But the way we act in public, we've made celebrities prisoners in their mansions.  And many who may be making less money than you think and can't yet afford a mansion, may be living as prisoners in places not much different from where you are.  This has to change...

Even in this contentious political environment that we are in, with critical world events swirling around, Donald Trump should be able to take his family out for dinner at a restaurant in the city he is from, and not be bothered.  More than that, he should be treated with respect in that situation, because he is a private citizen who is trying to do an almost impossible job in public service.  Now, there are policies Donald Trump advocates that I find abhorrent.  But there is a large army of citizens, as well as opposing elected officials, who are fighting him on all of those.  If the President of the United States, no matter who she or he is, cannot enjoy a normal human activity, how do you expect them to remember how to be human?

Now, if Donald Trump is out having dinner in Manhattan two nights a week, then we have a problem...perhaps.  If things were going great and most Americans felt the government was doing a great job, we shouldn't mind that.  Perhaps being able to do that is what allows him to handle his job so well.  If things are going great, when we see politicians, we should say to them, "Great job, guys."  Maybe even pick up their check.  A lot of us make more money than them.  As we saw with the Duncan Hunter situation, not all of our elected officials have personal wealth.

This actually reflects a similar problem to the issue with how we treat celebrities.  It is weightier and more difficult because politicians do work that we perceive as having a greater impact on the world, but that is even more reason we should allow them some personal space on the street.  George W. Bush's presidency was extremely controversial and polarizing.  But he was peppered with questions by professionals, on television, and in press conferences.  Do you really think you have any criticism he hasn't already heard?

But just like with actors, because our politicians cannot freely walk amongst us and recreate themselves like normal human beings, have an outing with their family at a favorite restaurant, it is remarkable that they remember us at all.  You might think that they can go out and eat at an expensive restaurant that you can't afford.  But perhaps when they were a junior staffer just hanging on in Washington, they used to take their wife out to this one Applebee's every Friday night, and now tey can't go there anymore.  But you still expect them to be able to empathize with you.  How? You won't let them come out unmolested, not to a town hall to be questioned about their job, but to the mall to shop for clothes with their little girl.

I think about all this as I'm contemplating the significance of the fact that this actress that I saw in Las Vegas is Jewish, and while there are other factors, so much of our lack of appreciation for the people who work in Hollywood stems directly from antisemitism. We know Hollywood has a huge number of Jewish people, and it is hard for us to look at any place that seems Jewish in its character and simply recognize it as good, because we are all looking through an antisemitic lens.

I start to realize that so many of the women that I respect most in the world are Jewish, but also, an overwhelming percentage of the women who are most attractive to me. I'm not talking about the women who are just most attractive in their bodies, but the woman that I find most attractive in their total being. But I always thought I was just strange and different that I thought Jewish girls were so beautiful, but then I realized, Jewish women excel in acting not only because they are smart, and driven, and dedicated, but also because a great many of them are smoking hot.

But because the Jewish genome includes girls like Amanda Seyfried and Scarlett Johansson that we look at and think of as White, we don't stop to realize that Jewish women are well represented on the list of the most beautiful women in the world, but there are only about eight million of them in the whole world!

Jewish women are a beautiful endangered species, and about 75 years ago, they were dangerously close to being gone forever. But they made it, thank G_d and now, we have to protect them. I mean, you want a world without Bar Rafaeli and Gal Gadot?!? Nothing gayer than that. But that's an insult to gay men, because they love models and actresses. Hell, gay men love beautiful women more than we straight guys do, if we judge by their behavior. What does that say about us? We as men talk about all this protection dynamic shit but then we create the exact social conditions that cause women and children to suffer. I have decided to change and I WILL NOT GO BACK.

I often forget that Ayn Rand was Jewish, and thus that it was a Jewish woman who created this archetype of this girl Dagny Taggart who I knew I would love if I met her, and this man John Galt who I would follow. But she couldn't create the character of the WOMAN I would follow. It wasn't in her.

But it suddenly makes me realize that this actress would be the archetype of the character that Rand could not create. I remembered her saying a few shockingly unconventional things in interviews, and thinking, “I can't believe she said that out loud!”, and waiting for a firestorm in the media that never came. One of them was a controversial view that she doesn’t think monogamy is practical, which I strongly agree with, but you know what I did?  I dismissed it and said, “Ahh, she'll grow out of that.”. But I didn't think about the fact that while I was several years older than her, she had already done way more in her life than I had. She would have been more likely waiting for me to grow out of things than the other way around.

I had never heard about this actress being in any trouble whatsoever, or being a problem during any production.  She hadn't had a revolving door of celebrity boyfriends.  The only person I could say I knew of her dating was one of the coolest guys in Hollywood, and I hope she's still friends with him because I'd like to be friends with him too.  But the only thing she was constantly linked with was a new blockbuster movie. And right now, like a lot of the MAT Girls, she is a divorced single mother.

And suddenly I realized that as different as she was from what I expected, what I saw was exactly what I should have expected of a girl who started working on multi-million dollar projects as a teenager, and before the age of forty had written herself into the history books of her industry, and perhaps—probably—the history books of the world.  But yet, she was so very human, and that was what I loved more than anything.

What I saw in her was so much more than any Rand character. I saw a worker like Dagny Taggart, who was hot like Dominique Francon. A creator of beautiful things like Howard Roark, but with the ability to enjoy life like Francisco D'anconia. She seemed in her ability to get away with saying shocking things to have in her a little bit of Rand's most colorful villain Ellsworth Toohey, who I never thought was as bad as Rand made him out to be. She was one of the richest women in the world, but she could stand in front of a camera and convince you that she is anything, from a waitress to a queen. But she wasn't looking over her shoulder for John Galt. She was the female John Galt looking for people to join her movement, and she looked at me. But there was something more in her to my eyes...

I love Jewish people. I never really stopped to think about it, but there were so many Jewish people that were a positive influence in my life, from the Jewish girl in seventh grade (she was probably about twelve!) who wrote a note in my yearbook that always reminded me to be a better person, to some of my best bosses at work, from figures in history that I admire to people today that I admire. My main interests in life were physics, the arts and law, all fields with a heavy Jewish influence. Even my favorite sport, basketball, is one that has had a major Jewish influence and many Jewish Community Centers have basketball leagues.

This actress is so much more beautiful to me because she is Jewish. It isn't just something I can accept. It's something I want. I had never thought about the fact that so many of the problems that I was anticipating if I were to marry a White girl simply wouldn't exist with a Jewish girl. I never thought about the fact that for all her wealth and fame, we were both children of oppressed peoples. But because Jews have recovered from their oppression with greater speed and success than Black people have, we forget that in the lifetime of Jewish grandmothers and grandfathers who are still alive, who you can still go and talk to, there was a credible effort made to hunt them to extinction. It was worse to be Jewish in Europe during World War II than it was to be Black in America, anywhere, ever.

But worse than that, the Nazis weren't just trying to wipe out the poor Jews in the ghettos. They were wiping out some of the brightest stars and leading contributors to their society. It was a truly psychotic act, carried out with rational efficiency. And this is the fundamental way in which antisemitism differs from other forms of racism.

Most forms of racism are driven by a genuine feeling of superiority that the member of the dominant group holds. But in the case of Jews, the leaders of Germany knew that the arrival of the Jewish people brought good new ideas and made Germany a better country. They told the people that they feared Jewish problems when really they feared Jewish success. So the fundamental underpinnings of antisemitism is not a feeling of superiority, but a fear of inferiority.

The state of things in America today is not that different from the conditions in Germany before the Nazi movement took hold. We see prominent Jews who have made the most spectacular contributions to this country for such a small number of people, but yet we look at banking and blame those problems on Jewish people even though the bulk of bank stocks are held by Gentiles. We look at Hollywood and blame Jewish filmmakers for the vices in our society when they are only reflecting what we are really doing, and even so, we're too stupid to get that Arnold Schwarzeneggar's movies are essentially intended to be slapstick comedies, and Sylvester Stallone's characters are almost always reluctant fighters.  And the majority of the stock in media companies is also Gentile-held.

We are in similar conditions to those that existed when fascism arose, but we still have time to turn it around.  But we don't have forever.  We need to stop looking at Donald Trump as an individual and start looking at ourselves and our society...

Listen, I study physics. The man who taught us that matter could be converted to energy was Albert Einstein, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Europe. The man who first theorized that the atom could be split to make nuclear power was Leo Szilard, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Europe. The three leading scientists of the Manhattan Project were Edward Teller, Jewish; Robert Oppenheimer, Jewish; and Enrico Fermi who was not Jewish, but his wife was, which meant, in the context of those times, that he was effectively Jewish too. Because if somebody was coming for this actress trying to round her up, I wouldn't be having it, so I'm sure he wasn't either.

So you believe “Jews all stick together”, right? You believe that “Jews look out for themselves first”, right? There were already agreements in principle regarding the establishment of a Jewish homeland even before the start of World War II. By the time the Manhattan Project was finished, an Allied Victory seemed assured.

So if Jews want to rule the world, why wouldn't this team of overwhelmingly Jewish scientists have just held on to the idea of nuclear power so that Israel could be the world's lone superpower? There were Gentile scientists working on the program, but the world's top physicists were nearly all Jewish. It would have been easy, easy, for just Teller, Oppenheimer and Fermi to conspire to pocket the invention. Contrary to popular belief, Einstein was actually not on the Manhattan Project. He was primarily an astrophysicist not a particle physicist, so it was out of his area.

Believe me, the Russians were not going to get the atomic bomb before 1950 without any of the Jewish physicists who were in the West. They would have gotten it eventually, but not before Israel. But these brilliant Jewish scientists didn't hold on to this wisdom until they had their own country, to lord it over the rest of us. They gave it to the nation that had been the best to them, even though at that time, a Jew still couldn't get into any of the best clubs or neighborhoods in America, or any of the top schools except Harvard.

This is the slam-dunk, close the book, drop the mic argument against a global Jewish conspiracy for world domination. They had it in their hands, and they put their faith in America and gave it away. But yet, you have all these Americans today who don't think we should stand up for Israel and believe we should let the very people who gave us the bomb face annihilation by it. To allow this would be to the eternal dishonor of America.  The Jewish people have always been champions for human rights.  I believe they can be trusted to treat the Palestinian people fairly when they are not under threat.

Like Ayn Rand, Karl Marx was also Jewish. Just this sentence debunks a lot of the claims of antisemites. I can't forget that Marx was Jewish like I do with Rand because antisemites mention it every five minutes to try to suggest that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. I remember Ayn Rand's Jewishness most often when people mention that Marx was a Jew.

But Ayn Rand and Karl Marx were on opposite ends of the political spectrum and they were both Jews who repudiated both the Jewish faith and Jewish cultural identity. And the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union badly persecuted Jews though their activities did not rise to the level of the Holocaust. Why do you think there are so many Jews of Russian descent in America, nearly all of them staunch anti-Communists, some as far to the right as Rand?

So the Marx/Rand contrast illustrates a lot about how antisemites will look to blame someone Jewish no matter what. Conservative antisemites will point out that Karl Marx was Jewish and say socialism is hence a Jewish conspiracy, but you have another Jewish writer who is on the opposite end of the very same debate on socioeconomic theory. Many would call her anarcho-fascist, and she's intellectual public enemy number one for many liberals.

But neither Ayn Rand nor Karl Marx identified as culturally Jewish. They would have been to Jews like Larry Elder and Alan Keyes are to Black people.  But though they both chose to reject their Jewishness, you can still see some evidence of aspects of Jewish culture in their thoughts and theories, just as you can see evidence of Black culture in those two.

As perpetual outsiders with no home country, Jewish people were often able to see the problems within a society through clearer eyes, and propose better solutions than those in power could see. This gives rise to theorists like Rand and Marx who, whether you love them or hate them, see the world in new ways, and point out things about it that others have missed, like Noah Chomsky and Henry Kissinger in modern times.

So when the Jewish people were on their long, arduous journey around the globe, when they arrived in a society, the best and brightest Jews would propose ideas that would make the society better, and the positive results were obvious, so those Jews would become prominent and respected citizens, as they were in pre-Nazi Germany, as they are in America today.

But most Jews were always working class, then and now. We don't grasp that because Jews excel in some of the highest paid working class jobs, but being an actor is still a working class job even though the pay is great when you make it to the top.  Some of the MAT Girls were able to get their foothold right away, but you have to remember, in the entertainment industry, a girl who hits it big at nineteen might have been going to casting calls and getting rejected for fifteen years.  In a lot of jobs, five years more and you can retire.

An actors' work is irregular and unreliable, salaries fluctuate wildly with economic changes, you are easily replaced by younger, cheaper talent.  Hours are often long, conditions often harsh.  At every job opportunity, hundreds or thousands of people show up and they only take a few.  It sounds more like the job of a Mexican bracero than multimillionaire.  And when we think of "actors", we forget the ones toiling away in the minor leagues as it were, in community theaters and low budget independent films.

But actors are so good, we literally have forgotten as a society that they are acting.  When you see people outside filming a scene in the snow, you think it’s not cold out there?!? But they give us the illusion that they were only out there for the thirty seconds we see in the movie, but they were out there for days, sometimes weeks, doing that scene over and over again to get it just right so that you would look and listen, and it would feel real.  They are so good at pretending to be other people that a part of me always has to think a minute to be sure that Gwyneth Paltrow's not from England.

And it's funny, when I saw this actress in Vegas, I probably didn't recognize her because we just can't see actors as people who work as hard as she looked like she had been working.  My pick-up line to her, if I used pick-up lines, would have been, "Young lady, you are working way too hard.  Do you have time to come to Mandarin Oriental and have a drink with me and still catch your flight?  I'm a preacher's kid and I can tell you hilarious stories about that."  But by then, I would have recognized her, and added, "I've got a script I think you might like, too.  But we can talk about that if you want to see me another time."

I think about the burden that this girl and all her friends and professional colleagues are carrying, and it is almost an exact parallel with Atlas Shrugged.  They are the ones who entertain us, but yet, they can't even go out to relax without us bothering them, even though they are working people like us.  In days past, entertainers were a part of the community, the person in the next hut or the next apartment who had a special talent.  These people usually performed for free, but the community paid them back by showing special respect to those roles.

When hard times hit, fascists blame the workers.  Actors are working people, and people are already primed to see them in a negative light because they believe "Jews control Hollywood".  So when our drug policies and social policies led to a crime surge, the violence in our streets is an action hero's fault, not the fault of our failed policies and our culture of alienation and desperation out of which the need for an action hero arose.

But even though there are millions of Jews in America, only a relative handful are in the movies.  I think because we see actors playing so many characters, we forget what a small group of people our favorite stars really are.  They are really more like a traveling troupe of actors, but thanks to Thomas Edison, they can settle down.

The film industry is vast and global, but Hollywood, the group of people who put out the bulk of the films we love as Americans, is only an industry of thousands, and while perhaps a majority of the filmmakers are Jewish, the bulk of the people employed as a result of their work are Gentiles: the people who work in your local theaters.  But anyone Jewish was seen through the lens of stereotypes about Hollywood, just as anyone Black was seen through the lens of stereotypes about urban gangs.

This was the position Jews found themselves in at every stop on their journey. They would arrive in society, lend the wisdom and insight of their culture, give freely of their ideas and their labor, but again and again when hard times hit, in Spain, or in Germany or in America, the problem was Jewish bankers, Jewish landlords, the Jewish media, Jewish lawyers, Jewish criminals, and if all else fails, some secret rituals they must be performing in connection with that strange religion of theirs.

We would blame Jews even though everyone, the leaders of the society certainly, knew that they had made many positive contributions, that our world had gotten better when they arrived. More colorful, more vibrant. Jews have always been leaders in the arts. People say, "Jews are stingy", but look at any list of donors for a charitable cause, and you'll see a lot of traditionally Jewish names on it if there are any Jewish people in that community...and sometimes if there are not.  Take note of how there are so many public spaces that were established thanks to gifts from Jewish donors.  But what is notable is that these are public spaces for relaxation and recreation--museums, theaters, parks, but also things we need--hospitals and relief agencies.  You look at any campaign for human rights, and you are sure to find Jews at the forefront working for justice, even in the Muslim world.

As Jews fled from country to country, they picked up at all their stops the good things from those cultures, and integrated them into their own culture.  But in order to demonize them as political scapegoats, all those good contributions had to be explained away. How do you do that? Say that those things may appear good but they are part of a sinister unseen Jewish conspiracy. That's antisemitism.

I always spent a lot of time thinking about the predicament of the Jewish people, but I find myself saying all of this publicly now, because if my wife is going to be Jewish, like Enrico Fermi, it makes all this antisemitic shit personal now, and I can't let it go and just ignore it like I've done at times in the past. But even even if I can't get this actress, or any Jewish girl to marry me, I still won't stand for it anymore. If I am welcomed, I want to become Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., but I don't want to convert to the Jewish religion, though I'm not ruling that out. I want to convert to the cultural identity of Jews, particularly liberal American Jews of the kind you find in Hollywood, and most particularly, The Jewish MAT Girls.  And as much as I love Frank Sinatra records, and Dean Martin movies, I don't want my crew to be guys, I want them to be girls.  I'm not looking to join the Rat Pack.  I want to join the MAT Pack.

There have got to be hundreds of MAT girls by now, perhaps thousands.  So my circle will be a little wider.  But I do have three special ones in mind to be my MAT Girl crew.  Two of them I know are friends, but I don't know anything about their relationship with the third.  But I'd love to take them for a ride and tell them this great story about a Jewish race car driver who used to drive for Mercedes-Benz.  I've got a Mercedes CLK, like the one Britney Spears used to drive, maybe still drives now.

You assume with all her money, Britney Spears would go buy a new car, but I wouldn't necessarily need a new car if I were rich.  But wait, she doesn't have control of the money she earned right now, does she? Hell, right now I might have more money than Britney Spears because if I understood this headline I saw correctly, they've taken her money and her kids?!?  I don't know the details of the situation, I just know Britney Spears seems like one of the nicest, kindest people around, and it always seems like the world is shitting on her for no good reason.   She gives me hope writing this because she is a multi-millionaire who married a much less successful guy.  It may not have worked out permanently, but something would be wrong with Kevin Federline if he wasn't grateful for the experience. 

Of course, this actress who I would like to marry, or work for, preferably both, she is one of the three in my MAT Pack.  Some might wonder, why don't I identify her? She is a celebrity. Because much of the book I've written about our encounter revolves around her and the history of my interest in her career, I'm sensitive to the fact that it could impact her in ways that I might not have enough information to foresee.  She has a very valuable global brand that could be impacted by anything that is published about her, so I would not want to promote or publish the book, or blast confirmation of her name on the internet even though people can make their guesses, until she at least knows about it. Like the courtesy that a reporter gives of asking someone for comment before they run a story. But I have this view not because I am a journalist, but rather a professional colleague of hers to some extent, though on the opposite end of the success spectrum.

Also, I consider it the compassionate and empathetic view to consider that there might be reasons that I cannot even contemplate why she may not want it mentioned she was in that place at that time. Here's one I realized a little while ago, but never thought about with celebrities. Suppose that actress was supposed to be somewhere else that day, and she had been working nonstop for a few years shooting movies back to back to back, and she was tired and overwhelmed and she just had to get away to Vegas.

So maybe she told the person she was supposed to be meeting that she was sick and took a mental health day, had her assistant check into a room, sneaking in through the back entrance, and I happened to see her sneaking out through the back exit, which is exactly where we were. I've checked and there wasn't any event that I can find going on there that she was publicly promoted to be attending. So when you're leaving Vegas on Friday night of Labor Day weekend, you were probably there because you really needed to get away...

In the weeks after that night, or even the years after, I would be lying to tell you that I was thinking about her all the time. In fact, in the days immediately after that, I spent more time thinking about a gay man who started singing while walking through an empty mall in a hotel on the strip later that night as I was on my way back to my hotel. My thoughts kept coming back to her, as days and weeks and months, an then years went by, like the seed of a great tree growing in the earth.

After I got out of prison, I decided to do some research on who she was. I did consider the actress, but when I looked at still pictures of her, I thought, no. And there was a story that suggested she was somewhere else, which is a big part of the reason why I won't say who she is unless she agrees to it. So I moved on, and it tells you a lot about this woman's bearing that the main suspect I identified is a woman who would be on any reasonably long list of the most important people in the world. Not the most important women in the world, but the most important people in the world. I had never heard of this woman, but as I looked up information about her, she struck me as someone that I would believe in. But in watching a video of her speaking, and seeing her body language, and her eyes, I know it wasn't the girl I saw in Las Vegas.

The interesting thing is, the closest thing I've felt to what I felt when I saw this actress was the first time I saw Condoleezza Rice. I'm not talking in terms of sheer beauty, although Condoleezza Rice is a very attractive woman and it doesn't show television. No, I mean in the aura of power that she projected.  When I first got to Stanford, I passed her one day walking in the mall with university president. For those who don't know, at that time in 1994 she was the provost at Stanford, in essence the second in command, but having greater responsibility in some important areas than the university president. 

I knew who she was, had seen pictures in school publications, but she hadn't yet been Secretary of State and was not yet famous in the way she is today. My main reason in being interested in her was that she a Black woman who had a resume that looked like she was one of the smartest people on the planet. I did not see her notice me as we passed, but I remember being stuck by her presence.

Look, I was once in a business meeting with a former Congressman, and he said something that personally annoyed me, and I got up on my hind legs with him. I'm not the kind of person who cowers every time someone with power walks into a room. I've been around people with power all my life. But again, time often confirms the validity of what we perceived in a moment. They call it women's intuition sometimes.

At that time, if you'd said "Condoleezza Rice" to a random man on the street, they would have thought you were talking about a girl in the hood somewhere. But she was walking along with the university president and I recognized but did not notice him. She was the one that stood out to me as the more important of the two, and while he is a well respected academic, today we can see that a reasonable person would agree that she is the more accomplished, and in the political and academic world, she's still young.

But more than that. She was cute. Does that violate national security for me to say that Condoleezza Rice is cute? I mean, she was a girl that I would have walked up to talk to her, if she wasn't basically like the principal of my school.  It would have been foolish and irresponsible of her to consider something like that, and it also would have been foolish and irresponsible of me as one of the top recruits to what was, that year, the number one ranked school.  But once neither of us was Stanford anymore, given that I knew she had basically a MAT Girl prodigy type background, while she was everybody else's radar as a political figure, she was on my radar as an impressive woman I saw at the mall.

And being a part of the Stanford network, I knew I could get in touch with her if I needed to. But at the time in life where the age difference would have been surmountable, and I was ready to consider taking a step that would have led to that level of increase in responsibility had it worked out, she was Secretary of State of the United States during a war. I wasn't going to waste her time with my bullshit. But who knows, maybe that would have been what she needed after a hard day of working on the world's toughest problems.

But this actress could not be mistaken for Condoleezza Rice, and it says a lot about her who became my second suspect. There is a recruiting company I've worked with for years and I get emails from a secretary there with job opportunities, and they are located in Nevada. I got a note about a job I was interested in and I went to learn more about it. I happened to see a picture of her, and based on that picture, she could have been the girl.

Working in patent law for so long, and she is a recruiter for patent law jobs, the traits I saw in that girl in Vegas, that she was diligent, organized, and very very busy, I thought, there was enough of a physical resemblance that perhaps it was her. Maybe she was someone like me and scoured discount shops for obviously expensive, elegant clothes like the ones this actress was wearing. And that would explain why she might be leaving Vegas on Friday night, to go back to work in Reno.

But then, I got what I believe is my answer. I was watching a movie with this actress in it, and even as I'm watching it, I'm thinking it was not her that I saw in Las Vegas. And then this one scene comes on where she is walking, shot from an angle very similar to the angle when I saw her, and the recognition was instant, I thought, “That's her!”. I didn't think that the girl I saw in Vegas was this actress. I didn't think about her brand. I just recognized her, the way you would any person you had seen a long time ago and had been looking for ever since.

There is a second part in that scene and she is talking, but in a way that I've never seen her talk in any of her other movies. And it is noticeable because she's talking the same way that the girl in Vegas was talking. I couldn't hear her words, but the gestures, the way her mouth moved, it was obviously the same person. But yet, there is a certain way that she looks in most photographs, even in one shot in the middle of that very scene, where she looks totally different, and that totally different face is the one we all recognize.

I watch this scene, and there is this one close-up of her face, talking, and if back when the Atlas Shrugged movie was just a rumor, if that shot had come up during the trailers in a theater, I'd have assumed I was looking at a trailer for Atlas Shrugged and she was playing Dagny Taggart, a role I would have thought she'd be all wrong for. But when I saw her in that lobby, she was something more than that...

You see, people always thought I wanted to be a leader but I didn't. I wanted to be prepared to lead if necessary, because I knew I was a person of special capability. When I admired historical figures like John F. Kennedy and so many others, I didn't want to be like them. I was shy fundamentally, and didn't want that much attention. I wanted to find someone like them that I could follow and support, but I never found anyone that I could put that much faith in.  I probably wouldn't have been able to put that much faith in JFK in real life instead of in a history book if I had known he was cheating on his wife.

I saw an urgent need in society and I wanted to be the one to fill it. There weren't enough talented, capable people who wanted to be a supporting actor, even more than they wanted to be the lead. Well, there were, but they were usually people who had dismissed all hopes of being the lead long ago because they felt they didn't have the look or the talent. 

But there were rarely people who could have been a leader themselves who could look at someone else and ask them, “What do you need me to do?” So many leaders fail only for lack of support they can trust and rely on. But if we always have all the best competing to be the leader, and engage in this incessant competition to be the best, the leader is alone and unsupported. We can all be stronger if we know there is somebody behind us who might be stronger than we are, but is our partner.  Keating & Roark.

My personal emotional desire was to be under the wing of a great person who I could trust and believe in, and lend all my talents to helping them achieve a goal that we shared. But as progressive as I was, wanting a woman to be the leader in our relationship, even saying as I have been doing over the last several years that I think women are superior to men and should be in the driver's seat in society, I still was looking for a man as that ultimate hero figure in my life as it related to work, politics, and science. I wanted a woman to rescue me in love. But in my professional life and in the political realm, even in the scientific realm, I was still looking for male leaders.

For example, one of the major endeavors of my life has been the study of physics, but I never even thought to ask who the best female physicist in the world was. I saw a woman won the Nobel Prize in physics last year, and all I did was skim an article or two about her.  But that's more than I've read about the male Nobel Prize winners other than my freshman physics professor.  But look, I confess, I'd have been more likely to look for more information about her if she was attractive to me.  Because men are starved for the opportunity to appreciate beautiful women without being shamed for it, they try to find a beautiful woman in every role, and this is how a certain wing of the feminist movement is self-defeating by not embracing and celebrating those that they would call their sisters, the MAT Girls who have gone above and beyond what any feminist could demand of a woman.

It leads to a backlash that is why so many people have a hard time respecting Hillary Clinton as one of the most successful and accomplished people in the world. A lot of people, liberal and conservative, act like Hillary Clinton is only where she is because she married Bill, and that she wouldn't be in this position if she hadn't. That is as preposterous a supposition as saying that Beyonce is only where she is because she married Jay-Z.

Beyonce and Jay-Z work in an industry where you are able to prove yourself at an earlier age, so they were already established as individuals when they met each other. But I guarantee you that in the 1970s and 1980s, people who are in the know that were on the lookout for important figures on the future political landscape were on the lookout for Bill Clinton AND Hillary Rodham. Hillary Clinton is a woman of such accomplishment on her own, that we don't often enough stop to consider that without her, Bill Clinton might not have made it to be President.

I disagree with some parts of Hillary Clinton's platform, but I think we probably share a pretty similar view of what a healthy world would look like. But her priorities, her passions, are in many ways different from mine, so she is not someone that I would build my life around working for her, like I would have done for John F. Kennedy. But we often don't give people enough credit because we don't connect with them in that powerful emotional way. But because the Girl Power political movement does not embrace its most powerful examples, girls who were millionaires before puberty, because of internal feminine rivalries about beauty, Hillary Clinton is not seen as a person who was once a young woman who set very ambitious goals and achieved them.

In addition to that, we focus too much on celebrating people who break particular barriers. But sometimes a person breaks a barrier in terms of the collective weight of their actions. History will look at the life of Hillary Clinton and say that her total career as a person in political life was a new high water mark for women, but also, was one of the most significant political careers in American history, male or female. Eleanor Roosevelt was powerful and inspirational woman that you may like a lot more than Hillary Clinton, but she was not even seriously considered to stand for election as president, while Hillary either ran or has at least been discussed in passing as a potential serious candidate in every election in the past 19 years.  But the fact is, both Bill and Hillary Clinton would likely be people in important positions in society doing important things no matter who they had married.

But it makes me think of the one girl in my life who I was ready to follow like that, who I was ready to build my life around her mission and make it my own. And its funny, I met her in 1990, and the time when we were closest was when the Clintons had just come to the White House and Hillary Clinton was working on health care reform.  I saw this girl as a future leader of the world, and Hillary had not yet been a Senator, not yet been the Secretary of State.  She was just the president's wife, but based on what I saw her doing, I always thought of this girl back then in the 90s as being the next Hillary Clinton.

Hillary is an older woman now, but I saw I picture of her in college, that black-and-white one where she is wearing the Coke bottle glasses and the striped pants, she's sooo cute.  In that picture she reminds of that girl so much the way she looked in high school.  Man, if I'd been in the Hot Tub Time Machine back then and met Hillary, cute like that and with everything she had worked on, even at that young age?  Bill would have had to run pretty damn fast to beat me across the Yale commons to talk to that girl.

I'm thinking of all this, and for the first time in my life, I'm able to distill into words the emotion that I felt when I saw that actress in Las Vegas. I look at her face on the screen in that scene, and I can't see the imaginary world of the movie anymore. I see that actress, in the middle of a hard day at work, and I think, wow, she is so good at this. And I remember a movie I saw her in a long time ago...

It is one of my favorite movies, and it isn't that I forget that she was in it, but I forget that she is the person who did it, if that makes any sense. When I saw her in that movie, in a performance that I thought was worthy of an Oscar, I thought, “This girl is going to be one of the best there is.” But I never could have imagined that she would grow up to be the magnitude of star that she is, and certainly never would have guessed that years later I would see her and think that she was the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen. Hell, I didn't even think that when she was already a grown up famous for being beautiful.

And therein lies my bedrock argument that what I felt when I saw her was real. She has one of the most famous faces in the world. But not only that, she works in an industry that I follow closely and that you can even say that I work in as well. I've seen her face on screens and in magazines and newspapers thousands and thousands of times over nearly two decades. We all have. Her face is on DVD covers of movies I own, so I've had pictures of her in my house at all times for over a decade. But yet, there she she was, looking right at me, only seventeen feet away, and I didn't recognize her as the famous actress even as I was stuck by her like no person I'd ever seen. It wasn't a celebrity sighting. It was a girl of my dreams sighting.

There is this expression she makes in that scene and when I see it, I almost think she's not acting. It feels like I'm back in that hotel lobby and I can actually feel the same emotion of that moment when she looked at me. And suddenly, I'm not seeing a movie character. I'm not seeing a celebrity with a famous name. I'm seeing a young artist, a business woman, a young prodigy. She is my real life storybook hero come to life. Not John Galt—Jane Galt.

I know now that what I want more than anything else in life is to meet this girl. I don't want to meet her standing in front of a promotional poster for some movie, or at some orchestrated press event that the curiosity of my identification with MAT Girls might provoke. I don't want to meet the brand. I could have done that years ago as I think she has appeared at Comic Con frequently and that is right here in San Diego where I live.

I want to meet the person who she is, the same person she was, the moment before she stepped on that set on the first day of filming of that movie that I love from so long ago. Maybe I'll meet her and I won't find her interesting and she won't find me interesting. If you want to take that bet, go ahead. I'll pass. But I don't really know her. She would probably find it fun that I would fail the most basic pop trivia quiz about her. She probably hasn't met anybody in a long time who knows as little about her as I do.

I mean, I know what city she's from, but I don't know if she is from the gutters or the palaces of that city. I've read mention of one sibling she has, but I don't even know that person's name or what they do for a living, or if she has any others. I don't know what her lifestyle is like. I don't know what kind of person she is. I would have thought she would be a laid-back, somewhat silly and fun person from the persona she exudes on screen, but that girl in Las Vegas, if you told me she had never smiled before, I'd believe it. So I recognize, she may not be the girl, or the boss for me. But then again, maybe she is.

What I know is this: Suppose it was one of the rites of passage of life that at some point, you had to bet everything on one person at first sight, knowing nothing else about them. You had to reach a certain age of maturity first, but you could do it at twenty-one, or you could wait and do it at seventy. But it was required of you once, and perhaps the penalty of dying without doing it would be that your estate would be forfeited to the government. Or perhaps, for a person of faith, it would mean that you would die to face an angry or at least disappointed God.

I would have considered this soberly, and I would have tried to make the best decision I could. I encountered many people who I think would have been tempting bets. There were many people that, once I got to know them, I would have been willing to go all-in on them, but at the first meeting? No.  I would have decided to be patient. I would have held on I think, right up until I saw this girl in that hotel lobby in Las Vegas. Perhaps if this was truly the ritual, there are others that in a moment of weakness I might have chosen to bet on. But she was the first one where I was certain, “Okay, her.” And for a while I didn't think she was a movie star. I thought she might be an ambitious secretary. And that's why I believe she's the one.  I don't know it.  But I'm all-in on her.  With everything, even my soul. 

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