When I played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, I got to bring Wiley, my 85-pound black lab. He's responsible for my favorite New Year's memory of all: At the end of the show, he ran onstage and then out across all the tables in the showroom, sending champagne glasses and gamblers flying.
At the beginning, Edo was a photographer, and I was more of a talent scout and doing styling and modelling. Then all of a sudden, in 1977, he gave me a Polaroid camera, and I discovered that instead of having to go to a lab and develop the film, I could just take a click and get a picture! It was genius, and I was very good at manipulating it.
Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.
I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them.
Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
Building a solid organ like the liver in the lab is different and harder than with an organ like the bladder because solid organs are very vascular.
When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.
Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
On even the worst days, when nothing was working at the lab, I knew that at home I would find warmth, peace, companionship, and encouragement. As a consequence, the next day would surely be better.
I get into lab early and leave a bit early, too. So I like to have an hour or two before everybody comes in.