Evidently, one has many experiences as an actor that are incommunicable, or at least not directly communicated. But this is not so isolating as it may seem. Pacino has come close to articulating the waking dream that is live performance—just not here, with his blunt attempts and mania for quoting his heroes. It was with an off-the-cuff anecdote he told during a 1979 interview with Playboy magazine:
The time I was doing [The Basic Training of] Pavlo Hummel in Boston, I made [a] connection with a pair of eyes in the audience and I thought, This is incredible, these eyes are penetrating me. I went through the whole performance just relating to those eyes, giving the whole thing to those eyes. I couldn’t wait at curtain to see who it was. When curtain call finally came, I looked in the direction of those eyes and it was a seeing eye dog. Belonged to a blind girl. I couldn’t get over it—the compassion and intensity and the understanding in those eyes . . . and it was a dog. What a profession! {read}