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Just yesterday my kid and I were trying to decide if we were desperate enough to see Boss Baby (we weren’t, but a lot of other people were). He saw the trailer and asked if that was Alec Baldwin, whom he knows from SNL. I said it was and then remembered that Alec, who now is the lead voice in a kid’s movie, once chewed his 12 year-old daughter out in a voicemail message. I showed my kid the Dora the Explorer remix of Alec’s message and he thought it was hilarious. My point is that if you told me Alec hasn’t had a drink for over 30 years I wouldn’t believe you. He’s allegedly been sober since 1985 though. Alec told his story to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News:

What if you hadn’t stopped drinking in February, 1985?
I think that I was one of the people who was lucky that it stuck. Therefore therif I didn’t get it then I would have gotten it eventually. I know that at that time and what I described, overdosing on drugs, which I kept private for years, I think that I would have gotten it eventually but I’m glad I got it when I did.

Not many people get sober when they’re young. I got sober when I was about to turn 27. Those two years that I lived in that white hot period as a daily drug abuser, as a daily drinker to my misery, that was a tough time. There was really a lot of pain in there.

[From ABC News]

Good for him for getting sober and sticking with it if that’s what he did. I’m still questioning whether he was sober that entire time, but I guess sober people can be rageaholics too, people in the throes of their addictions don’t have a monopoly on anger. Alec seems to be sharing this story now because he has a new memoir out this week, called Nevertheless. It sounds like he’s co-opting the women’s movement motto “Nevertheless, she persisted” doesn’t it? He has another interview with CBS News where he explains how he got into drugs when he first moved to LA in the 80s. He said “that’s the way it was back then, everyone was drinking and drugging.” It’s still that way, it just depends on the people you spend time with on a daily basis.

Also, Alec talked about his encounters with the paparazzi, he’s has several run-ins with them, and he said they were after “a picture of my wife and her fit little body running down the street.” He claimed that one photographer tripped and fell on top of a baby in a stroller in front of his building and that “if I decide to take the law into my own hands in some of those cases that’s just want I’ve got to do. I don’t really worry about it that much.” He’s assaulted paparazzi several times and he never hesitates to put people on blast and tell his side of the story. If a photographer fell on a baby in front of his building, don’t you think he would have told the press at the time?

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