Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

No rest for Alan Alda, who is being honored tomorrow night (4/24) at the Stars of Stony Brook gala at Chelsea Piers in New York. The event will celebrate the actor-director-writer-author-science enthusiast's greatest academic achievement to date: co-founding Stony Brook's Center for Communicating Science.

After that, Alda will go back to juggling activities ranging from serving as front man for several functions at next month's World Science Festival in New York City to preparing for scientific communication workshops at universities across the country to reading entries for his second annual Flame Challenge.

"This year, 20,000 students signed up," he reports, speaking of the Center for Communicating Science's competition in which scientists attempt to provide clear answers to questions posed by 11-year-olds. The kids then judge the scientists' responses. The 11-year-olds also provided this year's question: "What is time?"

"They'll be the ones judging scientists' entries. I haven't seen any of the entries yet. I'll be looking at them in a few days," Alda stresses. "My looking at them is just out of curiosity. It's the kids who are going to choose the winner. Winners, plural, actually — one in video and one in text."

Why 11-year-olds?

It's funny; that just happened. That's how old I was when I asked my teacher, 'What is a flame?'" recalls Alda, who will be seen again as Laura Linney's acerbic oncologist on "The Big C," returning for its final season April 29. He goes on, "Just looking at how kids present themselves when they judge these entries, they're very thoughtful and very curious. And they may be going through what I was going through at 11, which is starting to ask deeper questions. And, my God, you can't ask a deeper question than 'What is time?'"

HE DID I DO'S: What a change-up for Bryan Cranston, who will go from his Emmy-winning role as the cancer-stricken science teacher turned meth dealer on AMC's brutal and brilliant "Breaking Bad" to LBJ come September. That's when the protean actor takes on the portrayal of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in "All the Way" at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.

Long before he went "Bad" and even before he played the comedic dad in "Malcolm in the Middle," it's startling to find that one of Cranston's credits is ...

The nice-guy actor told us the story of his stint as a man of the cloth: "Back in the early '70s, mid '70s, when I was 18 and working on Catalina Island, I befriended Rev. Bob of the Universal Life Church there. One day, he said to me, 'Brian, I accidentally booked two weddings at the same time. Would you like to become a minister and officiate at one of them?' I thought he was joking, but he said, 'Here, come on, follow me.' He put a piece of paper into an IBM Selectric and started typing, made a copy for the secretary of state to make it all legal and official, and said, 'Here's your ID number, here's the marriage certificate, here's a book on this and what to talk about, here's the address. You can make 150 bucks in a couple of hours.' In 1974 — oh, my goodness! That was like my rent for the month!"

And money was tight for him at the time, recalls Cranston, who was then a far cry from the series star he is today. "My hair was long all that summer. I was like a hippie holdover."

If that bit of business wasn't unorthodox enough, Cranston recalled that for his first wedding, "I went to Van Nuys Airport in the (San Fernando) Valley so I could officiate in a six-seater airplane. It was the pilot and myself in front, the wedding couple, and then the best man and maid of honor in the back. When we were over the Hollywood sign, I turned to look over my shoulder and did the ceremony. I remember them looking at me with the utmost reverence and sincerity, and I thought, 'I can have fun with it, but I want to make it memorable for them.' It was like a little bird in the back of my head urging me on to make it special."

Cranston says he performed "about a couple dozen" weddings "over a few decades, then I put it to rest."

As for whether the Hollywood sign couple has any idea that their wedding "minister" went on to become the star of "Breaking Bad" and so many other productions, he said he could only guess. But somewhere out there are marriage certificates with his name on them.

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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