Candid Camera: Take a Sneak Look Inside Alan Cumming's Universe

Courtesy of Alan Cumming.

ALAN CUMMING was 10 when a strange man pulled up outside his house and gave him a plastic Kodak camera, a prize Cumming won at a local church jamboree. "I stood there, just staring at the magical offering, absolutely dumbstruck," he writes in You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures (Rizzoli, $29.95), a charming mosaic of anecdotes and photos that is exactly as advertised. Chatty asides, such as meeting Liz Taylor at a birthday party for Carrie Fisher ("She proffered her hand with the enormous Krupp Diamond ring Richard Burton had given her in 1968 -- I told her I had seen smaller New York apartments"), are punctuated with Cumming-esque edicts (hating on Crocs is "a form of fascism"; L.A. is a "city built around an industry with self-consciousness at its very core"). But what shines through is Cumming's sensuous pleasure and impish delight in the big wide world around him. It's a far cry from his Scottish childhood, when his ogre of a father sought to bring his photography career to a premature end by banishing his camera to his bedside drawer. You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams is his sweet revenge.