The following piece was written in January 1997, under the pseudonym "Daedalus," for Alexis Massie's now-defunct Web site Pandora's Box of Tricks. I feel free now to reveal that the Thayne of this essay is in reality author Sean Stewart, and the book in question his excellent novel Clouds End. I did eventually finish reading the novel, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you pick up a copy.

So anyway, I have this writer friend. Let's call him Thayne. Thayne's fourth novel was released a few months ago to a great deal of acclaim and huzzah. Having admired his first three novels immensely, I held the new book reverently and breathlessly when I spied it on the "New Fiction" racks at Barnes & Noble, like a new uncle might handle hold his brother's infant child. But I didn't buy it.

No, since I'm really a cheap bastard at heart, I finally worked up the nerve to ask Thayne if he might have an extra copy lying around that he would mail to me. Thayne allowed as how he did and he would. You may be turned off by my chutzpah, but it really wasn't such an unusual request between denizens of our particular literary ghetto—er, I mean, genre. We merry scribblers are sending one another copies of our stuff all the time, hoping that our fellows might deign to nominate our humble stories or novels for this award or that. It's the Way Things Are Done.

(To be honest, Thayne's first novel was the only book of his that I actually had to buy myself. I recommended it for an award, and the grateful author sent me a copy of his newly published second novel, inscribed and autographed, as his way of saying thank you. And thus our acquaintance was born.)

At last, the book arrived in the mail. I stripped the corrugated cardboard from about its snowy white covers as enthusiastically as a child on Christmas morning, and I turned it every which way, flushed with the excitement that can only come from the acquisition of a New Book. After I had riffled the pages a few times and felt that soft breeze caress my face, inhaled and savored that particular New Book smell, I laid the volume down on my desk until such time as I felt I could devote my full attention to it. And since I was working on a screenplay at the time, not to mention being somewhere in the middle of reading a different novel, I figured that would be a few days.

Before long Thayne had sent me email, inquiring as to whether or not the book had arrived. When I reported that it had, and that I was looking forward to diving in, Thayne wrote back to express his anxiety. He was worried that I might not like it. He, whose book has enthusiastic blurbs from Ursula K. Le Guin and William Gibson on the cover, was worried about me not liking his book. How charming and very flattering—and how perfectly like a writer.

The requisite few days passed, I finished both my screenplay and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and I finally had time to turn my attention to Thayne's novel. And I got about seven pages into it before I set it aside again, and raced through a Vietnam-era novel by another writer of my acquaintance. And then a book on the playwright's craft. And then a book on why Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.

Conscious that the clock was ticking, and that the pages were dropping from the desk calendar like leaves in autumn, I turned my attention back to Thayne's book. This time I managed to forge all the way to page sixty before setting it aside in favor of a book of conservative essays on government, a book of liberal essays on government, and a staccato-paced noir crime novel of pre-Kennedy era Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, poor Thayne is sitting at home sweating bullets as my verdict on his novel continuously fails to arrive. What a bastard I am.

So what's the problem? Why can't I just sit down and force myself through it? Is the novel really as bad as all that?

No. The problem is that it's really as good as all that. Thayne is a damn fine writer, and his texts are thick with imagery, allegory, symbolism, archetypes, and resonance. His characters and their worlds don't unfold so much as they coalesce, as if from fog, the eventual shape of the whole inherent in each small bit—holographic images that achieve their ultimate sharpness on the final page. His plots rarely follow any predictable narrative path, yet in retrospect it seems they have traversed the only possible route. In short, each of Thayne's novels is a treasure—and this latest promises to be his best effort yet.

Unfortunately, I haven't enough attention to spare at the moment to do this book justice. So many other clamorous thoughts and schemes and worries are crowding the stage of my brain that I simply have not been able to devote to Thayne's novel the sort of intentness and regard that it demands, that it deserves.

But how can tell him that without sounding like an utter phony making pathetic excuses? It's like the time a former girlfriend called me to let me know she was in town for only a day, and I told her with perfect truthfulness that I couldn't come to her hotel because I was doing the laundry. It cut no ice that I had an important job interview the next morning and nothing to wear—her first impression from that conversation, however wrong, was of my pathetic phoniness, and that's the impression that has stuck through the intervening years.

So. I'm stuck waiting for the day that I'm whole enough to appreciate a truly challenging novel, while its poor author is stuck waiting for the other shoe to drop. At least my guilt over this issue can be milked for a few measly column-inches, thereby beating back my guilt over the fact that I've let more than a month since my last piece appeared here. I can only hope that Thayne gets as much mileage out of his anxiety.

Of course, with my luck he'll get a whole novel out of it, and then we'll be right back where we started.

I wonder what ever happened to Butch Harper to make him such a mean bastard. He must have had some pretty serious unhappiness to contend with. Of course, when I was in 7th grade, I didn't care two figs about Butch's unhappiness. I was only concerned with my own—and the fact that the bastard was beating me up and terrorizing me every day in band class.

In Kaysville when I was growing up, grades six through eight attended junior high. When I was midway through sixth grade, my family moved to Kaysville from Bountiful, where sixth graders were the oldest kids in elementary school. This meant that I was catapulted from elementary school into junior high in the middle of the school year, with no friends to help cushion the landing.

I could write a dozen memos about how horrible that experience was (and I probably will), but today we'll stick to exploring how it affected my musical education. You see, I wanted to learn to play the saxophone. If I had started junior high at the time as all the other kids did, that would have meant simply signing up for band at the beginning of sixth grade, getting my parents to shell out for a sax, and showing up for class. Because I came to the game late, though, I wasn't actually able to enter the band until seventh grade, when the other kids already had a year on me.

That might have been more bearable had I actually been permitted to study the saxophone, like I wanted. Instead I was saddled with the clarinet. (Don't get me wrong—I have a lot of respect for the clarinet. But it just ain't as sexy as a sax.) You see, my dad, who is a school teacher, consulted with the music teacher at his school as to how to rent a saxophone for cheap. He was apparently told that it would be even cheaper to rent a clarinet, and that it would be easy for a clarinet student to switch to the saxophone later on. Moreover, my father was advised, it's damn tough for a sax player to switch to the clarinet later on.

When my father explained this logic to me, I was both crushed and baffled. "But that doesn't make any sense," I protested. "I don't want to switch from the saxophone to the clarinet later on."

Tough, kid. Here's your new clarinet.

Okay, so the clarinet wasn't all that bad. But the necessity of playing it only became all the more unhappy-making when Butch Harper entered the picture.

Butch was in a situation similar to mine. He was entering the band at the beginning of seventh grade, only his instrument was the bassoon. Butch was a tall, wiry kid with blonde hair and a look of permanent rage burning in the eyes of his otherwise stupid-looking face. Did I mention that he was a mean bastard? Oh, Jesus.

Mr. James Thurman was our band teacher. He was not well-loved by the kids in the band, as I recall, but he was more than competent as a musician and conductor. Still, he had a blind spot big enough to drive a truck through.

In order that Butch and I could catch up with the rest of the students in the class—and not be in everyone else's way—Mr. Thurman would regularly send the two of us off to a little soundproof practice room at the back of the classroom. That was where we were supposed to practice our instruments until we were good enough to be with the rest of the band fulltime.

That was where Butch Harper terrorized me.

For starters, he would usually force me to put his bassoon together for him. If I was lucky, that was all that would happen. If I wasn't, or if I balked from anything he wanted me to do (like setting up his music or turning his pages for him), then he would hit me in the upper arm with his fist or smack me on the back of the head. Sometimes I would cry, and Butch would call me a pussy and hit me again.

I tried to tell Mr. Thurman what was going on, but he pooh-poohed it all. "Just tell him to leave you alone," he said.

"I do," I said. "Don't make me go in there with him any more."

I believe Mr. Thurman once had a few words with Butch. That ended up a pretty bad day for me in the ol' practice room.

After a couple of months of this, I was good enough that I didn't have to go to the practice room anymore, and Butch Harper's tormenting of me ended. Mostly. Every once in a while he would threaten me in the hallway, but I finally put an end to that toward the last days of eighth grade, when he tried pushing me around at a school dance.

I was trying to ask a girl to dance (I don't remember who), when Butch came up and started, well, pushing me around. So I hit him, twice, right in the chest. I still don't know what came over me. The blows were glancing at best, but Butch left me alone after that. At heart, he was just a coward, and pretty pathetic at that.

Mr. Thurman is now a Mormon bishop in Layton, Utah, or he was last time I heard. I've mostly forgiven Butch Harper, but I have a harder time with Mr. Thurman. Maybe he was right to keep sending me back into that practice room to face my demon, and maybe not, but I certainly don't love him for it.

My only hope is that he's not trying the same tactic with the battered wives in his ward.

I rarely walk out of movies. Somewhere deep inside, I suppose I consider the contract between artist and audience so sacred that I can't help but uphold most of my own end even when the artist or artists are failing miserably to live up to their own.

That unspoken contract works like this: I, as the audience, promise to offer my suspended disbelief for ninety minutes or more, while the artists promise to present me with interesting characters who behave more or less like real human beings, who face threatening challenges, who struggle and evolve, and who bring their conflicts to some kind of meaningful resolution, for good or for ill. Not such an unreasonable deal, right?

Well, not everyone lives up to this contract. Lots of times the artists fail in one or more of the areas I listed, and lots of times I withdraw my suspension of disbelief before the movie is over. But I almost never walk out before the end, because I believe there's always something to learn from a movie—even if it's only learning what not to do in your own stories.

In fact, as I think about it, I can only remember one movie that I've walked out of, and that was Fled, and I didn't even walk out of that until about ten minutes before the end of the film. The pointless violence and mayhem that were filling in for an honest climax to the story finally became too much for me. It's not even that it was offensive violence. It was just pointless and dumb—and all the more so, because I had seen it all before in so many other bad flicks, so many other times. But still, I stayed with that movie almost all the way to the end. I stuck it out.

My former flame Roxie walked out of a movie once, though—and I think she was pissed off that I didn't come with her. The movie was Glengarry Glenn Ross, and Roxie walked out because she found the excessive use of profanity offensive. I found that ironic in the extreme, because she certainly wasn't afraid to use the word "fuck" herself if she took a mind to—and she definitely wasn't afraid to act the word out. I think she ended up wandering into another theater and watching The Lion King.

(All of which reminds me of a joke, if you'll indulge me. A panhandler, begging in the street, asks a well-dressed businessman if he can spare a little change. "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,'" says the businessman with his nose in the air. 'William Shakespeare.' Miffed, the panhandler says, "Oh, yeah? Well, 'Fuck you.' David Mamet.")

This wasn't nearly as distressing to me, however, as the time I had acquired tickets to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Pioneer Memorial Theater in Salt Lake City, and took Roxie to see it. By the end of the first act, she was insisting that we leave—and at intermission, that's exactly what we did. Now, if I rarely walk out of movies, I've made a habit of never walking out of a play, but there I was, trailing along behind good ol' Roxie as she fled from a theatrical experience that required her to engage any portion of her heart or her intellect.

This and countless other incidents should have clued me in to the fact that Roxie was entirely wrong for me. But I never walk out until it's too late, until I've seen so many derivative repetitions of the same awful dysfunction that I finally have to move or be buried beneath the numbing pointlessness of it all.

I think maybe it's time I learned to walk out earlier on people who aren't living up to the unspoken contract between us.

In one of these recent memos, I mentioned something about how teenagers can always be counted on to do the wrong thing. In the great tradition of using myself as proof of whatever thesis I'm propounding, here's another example to help nail the lid of that particular coffin down even more securely.

It was sometime during the 1985-86 school year—I don't properly recall what season. As one of Davis High School's distinguished alumni—okay, really it was because I was friends with the then-current student body president, Chris Watkins—I was invited to serve as one of two judges of the school's annual lip-sync contest. (I was eighteen years old, still younger than some members of the senior class at the time, and I had graduated in 1984.)

How it worked was this: A handful of students would get up on stage, costumed as musicians, and pretend to play and sing some popular song. Bret Nybo (a graduate of the class of '82) and I were to judge the participants in categories that included costume, performance, creativity, audience response, and the precision of the lip-sync. At the end of the hour, we would add up the scores and announce the winner.

Simple, no?

Ten or twelve acts performed. I recall only three of them in any detail. First, early in the show, was a group led by my friend Mike McAllister, who performed "I Send a Message" by INXS, from the excellent album The Swing. Mike's turn as the recently departed Michael Hutchence was energetic and spirited, featuring plenty of hip dance moves and some nifty tricks with the microphone stand, and his lip sync was virtually flawless. The rest of the group turned in fine performances, as well. Particularly notable was the fellow playing air saxophone, who spun around on the back on the floor, horn raised to the ceiling, during his solo. Mike and crew received high marks in virtually every category, from both Bret and me.

Somewhere in the middle of pack, a group of four sophomores performed the ever-popular "Bohemian Rhapsody," from Queen's A Night at the Opera. The two lead vocalists, who traded lip-sync duties, were twins—diminutive kids but, admittedly, cute as buttons. Their rhythm section consisted of two burly kids with crew cuts who looked like they might have three functioning neurons between them. The crowd cheered and screamed while these sophomores performed, and while we were forced to give them high marks in the audience response category, they hadn't gone to any particular pains to dress up, and their lip sync was absolutely horrid. Frequently it seemed to me that the twins didn't even know the words to the song.

The final group of the hour were four seniors, who tackled the two opening tracks from Van Halen's 1984—"1984" and, if I recall properly, "Hot for Teacher." The first number is a short but blistering guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen, and Blair Leishman, Davis High's own brilliant guitar prodigy, played along with the recording in such a way that you just knew he could have done it for real. That led into the second track, where the vocalist—the senior class president, whose name I can't quite recall—tore into the lyrics with all the relish and sensuality of a born rock star. This group received uniformly high marks as well.

Bret and I added up the scores, the dust settling around us, then took the stage. We had to stand awkwardly close together to both fit behind the lectern. "We've tallied all the scores in seven different categories, and it looks like there's been a tie," I announced. "Your applause will determine the today's winner!"

The audience applauded.

"First," said Bret, leaning in toward the microphone, "is INXS with their rendition of 'I Send a Message'!"

The audience responded with enthusiastic whistles and cheers.

"And next," I said, drawing out the moment, "is . . . Van Halen!"

A few people started to applaud, but they were quickly drowned out by a chorus of boos that swelled until the entire auditorium was giving us that old Bronx cheer. Someone started a chant of "Queen! Queen! Queen!" and before long the whole place was shaking to that thunderous demand.

Bret and I turned away from the mike and conducted a hurried conference. And what did I say to that vast and angry throng when next I spoke? Did I say, "I'm sorry, but audience response is only one of the categories we were asked to take into consideration, and your favorite little twins scored abysmally low in every other category"? Did Bret and I do the right thing?

Here's what I said: "Looks like we made a mistake in our arithmetic. The winners are Queen!"

Bret and I were hailed almost as heroes by the people we ran into as we left the auditorium. Mike McAllister was more than sympathetic, despite his disappointment at having come so close to legitimately winning the contest. No one told us we had made the wrong decision.

But dammit, we did make the wrong decision. We let the tide of popular opinion frighten us into compliance, instead of standing beside the findings that we as judges had been empowered to make. I mean, what's the worst thing that could have happened? Did we think those high-schoolers were going to stone us or something?

It was only a dumb high-school contest, sure, but there are lessons to be found in everything, and I'm afraid the lesson that Bret Nybo and I taught to a thousand mindless mob members that day was that you can always get your way if only you shout loudly enough.

I send a message, indeed.

Well, I want to send different message today. I should have stood by my decision that day. I shouldn't have knuckled under to the demands of the mob. I want the world to know that Queen didn't earn the trophy they took home. It should have gone to either INXS or Van Halen, and if I'd been a stronger person then it would have.

Sorry, guys. I'll try not to let you down again.

Not long ago, a new colleague at the office told me that I reminded her of Dennis Miller. You know, old news anchor from Saturday Night Live who's now in movies and has his own show on HBO? The comic who's so witty and sarcastic and full of obscure pop-cultural references? Yeah, that guy.

She seemed to mean it in a good way, in case you're wondering, and I was surprised at how genuinely pleased it made me feel. I told her it was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in some time, and I meant it. It's been a long time since anyone told me that I reminded them of someone famous. I've missed it.

And isn't that a peculiar thing—that being told I remind someone of someone else is such a positive thing? I mean, don't we all want to be liked for who we are, and not be judged on the basis of comparison with someone else? Why do people find it so pleasing to be compared favorably with celebrities?

I think it's really pretty simple, and that there are a couple of elements to it. First, I think on some level we all recognize that telling someone they remind you of a celebrity is shorthand for enumerating the many positive characteristics they share with that person. We all know what characteristics celebrities have, at least outwardly, so it's an easy way to convey a great number of compliments without actually enumerating them one by one, which might be awkward.

For example, when I hear that I remind somone of Dennis Miller, what I really hear on a subliminal level is that I'm coming across as suave and dry and witty and intelligent and self-possessed and maybe a little sarcastic. And that's not to mention snappily dressed, bearded, and long- and dark- and curly-haired.

Now, whether all those things are things that my colleague meant, either consciously or subconsciously, they are the things I associate with Dennis Miller, and so I'm pleased to hear them. And that's not the only thing I hear. When I hear that I remind someone of a celebrity, there's the subtle implication that, since I share the traits that have made that person so well-known and successful, I have the potential to be just as successful.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that comparing someone with a celebrity is such a surefire method for making them feel good. (Assuming you've chosen the right celebrity, that is. I mean, most right-thinking people aren't going to feel particularly honored if you tell them they remind you, say, of Rush Limbaugh.) And it shouldn't be surprising that most of us respond to it so well. Most all of us have within us a yearning to be widely recognized for the good things about us, and this plays right into that basic desire.

(I'm typing this with a cat curled up contentedly in my lap, eyes closed. I think his basic desire is to take a nap at the center of the universe.)

Like I said, it's been a good long time since anyone told me I reminded them of anyone famous, and I have to admit that I've kind of felt bad about that. I've thought back wistfully to the days when I was a skinny gawky kid two-thirds of my present weight, and folks like my girlfriend Katrina would tell me I reminded them of Timothy Hutton. (Katrina even went so far as to put "Debra Winger" for the return address on her letters when she wrote to me during my mission.) I remember the starry-eyed girls in the town of Brooks, Alberta, who had crushes on the close-cropped young missionary Elder Shunn because he looked just like a really bad photo of Kevin Bacon from the cover of one of their teen-idol mags. (And, of course, because young Mormon girls always get crushes on missionaries. I swear, I've never had so many women come on to me as when I was wearing that damn black nametag and couldn't do anything about it. It's not fair.)

Well, I'm a long way from being emaciated enough to remind anyone of Timothy Hutton anymore. It was just the other day that I was looking at a photo of myself with my friend Tim Bishop and his wife at an amusement park in Utah, taken in the first year or two after my mission. I looked at that narrow face, that pipestem of a neck, and despite the goofy mustache and the hair worn long in the back, I could see the resemblence to Timothy Hutton, I could see it, and I missed having people comment on it. I felt old and fat and unattractive.

But hey, now that I've matured somewhat, I remind someone of Dennis Miller! I'm still floating. It may be shallow of me, but that one's going to keep me going for weeks.

Now, who is it you remind me of?

I ran into John Turturro again today. (Not today as you read this, but today as I write this, which is more than a month before this memo is scheduled to appear.) Well, okay, I didn't really run into him. I actually just passed him on the sidewalk while I was walking down Seventh Avenue here in Brooklyn, on my way to the hardware store and then to the Second Street Cafe for Sunday brunch.

This is the second time I've run into—or maybe I should say "run across"—John Turturro in Brooklyn. The first time was in the subway station at Grand Army Plaza one morning about six months ago when I was late for work. I was descending the stairs into the station when I saw a tallish fellow with curly dark hair and a goatee determinedly trying to get one of the turnstiles to read his MetroCard. There he was, head down with a look of intense and single-minded concentration on his face, repeatedly swiping his card through the slot, and I thought to myself, "My God, that's John Turturro."

Now, I have to tell you, I'm a really big fan of John Turturro. Barton Fink, Quiz Show, Miller's Crossing, Clockers, Box of Moonlight—I think they're all terrific performances. I'm amazed at the way he can make what seems like a physical transformation in his varied roles. The tough, abusive older Italian brother of Do the Right Thing is nothing like the sweet but picked-on kid of Jungle Fever—and he looks physically smaller in the role. Amazing.

So there he was in the subway station, having trouble with his MetroCard, and the woman with him was egging him on from the other side of the turnstiles: "Come on, John! Hurry!"

My God. John Turturro, despite powerful biceps, looked so much like an incompetent kid being harried by an impatient parent in that moment that I just wanted to go up to him and put my arms around him and remind him that he was John Turturro. And incidentally tell him how much I loved his work.

But, suave and unflappable New Yorker that I have become, all I did was go around him and slide my MetroCard smoothly through the slot in the next turnstile, just as he finally got his to work. The three of us—Turturro, his female companion, and me—all descended the stairs to the platform at the same time, and I said, just one New Yorker to two others, "There's something wrong with that turnstile. It gives everyone problems."

I said that to the great actor John Turturro, who is ten years my senior, because he looked so much like a kid in dutch. He didn't say anything to me, and neither did his female companion.

Today when I saw John Turturro, he was walking north on Seventh Avenue with a woman and a small girl. I honestly can't tell you whether or not it was the same woman as before. I didn't pay much attention to the woman either time. The goatee was gone this time, and Turturro was looking around himself with what looked like open-mouth wonder, and maybe some apprehension. I swear to God he looked like a kid on his first trip to the city. And Brooklyn was where he was born and raised.

I didn't say anything this time. But maybe next time I see him—and I'm sure I'll see him again, since he obviously lives in the neighborhood—I will say something. Maybe I'll say, "John, what the hell is going on inside your skin? Are you just an empty vessel that fills from time to time with these amazingly real and well-defined characters and then lies as slack as a drained wineskin the rest of the day? Or do you look that way simply because the mantle of celebrity the rest of us have placed upon your shoulders, the weight of our awed gazes as you pass, has forced you apart from our company? What can I do to help make your passage through this ordinary world more meaningful?"

Maybe I'll say that. But it's more likely that I'll just look at him and think to myself, once again, "My God, that's John Turturro. Wow."

I guess this is celebrity week here at Memos from the Moon. I can't seem to stop droning on about the subject, and I really can't seem to get away from droning on about the subject as it relates to my observations of John Turturro. So here we go again. I hope you'll forgive me.

Common wisdom has it that New Yorkers are a blasé lot, inured to the sight of celebrities in their midst and not at all star-struck. It's those of us greenhorns from out of town whose jaws drop to the pavement and who start falling all over themselves at the sight of a famous actor or musician. A good example might be my friend Andrew from work, who couldn't stop gushing about catching sight of Parker Posey at CBGB during a Patti Smith show. By his own report, he followed her all over the club trying to make certain that it really was her. Andrew recently moved here from Texas.

But I think the rules about detachment must only apply to Manhattanites. From the reactions I saw when John Turturro boarded a subway car at the Grand Army Plaza train station, it would seem that Brooklynites are every bit as star-struck as the rest of us poor schlubs.

In my previous memo, I described how I came across John Turturro having trouble with his MetroCard one morning in the subway station. I descended the stairs to the platform near him and his female companion, then stood near them, watching, as they waited for the Manhattan-bound train to arrive.

We all boarded the same car when the train came. I sat about a quarter of the way down the car from Turturro and friend. I pretended to read a paperback novel, keeping a watch on him out the corner of my eye. He produced a screenplay from his shoulder bag and began to read, appearing totally absorbed.

I kept a watch on the other passengers as well, mostly older black folks. I was curious to see whether they would recognize John Turturro, and how they would react when they did. It was around Nevins Street when someone did. I saw someone nudging a companion and indicating the actor with a nod of his head. Before long excited whispers were traveling around my end of the car and a dozen pairs of eyes were straining to catch a glimpse.

Turturro appeared to notice none of this, his nose buried deep in his script. A fellow near me was saying to his friend, in a barely hushed voice, "What's his name? Uh . . . Tarantino? Tor . . . ?"

"John Turturro," I said.

The man nodded. "That's right, that's right."

Another fellow asked, "What's he been in?"

"Do the Right Thing," I said. "Jungle Fever."

"Oh," this fellow said, his eyes lighting up. "Yeah."

To their credit, no one on the train went over and bothered Turturro for an autograph, at least not before I disembarked for work at Wall Street. (This stands in sharp contrast to a story my ex-girlfriend Katrina told me about a friend of hers, whom I'll call Bambi, who had visited Katrina at her home in Bozeman, Montana. Katrina and Bambi were in town when they spied Meg Ryan, who lived with Dennis Quaid on a ranch outside of Bozeman, coming out a store. Bambi insisted not only on bugging Meg Ryan for an autograph, but she had to have her picture taken with the actress as well. I saw the snapshots. Bambi looks giddy. Meg Ryan looks unhappily tolerant. I would have been mortified.) But now I know that Brooklynites are just as human as anyone else.

Anyone else but Manhattanites, that is, who can't see the stars in the sky above them, and don't care about the stars in their own midst.