Kliph Nesteroff has a terrific article up about Richard Nixon and his relationship with television, especially Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and its head writer/producer Paul Keyes. I was on the fringes of a lot of this and know many of the folks involved and everything Kliph has written coincides with my knowledge…and I see that Chris Bearde endorses it all in Kliph's comments section. Chris was one of the most important folks in the creation/production of Laugh-In so that's a darn good piece of confirmation.

It's arguable, of course, how much impact Nixon's cameo spot on Laugh-In contributed to his election and I'm inclined to think its impact has been exaggerated. Then again, it didn't hurt and what may have helped him even more was that Keyes made sure the show was largely devoid of Nixon jokes, allowing through only the kind that didn't wound. You know, when you're doing jokes about politicians, you can make fun of their sanity or you can make fun of their choice of tie. They're both jokes about the guy but the tie jokes don't cost him votes and may even humanize him. I did meet Paul Keyes a few times and didn't like him much. I have loads of Conservative friends (and I was even pretty Conservative myself back then) but Mr. Keyes struck me as the kind of person who thinks that the richer you are, the better you are as a person in the only ways that matter, no matter how you made your money. No wonder he got along so well with Nixon.

For reasons I'm not sure I can explain, I like shopping at Costco. Well actually, I don't really like shopping anywhere but since one must at times shop, this one prefers to do it at Costco and not that many other places. Some of that is because when you shop at Costco, you go home with such large quantities that there's less need to shop again soon.

But I also like the feel of the place, the mood of the customers and employees, the little women in the hairnets dispensing free samples…and the fact that in almost every visit, I take home something that makes my life better in some way. I have been to five different Costcos in Southern California and as I'll tell you in the next installment in this series, one in Indiana. I felt very welcome in all of them.

That is not the case with other huge stores. In the last few months, I found myself in a Kmart, a Best Buy, a Target and a Walmart. I couldn't wait to get out of the Walmart. There was something tacky about the place…a joyless mood with customers afraid to make eye contact with one another. I was there because I was looking for three items I'd been unable to procure anywhere else and the Walmart website said this particular store had all three in stock. It lied. They were out of two and had never heard of the third…or so said a pale store employee who looked like one of the orphans in a bad road company of Oliver. I was almost happy to hear that they didn't have what I wanted because that meant I could leave immediately. Which I did.

The one nice thing about the store for me, though I didn't purchase anything, was that anything they seemed to have in multiple colors, they had in orange. Some Walmart exec must have ordered this because usually when you have to pick the color of something you're buying, my favorite color is not an option. I'm even surprised when you can get an orange in orange. Anyway, I got out of there fast and didn't even pause to buy something that was orange.

My assistant Darcie and I stopped into a Target a few months ago to pick up a new vacuum cleaner for my mother's house. They had about twenty sample models on display and once I'd made my selection, I had the nigh-impossible task of flagging down a store employee to fetch me a fresh one from the back. Darcie and I fanned out to scour the aisles but we could find no one. You'd have better luck trying to hail a taxicab in Times Square on New Year's Eve if you were non-white and bleeding.

Finally, one clerk apparently made a wrong turn and wandered close enough that Darcie could tackle him. He grudgingly looked up the model I wanted and told me it was out of stock. Then he looked up my second choice and told me it was out of stock. After he informed me my third choice was out of stock, I told him, "Let's do this the easy way. Tell me which of these vacuums you do have in stock." He actually said, "All of them, except for the ones we're out of."

I go occasionally and voluntarily to a Kmart near me because it's near me and sometimes, you have a sudden urgent need for a ball peen hammer. Best Buy isn't bad but for some reason, every time I find an item I want, it's the only one they have left and it's been purchased by someone else, returned and resealed. The sales people sometimes look that way, as well.

So it's Costco for me and I am well aware that it's a different kind of store from the other institutions. For one thing, at Kmart you can buy one of something. But at Costco, people look at each other like they're not ashamed to be there. Oh, one may occasionally fight over a rotisserie chicken but for the most part, it's a very friendly place.

When I take my business there, I not only come home with truckloads of toilet paper, case lots of white vinegar and enough Brita filters to purify Lake Michigan…I usually come home with an anecdote or two. I've told some of them here before and will be sharing a few more under this category heading in the next few days. You may wind up with more of them than you want but I'm afraid that's just part of The Costco Experience.

Hey, what do you say we redesign the dollar? And while we're at it, let's update the five, the ten, the twenty, the fifty and the hundred, too.

I said here that the only two people who lived to see Broadway theaters named after them were Stephen Sondheim and Neil Simon. An awful lot of you wrote to remind me that Helen Hayes was alive when they christened the Helen Hayes Theater. In fact, that happened twice. In 1955, the Fulton Theater on West 46th was renamed the Helen Hayes Theater. It was torn down in 1982 to make room for a Marriott so the following year, the Little Theater on West 44th was renamed the Helen Hayes Theater. Ms. Hayes didn't leave us until 1993…so I was wrong. I think I'll fall back on the Limbaugh Defense and just say that I'm not responsible for the faulty information since I read it somewhere on the Internet.

Also: I asked if anyone had seen Neil Simon lately. Many of you pointed out that he was present when the revival of Promises, Promises opened last April. Okay…has anyone seen him more recently than that or heard him interviewed? (By the way: The revival closes just after the first of the year.)

The "Mosque at Ground Zero" (i.e., the Community Center a couple blocks away) is one 9/11-related building controversy in New York. Another is what, if anything, will someday be built on the site where the World Trade Center once stood. I've been following both discussions and at the risk of seeming tasteless or cowardly, I'll bring up one rarely-discussed aspect of the latter. If you were the CEO of some big company looking for office space, would you lease it in a new World Trade Center? I mean, if we have this oft-expressed reason to rebuild there — to show terrorists they can't intimdate us — don't the terrorists have as much reason to attack it again in some way? I'm not saying they could bring it down again or that another attack would necessarily wreak comparable amounts of death and destruction…but if you were that CEO, would you want the responsibility and guilt if you moved in there and something did happen?

This keeps popping into my brain when I read about plans because one of my most vivid memories of 9/11 is watching some gentleman — and he was obviously a very gentle man — sobbing uncontrollably on the street outside the rubble. He was the boss at some company housed in one of the towers and almost every employee had been killed. He would have been too if he'd come to work earlier that day and he almost wished he had. The official body count of 9/11 didn't begin to itemize all the human tragedy of that day. That boss was one of many who were devastated by the planes flying into the buildings. I felt so sorry for that poor man, punishing himself like that when he did nothing wrong.

Leaving aside matters of economic practicality, which I'll get to in a moment, I'd like to see the World Trade Center rebuilt — bigger, bolder, more defiant than before. It would say something about the American spirit and determination. But I also think it would say something like, "We double-dog dare ya to come try something with this one, ragheads!" Even if I were courageous enough to place myself into that building, I don't think I'd say to my hypothetical employees, "Hey, we're all moving into the new World Trade Center. I know it may make some of you uneasy and I know your family may worry about you going to work each day there…but if you want to keep your job, that's where you're going to have to go." And if, God forbid, even one employee or office visitor did get hurt in even one terrorist attempt…well, I wouldn't want that guilt. I'd certainly feel more responsible than that crying gent whose entire staff perished on 9/11.

This is almost never mentioned in all the discussions I've read about how and what to build there. Would enough companies lease space in a new WTC that the enterprise wouldn't be a colossal failure? And if it were, wouldn't that at least partially nullify the "We'll show those $@#&* terrorists they can't harm us" reason for erecting anew? After a big air crash, there are always a lot of people who give up flying, if not forever then for quite a while. How many people might simply balk at setting foot in World Trade Center II?

Add to all this the apparent fact that even without that hanging over it, a new and bigger WTC might not make monetary sense. Joe Nocera cautiously and respectfully makes the argument that the proposed Freedom Tower (aka 1 World Trade Center) would be a bad place to rent office space just because of the price per square foot. Like most of you probably, when they knocked it down, my immediate reaction was, "Well then, we'll put it back up!" But of course, that's easy for me to say. I don't have to pay to put it back up, nor am I a prospective tenant. Maybe we oughta put the legendary American ingenuity to work and think of something else that would be appropriate to build there.

Here are two questions I get from time to time, usually in tandem. Jen Carter is the latest to ask…

Have you ever had any jobs other than writing? And at what age did you decide that's what you wanted to do with your life?

Taking the last part first: As far back as I can recall — and I can recall pretty far back — I figured I'd wind up doing something like what I do for a living. Never wanted to be a fireman or a movie star or president or shortstop. Friends my age were always flitting from one dream to another, changing future careers more often than they changed their socks. My big indecisiveness was over what I'd write: Was it going to be comic books? Non-comic books? Cartoons? Magazine articles? Situation comedies? Screenplays? As it turned out, I've gotten to write all those things, often at the same time. Not only that, I've worked and continue to work with a lot of the specific characters and human beings who'd starred in those aspirations. In 1958, I was thinking how neat it would be to work with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera on Yogi Bear. In 1982, I was writing a Yogi Bear special for the studio, working with (and occasionally arguing with) Bill and Joe. I'm still processing a lot of time warps like that.

I guess I was around six or seven when I settled on my life's work…not that I couldn't or wouldn't have changed if some better alternative had presented itself. No viable option ever did and the following is not meant as a joke or faux humility. I really never found anything else I thought I could do. When they gave me those tests they gave kids then to determine the jobs for which you might have a smidgen of aptitude, I could just sit there and check them off: "Can't do that…can't do that…can't do that…" Tomorrow, if I had to make my living via manual labor or anything involving math or even serving the public directly, I'd wind up bunking with that homeless guy who sleeps behind the Jack-in-the-Box near me.

I've never believed that you can be anything if you put your mind to it. Maybe it works that way in your world…and if so, great. In my world, people have limitations and the trick is to recognize yours, eliminate the impossible and find something you like within what's left. When I speak to classes of wanna-be writers or actors, I always tell them the following; that the key to success in those areas is, I think, to locate that sweet spot between Idealism and Pragmatism. This is probably true to some extent in every field but those are the only two I know well enough to comment upon. I certainly have a nice cache of anecdotes about acquaintances who've failed, professionally and personally, because they were all Idealism and no Pragmatism or all Pragmatism and no Idealism.

Skip these last two paragraphs if you're the kind of person who gets annoyed to hear people say how happy they are with their lives. I feel quite fortunate that I somehow manuevered into the area where I felt least incompetent…and that I knew what that was, early on. I still run into guys from high school who are trying to decide what they want to be when they grow up and it's getting late in the day. They all have the problem my father had. He never found anything that he could do that he wanted to do, so he spent his life working a job he hated. I saw what that did to him and it was just plain unhealthy. He practically came home from the office every day with black lung disease. Ultimately, he had to derive most of his happiness in life from watching that not happen to his son.

I have occasionally made money as an editor, an artist, a letterer, a producer, a teacher, a voice director or even — gasp! — a performer. My work in most of those areas has been very limited because my competence in most of those areas is very limited. In any case, I consider all of those to be adjuncts to my life as a writer. So though it may not be technically accurate, I feel like the answer to the question "Have you ever had any other jobs than writing?" is no. In fact, I often don't even feel like I've ever had a job, period. Once in a while, there's a producer or editor or network exec who can make me feel that way but the feeling, like those associations, never lasts very long.

My pal Aaron Barnhart gives us a preview of the new PBS show, Roger Ebert Presents At The Movies. This is around the eighty-thousandth attempt to replicate the success of the original Siskel/Ebert programs and I have no idea if it'll succeed, ratings-wise. But every time I see one of these shows, I have the following thought: I wonder if the folks behind them understand that what Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert did was a series that was a lot more about them than it was about films.

I don't think America has ever been that interested in watching a couple of strangers tell us their opinions of the latest flicks. For years though when Siskel and Ebert were on, folks developed an interest to watching those two guys argue. It could have been about sports or recipes or any topic if they'd been equally enthusiastic about it. No other combo of movie critics has ever matched that chemistry, even when one of them was Ebert.

Gene and Roger came to the arena as established competitors and there were times on the show when they seemed genuinely pissed at each other and eager to prove the other wrong. That made it all the more meaningful when they agreed and especially when they hit upon some common ground of passion and it seemed like, just for the moment, they really liked each other. It reminded us of all those nice moments in our own lives when we find ourselves bonding with someone who, not that long before, we regarded as an adversary. It was, in a way, a genuine Reality Show. That particular friendship, stormy as it was, mattered to us.

The hosts of the new program may be fine, articulate folks who truly know movies. I'm not saying they're unqualified. But if I were charged with casting a series like this, I don't think I'd go searching through published reviews looking for witty print reporters. I think I'd look for two guys who've been sitting around some bar for years, yelling at each other about whether Daniel Craig is a better James Bond than Timothy Dalton and if either of them is fit to carry Sean Connery's toupee.

As I mentioned, Jason Alexander and Stephanie J. Block will be starring in a short-term production of They're Playing Our Song up at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA. This is the musical by Neil Simon, Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and I expect it to be a fine evening (or matinee, if you prefer) in the theater. It's there for sixteen performances only starting September 28 and I have a special deal for you. Order here and enter the code SONIA to get $10 off any ticket for any performance.

The matinee on Saturday, October 2 will be preceded by a special lecture/program. At Noon, I will be speaking about the history of the show and interviewing some of the people involved in the design and staging of this production. Our presentation lasts around an hour and then the show starts at 2 PM. Last time I did this, some people brought picnic lunches to eat on the UCLA Quad lawn in the hour between. I hope that wasn't the best part of the afternoon.