Larry Blyden was a favorite actor of mine when I was younger. He was one of those rare guys who had a good career on TV, a good career in the movies and a good career on Broadway — all three. He is probably best remembered from his time as the host of the syndicated What's My Line? game show but he was also on two episodes of The Twilight Zone, a great short-lived sitcom called Harry's Girls and dozens of other shows.

My all-time favorite thing I ever saw on a stage was the 1970 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Phil Silvers. Larry Blyden won a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor as Hysterium in that production and was also the main person responsible for that limited-run Los Angeles offering being transferred to Broadway.

He was in a number of other plays on The Great White Way. Whenever he was, he was known to post his Theatrical Laws on the wall of his dressing room and to hand out printed copies to others. Here are Larry Blyden's Theatrical Laws…

1. It is better to have a hit than a flop.
2. Never put a first year Stanislavsky student in a French farce.
3. Know how many acts are in the play.
4. It is as important to know the cues as it is to know the lines.
5. Save your money.
6. Know which battles you can't win and don't fight them.
7. To have a career in the theatre, one must also have a store.
8. Work breeds work.
9. It is not safe to tell about a job until the day after the show.
10. Save your money.
11. Don't dazzle them with everything at once.
12. Stay down for the laugh.
13. Don't stay down for too long.
14. Most of the people in Bangkok never heard of you.
15. Insanity often passes for talent.
16. When reading for a part, remember that they don't know what to do with it either.
17. Save your money.
18. It is better to act in a play that fails than to get behind in the rent.
19. Being applauded at the end often only means you got through it.
20. Doing a commercial is better than not doing Hamlet.

Larry Blyden died in 1975 in an auto accident when he was vacationing in Marrakesh. He was 49 years old. I bet if he'd lived another 20-30 years, you'd know him from a lot more things than you do. A very talented man.

Daniel Larison: "Iran hawks have been agitating for open conflict with Iran for years. Tonight, the Trump administration obliged them by assassinating the top IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and the head of Kata'ib Hezbollah in a drone strike in Baghdad."

Fred Kaplan: "You don't deliberately kill someone like Soleimani unless you're at war with his country, and even then, you want to think long and hard before you do, given the near-certainty of blowback. The blowback may soon be coming. Friday morning, Khamenei called for three days of national mourning and a 'forceful revenge.' It would be shocking if he didn't follow through."

Alex Ward: "A deadly opening attack. Nearly untraceable, ruthless proxies spreading chaos on multiple continents. Costly miscalculations. And thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — killed in a conflict that would dwarf the war in Iraq. Welcome to the US-Iran war, which has the potential to be one of the worst conflicts in history."

Jonathan Chait: "Beginning in 2011, and continuing through the next year, Donald Trump began obsessively predicting that President Obama would start a war with Iran in order to be reelected. Trump stated it publicly, on at least a half-dozen occasions, explicitly positing that attacking Iran would help Obama win reelection."

Kevin Drum: "I'll make one prediction for sure: every time we kill someone like this, the replacement turns out to be even worse. We may consider Soleimani a state terrorist of the first order, but I'll bet he seems like a cautious and prudent institutionalist compared to whoever takes over for him."

ME: "Remember how long it'll be until we vote and…remember how volatile everything is about our current political scene. Everything can change tomorrow. Everything will change within the month, let alone the 321 days until we go to the polls and vote for whoever's names are on the ballots."

I'm not sure why I'm putting this here. The YouTube producer MsMojo will do a "Top 10 Best" list about anything. I'm surprised they haven't done a "Top 10 Best Members of the Three Stooges" yet. (If they did, they'd probably pad it out with Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, etc.) This is their list of "The Top 10 Best Broadway Musicals." Needless to say, I don't agree with it and neither will you.

Discussing lists like this is always a problem because the criteria is unstated. Does popularity matter? Number of awards? Just what do they mean by "best" anyway? In this case, are we talking about how good the show was in one specific Broadway production or are we evaluating the book and the score, regardless of who performs it? I've seen some pretty lousy productions of some great musicals.

Of their ten, I've seen three. Haven't seen Les Miserables, haven't seen The Phantom of the Opera, and as we all know, I haven't seen Cats live. I would never make up a list like this but I wouldn't put The Lion King, Rent or Jesus Christ, Superstar on it, and I think Hamilton needs to age a few more years before we'll have some idea of how it fits into the overall parade. My list would almost certainly include The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, 1776, maybe Gypsy or Sweeney Todd, and definitely my favorite, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. None of them made MsMojo's Top Ten.

But I really don't have a list and if you do, don't send it to me. Here's theirs…

I had a nice week or so of pretending he wasn't there but eventually, we all have to get back to reality. Here are three reminders…

First up: Daniel Larison reviews how Trump's approach to Iran and North Korea has basically been to do almost nothing — and certainly nothing that's been effective — but to keep telling the American people he's solved those problems. But he hasn't. Money quote from Larison…

The problem here is not just that Trump gambled on bad policy goals and lost, but that he is determined to lie to the public about those policies for as long as he can. Trump has made sure that neither the Iranian nor the North Korean government can trust him, and he has proved to the American people that we can't trust him, either. His foreign policy initiatives fail in no small part because no one believes what he says and no one is willing to take a chance by trusting him to honor the commitments he makes.

Secondly: Jonathan Chait reminds us that Trump is still waging war against CNN because, as Chait puts it, "its message is not controlled by his loyalists." He also likes to lie about the ratings of anyone in that category. It reminds me of a blog post that famed zillionaire Richard Branson wrote back in 2016…

Some years ago, Mr. Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people. He didn't speak about anything else and I found it very bizarre. I told him I didn't think it was the best way of spending his life. I said it was going to eat him up, and do more damage to him than them. There must be more constructive ways to spend the rest of your life.

Finally for now, Steve Benen tells how Trump's claims and predictions about the stock market do not relate to reality or even to each other. Quote from Benen…

Part of the problem with Trump's boasts is that he often sees the market as a real-time political barometer tied directly to developments in D.C. If the major indexes are on an upswing, the president sees it as proof of his genius. If they're declining, he insists his political opponents are to blame for the downturn. The result is routine incoherence.

The other day, I saw a clip of John McCain in something on CNN and I couldn't help think the following: That if he was still alive, he would already have been the first Republican senator to support the impeachment. Just a thought.

Yesterday morning, a friend and I drove up the coast to Malibu — a drive I figured (correctly) would take less than Forever on a morn when everyone was home watching the Rose Parade. Our destination was one of my favorite restaurants…the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe. I recommend it but I also recommend not going without a reservation and not going when there's going to be heading-for-work or heading-home traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway. The place has great food, including the best clam chowder I've ever had anywhere.

Do me a favor. Since I just wrote that, do not write to tell me where to get even better clam chowder somewhere I'm not likely to ever be. Any time I post anything like that, I get all these e-mails that, first of all, want to correct me like I've made some sort of factual error; like someplace I've never been really has the best clam chowder I've ever had anywhere. And it doesn't do a whole lot of good to write and tell me, "You want really good clam chowder? Next time you're in the Republic of Botswana…"

Among the many delightful things to consume at the Beach Cafe are anything that comes with french fries. Theirs excel in quality and quantity. The pile that came with my fried shrimp contained about as many as your average McDonald's fries up in a month…and yes, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect but that's what we sometimes do here since this blog was started centuries ago. Among the leftovers I brought home, I had a helluva lot of fries.

I've tried reheating french-fried potatoes in the microwave and it leaves them as limp as…well, for some reason this morning, I can only think of dick jokes. But microwaving fries doesn't work so well.

So I tried something I'd read about on that all-seeing, all-knowing source of information (some of it even correct)…the Internet! I sprayed a non-stick skillet with canola oil and put it over medium heat. When it was medium hot, I dumped in some fries, swished them around with a spatula for five minutes and…like the proverbial Phoenix, they rose from the dead.  I didn't know you could do that but now I know…and so do you.

Yes, a friend of mine and I went to see the film of Cats today. I enjoyed it somewhat more than I expected and a lot more than a lot of people in the theater thought I ought to. Some of them apparently thought it's acceptable behavior at a movie to hoot and yell things back at the screen if we're all in agreement that the film's a piece of garbage. I don't agree with that kind of etiquette ever and I don't agree that Cats is as bad a movie as some folks say.

Note that I did not say it was a great film. As I mentioned here, I've never seen Cats as it was meant to be seen — as a musical on the stage. But my sense is it's not possible to make a great film out of the source material and still remain reasonably faithful. What I'm thinking is what we saw this afternoon might just be the best movie that could be made out of it.

I thought it was visually splendid. I thought there are plenty of outstanding performances, including some fine dancing. I think some of the songs are pretty good. And I thought some of the vocal detractors in the audience were laughing at the movie when if they'd given the film more of a chance, they'd have been laughing with it. There was some rather funny stuff in there, especially with James Corden and Ian McKellen.

Yeah, the story's kinda weird. That's the story of Cats, a musical that millions have seen and most have loved. This is no time to change it. Yeah, it's weird to see all those people "made-up" (mostly by CGI) as quasi-human felines. Again, that's just what Cats is. About five minutes in, I decided to embrace the weirdness, the sheer outrageousness of it all. Some of the critics have said they should have made a cartoon out of the show. I decided to treat it as if they did. I had a much better time that way.

I am not exactly recommending this movie. If you can't get past the humans-as-cats, you'll be staring at it with the "Springtime for Hitler" look. If you can accept it for what it is, it might be a good way to introduce the kiddos to musical theater and you may enjoy it too. Just don't go because you think it's going to stink and you'll enjoy it for that reason. It doesn't and you won't. What you might do though is lessen the enjoyment for others in the theater who might be enjoying it.

On The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, they keep recording what goes on between scenes and now and then, they air those snippets or post them online. Here are some moments from 2019…

I woke up this morning, looked outside and damned if it didn't feel like a New Year. There was almost no traffic…no sirens…no one yelling. So far, the news bulletins that pop up on my iPhone haven't brought me any bad news or infuriating Trump tweets. I have a friend here and we have plans for the day that involve other friends. I have no e-mails from producers or editors asking, "Where the hell is that script?"

Yep. This sure ain't 2019…so far.

I know people who, first and foremost in the world, want their lives to be interesting…even if that involves stress and fights and conflicts and anger. I like "interesting" too but not when it comes with those things attached. I don't see them as unavoidable if one is going to have an interesting existence and to the extent they are…well, I could tolerate a little "boring" now and then. I think one of the reasons I was attracted to writing as a lifestyle was that you can always make things interesting by sitting down and writing something interesting…and without bloodshed.

I'm assuming it will not feel completely like a new year for very long. By Monday, it will certainly feel a lot like last year and the year before and maybe even the year before. In my experience, it usually doesn't go back more than about three years. But I'm going to enjoy the new year while it still has that fresh New Car Smell. Hope you enjoy yours while you can.

I guess 2019 couldn't get the hell out of our lives without forcing me to do one more obit — two, if I had anything of note to say about Neil Innes, who was kind of like an honorary member of Monty Python, which I don't. But I have some things to share with you about Jack Sheldon.

Jack was an actor, a singer, a great jazz trumpet player and a helluva cool guy. I'm sure I'm not the only person who remembers his short-lived sitcom, Run, Buddy, Run, which was kind of like "What if we made a TV show out of Some Like It Hot but removed all the drag and most of the humor?" He acted a lot on other TV shows, as well. Jack Webb used him a lot on the seventies version of Dragnet.

Jack used to tell the story — and it won't be funny if I tell it but I won't let that stop me — of one particular time when he was booked as a day player on Dragnet. Being hired on that show meant you showed up on the set without seeing a script in advance. All the lines you had would be on a TelePrompter. When Jack arrived, he found out he was playing a guy who smoked marijuana, which was kind of like casting Andre the Giant to play a tall guy.

The episode was about a dog that the L.A.P.D. had trained to be able to sniff out weed. That much of it was true and it's on YouTube if you want to see it. The scene with Jack begins around at around 20:20 and Jack's the guy in the sweater. I'm not sure if the dog you see in the show is the actual dog but the actual dog was present on the set, accompanied by a mob scene of police officers who were using the dog to bust…well, people like Jack.

When Jack arrived and found all this out, he dashed outside the studio, found a trash can and began emptying his pockets frantically.

When he told some of us that story, he said, "I got rid of all my pot and I was picking out seeds and twigs from the lining of my pockets but it was a waste of time and pot. Even if I'd been nude, that pooch could have sniffed the stuff on me. Fortunately, the cops were cool. They didn't want to bust a guy on Jack Webb's set, especially after someone told them I was a jazz musician."

Jack was a great jazz musician and he was always popping up around Los Angeles, sometimes solo, sometimes fronting a band at the Smoke House or the Catalina Bar & Grill or the old Jax Bar & Grill in Glendale. I also sometimes saw him downtown at the Music Center and I don't mean in one of the theaters there. When he had no booking, Jack would often drive down there with his trumpet, set up on the grounds there and start playing his horn for passers-by. He had a hat out to accept tips, often from puzzled folks who said, "Isn't that the guy who's on The Merv Griffin Show all the time?"

It was. That was another place you may have known Jack from. For a long time, he played trumpet in that show's band and Merv would often bring him down to chat as a kind of sidekick. And of course, you all know Jack from his greatest, most enduring performance…

One of his biggest fans and closest friends, Chuck McCann used to drag me, not at all against my will to wherever Jack was playing. I liked that Jack always played "I'm Just a Bill" as part of his show and I really liked that he'd come sit at our table between sets and tell stories. When Chuck had a party at his home for his seventieth birthday, the place was packed with celebrities. Even Hef put in an appearance. And there, set up in the living room was the Jack Sheldon Quartet performing — and all the mingling and star-humping stopped to listen when Jack performed "I'm Just a Bill."

Someone told me Jack paid his sidemen for the night but refused to take a nickel from Chuck. When Chuck offered a check, Jack tore it to shreds and said, "Hey, man! Don't you know how to accept a present?"

My favorite moment with Jack Sheldon was at the memorial service for Pat McCormick. Pat was famous for dropping his pants in unlikely places so the end of the show went as follows: All the comedians in the audience — which included everyone from George Carlin to Shelley Berman to Jonathan Winters — got up on stage. Jack played "Taps" on his trumpet and then as he hit the final note, everyone dropped trou.

I was in charge of the seating at the event and I saved a seat in the front row for Jack and his horn. When he arrived and I started to show him to it, he said, "I need to be sitting next to a hot lady. I'm leaving if you don't put me next to a great-looking lady." I said, "Give me a minute." I did some fast rearranging and I placed a lady named Debbie Boostrom in the seat next to where Jack would be sitting. Debbie was Playboy's Playmate of the Month for its August 1981 issue and she still looked great. Jack was quite satisfied with her hotness.

It was a great, hilarious ceremony and on the way out, Jack made a point of seeking me out to thank me for the seating arrangements. He said, "You know I was kidding, don't you? I always ask that and I never get it. I play a club and the guy in charge asks what I need and I always say 'a hot babe' and I never ever get one."

I said, "Never?" He said, "Never. I'm a jazz musician, man. I can't even get them to give me a room to change my clothes where someone isn't coming in every three minutes to take a shit." I hope he has one now.

We don't like to speak ill of the dead on this blog but the dead person in this case is Don Imus, who seemed to love speaking ill of everyone, dead or alive. I was not a fan of him on the radio and even if I'd wanted to be, most of his career was spent in marketplaces that did not include Los Angeles.

I first became aware of him in the early seventies because he had comedy albums out and they had Jack Davis covers. To this day, I'd buy a box of tampons if it had a Jack Davis drawing on the box, and back then, I was buying every comedy album I came across. I especially bought them when I found a copy in the 3-for-a-dollar bin at the old Rhino Records shop in Westwood, as I did with the above record. I took it home, listened and decided I'd overpaid. Imus struck me as a much-less-clever version (possibly, imitation) of my local radio fave, "Sweet" Dick Whittington on KABC and later other L.A. channels.

What I heard of him on that record and elsewhere, did not strike me as witty or funny. It just seemed sour. A lot of it was phone pranks and I'm not sure there's a lower form of anything that pretends to be humor than phone pranks. I can't recall laughing at anything in the second half of my life-to-date that could be described as a "prank." Usually, it's just being a colossal dick to someone and then onlookers are supposed to find the discomfort of the victim funny. I almost never do.

Mr. Imus was off my radar for a long time but about twenty years ago, my mother (of all people) became a steady viewer of his morning radio show as televised on MSNBC. She didn't like him — which was fortunate because I would have thought she'd gone senile…but she liked his program. This requires some explanation.

After my father died, my mother began to live her life only for herself. She would eat when she felt like it, sleep when she felt like it…and that was about it because her eyes were too bad to read or knit or watch much of what was on TV. Except when she had to be up at certain hours for doctor appointments (she had plenty of those) and caregiver visits, she might just sleep all day, be up all night and eat breakfast at Midnight and/or Dinner at 6 AM. She was often up at 4 AM or 5 AM or whenever Imus was on MSNBC so she'd tune him for four reasons…

One was that it was live and it wasn't a news program. News was too depressing and in those wee small hours, she craved a little company. Secondly, his guest list included a lot of people she liked. Thirdly, it was a radio show. They pointed cameras at Imus and his guests and put the video on MSNBC but if you couldn't see the TV screen, you weren't really missing anything. And lastly, she was fascinated by the relentless negativity of Mr. Don Imus. She said, "I think I only watch to see if anyone can get a kind word out of that awful man." She said every now and then, someone could.

But for the most part, she said, "He thinks his job is to say something mean about everyone and everything." She didn't take it seriously because, well, if you come at the world like that, your opinion of any person, place or thing is pretty worthless. Of course you don't like it. You don't think you're allowed to like it.

When she said that, it rang a bell with me. I got to thinking about a number of stand-up comedians I've seen and even a few I've known. They think it's their job to say something mean about everyone and everything. If you say, "Pass the salt," they think they have to make a smartass remark about people who ask you to pass the salt. If you say you like banana bread or shoelaces, they have to say something pissy about banana bread or shoelaces. It's not a viewpoint on the world. It's a bit.

And there's often a market for that bit. Don Imus certainly had a long and lucrative career and I think a lot of people we see on TV are not expressing honest opinions. They're like Rip Taylor throwing confetti or Soupy Sales getting hit with pies. They're doing a bit that's made them a lot of money. They're giving their audience what it wants.

About the only nice thing I can say about Don Imus on the event of his passing is that he gave my mother a lot of pleasant hours. She really enjoyed not liking the man.

When you have a moment, read this true (apparently) story by Nancy French about her impulsive marriage to a "rank stranger." There's a lesson in it but it might not be the one you see coming.

A very partial rundown of things that pissed off Lewis Black in the year now ending…

In 1934, Stan Laurel and Oliver "Babe" Hardy appeared in a movie that is now known under two titles — Babes in Toyland and March of the Wooden Soldiers. By any name, it's a wonderful film…and one which is well-remembered and often shown around Christmas time. If you have the slightest interest in it, you'll want to visit this website where Laurel and Hardy buff Ray Faiola has compiled just about everything you'd ever want to know about it.

Since I didn't know Jerry Herman, I thought it would be nice to have something on this blog from someone who did. My pal Christine Pedi is an accomplished stage performer, a host on the Broadway channel at Sirius XM radio and the best Liza Minnelli impersonator in the business. After I read this on Facebook the other day, I called her up and got her permission to post it here…

I met Jerry Herman at a press event when I was a teenager. I asked if I could interview him for my school radio station and he gave me his home phone number without hesitation. When I called to make the appointment, he said we could either do the interview at his house or at the rehearsal for La Cage Au Folles which was about to open at the Palace. He was fitting me in after a meeting with the costume designer. I opted for the rehearsal space.

There in the room where he held his meetings were sketches on the walls of Theoni Aldredge's dazzling concoctions. Jerry was impeccably dressed…casual sweater and slacks but I was willing to bet everything was made of cashmere. He was a delightful, vivacious, darling who treated me and my Swingline cassette recorder as if I were someone from the New York Times. He was exactly the life force that I had hoped he would be. He was like his songs…life affirming.

Let's not put him in a box. though. He could give voice to complex, dark, deep internal feelings just as successfully and did often…but those anthems to the "live" mantra of Auntie Mame or Dolly Levi or Zaza were scene stealers. We're all fine with that because we know that this sparkly spring of enthusiasm and joy also ran deep when he had to.

I honestly can't recall much more from the interview (which is on a cassette tape somewhere in my Mother's attic) except that at some point an assistant came in with the most civilized lunch I'd ever seen…and come to think of it, now that I've been in more rehearsal rooms than I can count, it remains the most civilized lunch I've ever seen. A piece of roasted chicken, golden brown with some healthy greens (there might have been carrots…I suspect there were, they would have balanced the color) served on an actual china plate with silverware and a cloth napkin! That's how you dine when you're in head to toe cashmere.

A few years later, I got my first lead in a community theatre show. I was Mabel in Mack & Mabel. I can't recall exactly what it was but I called him with a question we had about the show. It was licensed for the "provinces" with a different ending than on Broadway. When he picked up the phone and I told him I was doing Mack & Mabel, his voice leapt up. "Oh, Christine! You're doing Mack & Mabel! How wonderful. Who's playing Mack?"

I paused. "Well…Jeff Schlotman?" (Did he expect to know him?) With no dip in energy, he said "Oh, please tell Jeff…" and then he went on to tell me about the B'way production and how they "loved her, hated him" and it was so dark. (The real Mabel came to a very sad and pathetic end.) But the licensed production had Mack fantasizing about how their lives would end if he could turn it into a silent film comedy complete with Bathing Beauty bridesmaids and Keystone Kops as groomsmen. Jerry was, again, investing as much importance in what I was doing in a high school auditorium as he would if he were talking to…Bernadette Peters? Well, it sure felt like that to me. Just total authentic interest and support and passion for what we were doing.

When it came to writing for the theatre, Jerry Herman could really do it all. He did indeed paint with many colors but his brights were so masterful, so convincing, we tend to want to follow that light. Of course we do. It's instinct to respond positively when encouraged to fan our inner flame. His anthems ignite that in us. He led with joy. He led with heart. He led with hope. That's the first thing we remember…no. it's the first thing we feel when we think of Jerry Herman.

So as we turn into a new year and decade, we make our plans and create our expectations.  But really, "the best of times is now.  This very minute has history in it.  It's today!"

I was with Jerry Herman exactly once for about eight minutes and it was just a few years ago when he was clearly not going to be around that much longer. He seemed very small, very nervous and when I told him — honestly — how much I admired his songwriting, he acted like I was the first person to ever tell him that instead of (conservative estimate:) the one-zillionth.

This is not one of those "obit" messages like people post on Facebook where the subtext is "the deceased was a wonderful, talented, successful person and I must have been somewhere in the same category because we were close friends and he loved me so." I really didn't know the man.

I would have liked to have known him; would have liked to discuss how he came up with so many tingle-inducing musical highlights in shows like Hello, Dolly!, Mame, Mack and Mabel and La Cage Aux Folles. There was something so natural and organic about his tunes. What's more, he did his best work — arguably in those four musicals — in shows where you really don't care a whole lot about the book. Next time I attend a production of one, if they announce "We're going to skip all that talking and just do the songs," it'll be fine with me.

Here — I'll show you what I mean. Watch this video from a BBC Proms concert. It's the title song from Mame and it just might be the best first-act-closer number in the history of musical theater. Ignore the male soloist who didn't hold the lyrics in his hand and as a result, got some of the words wrong. Just listen to the excitement and the way the number builds and builds…and it's so great, it doesn't matter that in the story, there's absolutely no reason for anyone to make this kind of musical fuss over Ms. Mame Dennis…

There's also no reason for the waiters at the Harmonia Gardens to do all that singing and dancing to celebrate the return of Ms. Dolly Levi but who cares? The fact that Jerry Herman wrote a great song is reason enough.

During my eight minutes with him, he said nothing quotable, nothing worthy of reporting here. What I thought might be worthy of reporting though was how pleased he was that I, a total stranger, was honored to meet him. Again, he acted like it was something new in his life when it must have been, at least, a thrice-daily occurrence.

There's a strange kind of humility I've witnessed at times in people of extraordinary accomplishment. If you have six Tony Awards, a couple of Grammies, the Kennedy Center honor and all those rave reviews and box office records — as he did — you can't very well act like you've done nothing. That kind of modesty seems really, really phony…because it is.

You also can't say, "You're right, I'm great" because that's pretty dickish. You might think it but you can't say it. Mr. Herman gave no indication that that's what he was thinking.

What he did was what I love to see. I love it when the person seems personally moved that someone — and a complete stranger might be better than an acquaintance for this — took the time to tell them how much their work had meant to someone else's life. It's certainly better that it comes from a person with no conceivable personal motive for buttering them up…praising them because something is wanted in return.

So I'm very pleased that I got to be among the zillion who met the man and thanked him and gave back a itsy-bitsy teeny-tiny microscopic smidgen of the joy his compositions have brought to the world. They'll continue to bring joy to the world and I hope he understood that. Because now there's no way for anyone else to remind him.