Rowan Atkinson interviews Elton John. Or maybe it's John Elton…

So I'm figuring that if the current Trump scandals unfold the way Nixon's did — and they may not — what happens next is a flurry of polls which G.O.P. leaders read to say, "If we don't get on top of this and we look like we're protecting and enabling this guy, we're going to lose the House and/or Senate." One of the things that did Nixon in was that Republican lawmakers saw their base splitting. If you were a Congressperson or Senator of that party, you saw that you could lose half of the Republican vote if you protected Nixon and half if you didn't. It's almost impossible to win another term if anywhere near 50% of your own party deserts you. It also makes you extremely vulnerable to a challenger from your own party.

I always thought one of the key "Nixon is doomed" moments of Watergate came when an obscure, well-meaning little rabbi named Baruch Korff started turning up everywhere in the news, identified as "Nixon's Chief Defender." You would have thought that Nixon's Chief Defender would have been a prominent Republican Senator, Governor or Congressman — but no. All those guys were hiding under their desks, afraid to link their future with their president's. I thought of that last night when several news stories said that Fox News was having trouble getting anyone important to come on and speak on behalf of Trump.

Rabbi Korff suddenly got a lot of air time because there was this void. No one else wanted to be Nixon's Chief Defender and the media — especially the three major TV networks and especially CBS — were desperate to have someone speak on his behalf. If they hadn't, they would have given credence to the argument that the press was biased against Nixon and ginning up the whole Watergate mess. So Korff was suddenly everywhere and though he meant well, I thought he did Nixon more damage than good.

Korff was a bad surrogate. He didn't know how to speak in sound bites and give short, quotable answers. He knew very little about Washington and nothing about the "spin" Nixon and his people wanted to put on his actions, so often the Rabbi's "defense" admitted things Nixon was trying to deny and vice-versa. (There's another parallel there to Trump. A lot of the official spokespersons who've been out there saying things on behalf of Trump have immediately been contradicted by other spokespersons or by Trump himself.  Nothing makes you look guiltier than not being able to get your story straight.)

Korff also had been a genuine hero during World War II helping Jews escape the Nazi onslaught. There were so many such heroes that his deeds had gone largely unheralded and he sometimes seemed less interested in championing Nixon than he was in talking about his own accomplishments. When Dan Rather asked Korff for a thirty-second statement about the latest Watergate revelation, he often got a ten-minute story about liberating concentration camps.

The rabbi looked silly with his self-promotion and sillier still when some of Nixon's anti-semitic remarks on the tapes came out…and of course it was not lost on some people that Korff was out defending Nixon because no one else would do it.

It may not play out quite that way with Trump because due to gerrymandering and polarization, more Republicans are probably in "safe seats" and less afraid of losing them. Then again, even those G.O.P. officials are afraid of Democratic victories and with Trump's growing unpopularity getting in the way of tax cuts, Medicaid cuts and other items on the Republican wish list. Already, some Republicans are at least looking like they support full investigations and maybe a Special Prosecutor.  Depending on what James Comey says in the coming days, there may be a stampede.

My long-held view though is that Nixon wasn't forced out of office by Democratic attacks so much as he was ousted by Republican defections. When Barry Goldwater said even he'd be voting yea on at least one of the impeachment counts, Richard M. Nixon knew it was all over. One wonders if Donald J. Trump will be as wise.

Let's go to the links…

• Jonathan Chait reports on the latest Republican spin: Trump didn't mean it when he asked Comey to shut down investigations. He was just joking. You're in lot of trouble when that's the best your supporters can come up with to support you.  ("Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…when my client took that gun and the note demanding cash up to the bank teller's window, it was just a prank…")
• Dylan Matthews explains what happens when a sitting president is accused of a crime. It doesn't work the way it would if authorities found out that you and I are operating that series of illegal cockfights.
• Paul Ryan is still supporting Trump, says Steve Benen. I suspect Ryan will defend Trump to the death…or until he gets big tax cuts for the rich, whichever comes first. This seems to have been a dream Ryan has had since he was about seven. At that age, I was dreaming of working for Hanna-Barbera writing Yogi Bear and Paul Ryan was saying, "When I grow up, I want to take away the health insurance of poor people so that rich people get even richer!"
• And Daniel Larison thinks that Trump is about to make things a lot worse for America in its relationship with followers of Islam. Trump making something worse always sounds like a safe bet to me.

Jimmy Fallon sorta/kinda regrets that when he had Trump on The Tonight Show, it was all fun and games with nothing of a serious tone. Before we pillory Fallon for not being harder on the guy, we oughta ask if Jimmy Fallon is even capable of being harder on anyone. I suspect that once the booking was made, it couldn't have gone any other way. At least Fallon didn't try to get Trump to play a round of some old TV game show…although To Tell the Truth might have been an interesting choice.

Farley Elliott, who covers the Los Angeles restaurant scene and once interviewed me, argues with a recent survey that showed people preferring the Five Guys burger chain to In-N-Out. Naturally, since I have the same preference, I think the survey is inarguably correct. All polls and surveys are correct when they agree with you and they're deeply flawed and biased when they don't. That's Trump's Law.

In fact, I'll go farther with this: I used to be an In-N-Out fan, as I think long-ago posts on this blog will confirm. My last few visits to an In-N-Out left me deciding those would be my last few visits to an In-N-Out. I'm not sure if they've done something to their burgers or if my tastes have somehow evolved but I thought the burgers were pretty unimpressive.

One caveat: I take mine without most of the usual toppings. I'm allergic to some and don't like others. I suppose one could argue that an In-N-Out burger is not an In-N-Out burger unless it's dressed the way they usually serve them. Faced with that position, I might then argue back that any burger from anywhere can be made better or worse based on your topping selections and that the true test is of just the beef patty and bun. In that contest, not only does Five Guys beat In-N-Out handily but so do most chains.

I recognize this is heresy coming as it does from a native Californian. Not loving In-N-Out here is like not loving Vin Scully and, yes, you can be deported for it. But in this world, we have to stand up for what we believe and I believe that Five Guys makes better burgers than In-N-Out…and don't get me started on their fries.

Our pal Leonard Maltin mourns the demise of VHS tapes. Well, not really. He's actually mourning the loss of some great packaging and certain movies which were available in that format and haven't made it to DVD or Blu-ray.

I have a shelf downstairs of Betamax tapes of shows and movies available nowhere else and every so often, I have my assistant transfer a few more of them to digital format. One of these days, I'll start on the shelf of VHS tapes that I didn't toss once DVDs came out of the same material.

While we're on the subject of Maltin: Last Monday night, Leonard emceed a wonderful program at the Academy of Motion Pictures theater — a screening of Bambi preceded by some fascinating "extras." At the reception preceding the program, I got to spend some time talking with Peter Behn, who at age four supplied the voice of Thumper. I can't imagine what it would be like to be part of something so beloved and historic at that age, and to go through life with people telling you how what you contributed to at age four was so meaningful to them. It was a fun evening even though Bambi is far from my favorite Disney film.

• Trump just might be starting to think he can't stand in the middle of 5th Avenue, shoot somebody and not lose voters.

If you're not watching Seth Meyers, you're missing maybe the sharpest political comedy on TV these days.  This "Closer Look" is doing the job that The Daily Show did in its Jon Stewart days…

Too much news. Here we go…

• David Remnick summarizes where we are with the new revelations about James Comey's memo and Trump's admissions of sharing info with Russia.  Not good for Mr. Trump.
• Jonathan Chait says that a few days ago, it was unthinkable that Republicans in Congress would ever allow investigations of Trump to get to the point where impeachment might become likely. Now, he says, it's becoming thinkable.
• Ross Douthat believes that it's time to invoke the 25th Amendment. That's the one where a majority of the president's cabinet declares the president unfit to serve and he or she is asked to step down…and if he or she won't, Congress can remove said unfit person by a 2/3 majority. This will never happen but it's amazing that a Conservative pundit is calling for such a thing.
• Dylan Matthews finds a helluva lot of similarities between Trump's actions and the actions that led to Richard Nixon having to resign lest he be impeached.  At least Nixon's defenders didn't pull the "He didn't know the laws" defense.

My feeling about impeaching Trump is that it will spare us from the worry that in order to divert attention from his problems or prove some point about how tough he is, he's going to do something really, really stupid, possibly involving nuclear weapons. If not for concerns like that, I might not care. I don't see President Pence as much better for this country.

Here's John Oliver with a "web exclusive" update on the campaign to maintain Net Neutrality. Since there's a chance here of some big companies making bigger profits if Net Neutrality goes away, I suspect it will. But it's still worth fighting to delay that day…

As has been told in many places, I met Bob Kane in 1968.  I was 16 years old and I spent a couple of extraordinary afternoons with this man.  In one, urged on by the vodka he was sipping, he rambled on for a couple of hours about his life and career, sometimes weaving dangerously close to what I now believe to have been the truth.

He went down a list of all the people he'd dealt with at DC Comics over the years, identifying which ones were idiots and which ones were pricks.  All fell into one category or the other.  I often note how some people use the same words over and over, and I couldn't help but observe that Mr. Kane did not seem to know any synonyms for "idiot" or "prick."  Those were the only words he used to describe anyone.  At one point, he identified one editor there as an idiot, then thought better of it and said, "No, come to think of it, he's not an idiot.  He's actually a prick."

He was not particularly nice to me, either.  He read some of my writing and told me that I had no talent and should just forget about this silly idea I had of doing what I've been doing for a living now for almost half a century.  Oddly enough, him saying that did not particularly bother me at the time, nor did I consider the possibility that he might be right.  A few swigs of Stolichnaya earlier, Mr. Kane became the first of five people I've met in my life who told me they'd screwed Marilyn Monroe.  Since I didn't believe that, I decided not to believe what he said about my writing.  (If you must know, the other four were Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, James Karen and Tony Curtis.  And as far as I can tell, these men didn't just tell me.  They told everybody.)

My meetings with Kane occurred in his rented apartment on Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood Village.  He was in town for a while to close a huge TV deal, he explained — something he'd created that was going to be "bigger than Batman."  He didn't say what it was but I assume it was The Silent Gun, a 1969 TV-movie/pilot that did not become a series.  It was a western starring Lloyd Bridges as a "fast gun" who accidentally kills a little girl and thereafter vows to never fire his weapon again.  He carries it but does not fire it, relying instead on his wits to prevail in situations where he previously would have just yanked the pistol from its holster and shot somebody.  Not a bad little premise, I suppose.

Otherwise, Kane was doing a lot of public appearances at the time, most of them keying off a "Batman for President" campaign he was flogging to tie-in with the then-current presidential election in this country.  Around his apartment, he had big sheets of illustration board on which he'd drawn caricatures of Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and other folks who may also have screwed Marilyn Monroe or claimed they did.  Of all the claimants, I'd put my money on Nixon and maybe L.B.J., not because I think they screwed her but because I think they screwed everyone.

Kane actually drew them, I'm pretty sure.  He often signed his name to the work of others but these, I believe he did himself.

There was a Batman one and on my first visit to his apartment, which was with some friends, he gave us all autographed photos of himself holding the "Batman for President" drawing.  On my second visit, to which I went alone, he gave me the original.  I found it the other day at the bottom of a big drawer and I took a photo of my lovely friend Jewel Shepard holding it…

Kinda cute, huh?  I mean the poster, not Jewel, though she certainly is.  And I just noticed that after the first photo was taken, Bob added a box around his signature.  This is probably indicative of something though I have no idea what it is.  Anyway, I thought you might enjoy this trip back to a day when the notion of electing a cartoon character to the presidency was way past ridiculous.

It must be tough to be a Trump supporter. Yesterday, he robbed a liquor store. Today, you have to go out and deny he robbed the liquor store and say it's fake news concocted by those slimeballs in the media. And you have to know darn well by now that tomorrow, he's going to be saying or tweeting, "Yeah, I robbed the liquor store and it was the proper and legal thing to do and I was absolutely right to do it."

Wish I collected royalties on the phrase, "Throw [name] under the bus." Here are some links…

• Rod Dreher, who cheers Trump's stated agenda but not the man, writes about the disclosing of apparently-classified info to Russia and says Congressional Republicans ought to bone up on impeachment proceedings.
• More on the same topic from Daniel Larison, who is also not a Liberal.
• Andrew Prokop has a primer on impeachment. My assumption is that it would never come to actual hearings and trials; that as with Nixon, a delegation of Republicans would go to Trump and say, "We've got the votes to put you on trial and investigate everything, including your taxes and business dealings. You can get out now or risk going to prison." And then Donald J. Trump would do, as he always has, what's best for Donald J. Trump.  And spin it as just what he wanted to do.
• Matt Yglesias reminds us how ridiculous it is that folks who thought the worst thing in the world was how Hillary handled her e-mail are now defending Trump's treatment of classified material.
• Matt Taibbi thinks there's more to the whole Russiagate scandal than we know.
• Joe Conason notes that the whole scare tactic of saying that Obamacare would create "Death Panels" was always a lie. But if we have the kind of cuts in Medicaid and other institutions that Republicans want to make, we may indeed have agencies deciding who gets to live and who's going to die.
• And here's a long but fascinating article by Lisa Miller about the drive to bring manufacturing jobs back to this country. I somehow cannot see Trump ever truly getting behind anything that would cut into the profits of American businessfolks. If they can make more money sending jobs overseas, they always will in Donald Trump's America.

Even at this moment, Bill Maher and his staff are sitting in their offices, trying to figure out what Maher can say on his show Friday night that will cause Trump to attack him by name. It will soon be a mark of shame for anyone who considers themselves an edgy political comedian if they can't achieve that.

Kevin Drum notes that Donald Trump's approval rating is not too impressive. 54.3% of the country disapproves whereas 41.2% approves. That's not a record low but it may be a record low for a president who's been in office less than four months. And this is before the outrage du jour of disclosing classified info to his Russian comrades.

This is not specific to Trump but I always assume that the disapproval number of an elected official is a lot more solid than his or her approval rating. The approval rating includes a lot of people who voted for the guy or gal, approved of his/her agenda — or at least what they thought that agenda was — but are deeply unhappy with the non-delivery of that agenda. Whenever a news story suggests that Trump is lying or flip-flopping or that he just doesn't understand things we hope our presidents understand, his supporters have to be wincing in political pain. He doesn't seem to be able to get that wall started or get all those aliens who scare you deported. He's spending time and government money playing golf and defending what he said 48 hours ago.

Or another way to put it is that the disapproval rating represents people who've given up on the official and the approval rating represents people who have either great optimism or stubbornness…and haven't. It's usually possible for that elected official to reverse a downward trend but Trump is so polarizing — and so determined to defend absolutely everything he says or does as correct — that I doubt he can do it.

Drum also notes in this post that Gay Marriage, which was supposed to destroy the moral fiber of our nation and bring God's wrath down on us by now, continues to gain favor among Americans. Even Republican support for it has moved from 28% to 47%. Any day now, it'll be over the 50% mark with Republicans…unless of course it destroys the moral fiber of our nation and brings God's wrath down on us. Seems like it's safe.

Hey, speaking of Lewis Black: If you've never seen him perform live, you're missing a very wonderful experience. Tomorrow morning, tickets are going on sale for concert dates between October 6 of this year and November 19. He'll be in New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. The schedule is on this page.

Now, here's what you do if he's playing close to you and you wanna see him. Join his fan club, which you can do on that page. It only costs $20 and you'll save way more than that if all you ever do is buy two tickets to one of his shows — and you'll also get better seats. Sign up today and then tomorrow at 10 AM Pacific Time, go to that same page and order tickets.

It's a great deal but you've got to act fast. When he played Los Angeles last year, I paid $75 apiece (plus some handling fees) for four spots in the center of the third row. Scalpers were later offering worse seats for $300 each.

Bob Schieffer interviews Lewis Black. This is from 2009 when Mr. Black was out promoting his book on religion and the lack of much of it in his life but many topics are addressed…

Just one Trump link today but it's an important one. David Roberts thinks some people are digging too far to analyze The Donald and construct a complex profile of his strategies and motivations. I think it's pretty simple. It's the old Flip Wilson premise of "What you see is what you get."

He really is that petty. He really feels it's all about saying whatever works at a given moment, never mind past inconsistencies or having to follow up tomorrow on what he says today. It worked to a certain extent when he ran businesses and it worked fine to get him into the White House. It doesn't work now that he has to operate within a different system of laws and limits. The man's used to being able to expect blind loyalty from everyone around him and to be able to fire anyone he wants who won't give it to him. And he doesn't seem capable of change…

In honor of the day, here's a rerun of a post I did here on October 9, 2012. It's the story of my mother's career as a TV star, which did not last long. A lot of careers as TV stars have lasted even less time than hers did…

One day in 1992, completely out of nowhere, my mother made the oddest request. She asked, "Do you think you could get me a job as an extra on a TV show?"

I wouldn't have been more surprised if she'd asked me, "Do you think you could arrange for me to be shot out of a cannon?" She was 70 years old, widowed and retired, and she seemed well adjusted to that life. At no point had she ever expressed the slightest interest in show business or working again, nor did she need money. She had my father's pension and if that had been insufficient — which it never was; not with a good health insurance plan as well — she had me. This was more like a whim. When she'd worked at the grocery store, she'd worked with a couple of folks who'd done extra work and it sounded…well, maybe not so much fun as interesting.

I warned her. There were extra jobs and there were extra jobs. Some required walking back and forth hundreds of times in shots or running or moving about. She could walk then but being 70, she had her limits. She said, "I was thinking…maybe in the jury in a courtroom scene. There are a lot of shows on these days that do scenes in courtrooms and they need older people because older people sit on juries." That made a fair amount of sense. Not a lot of walking for extras who play jurors. I asked her if she had a show in mind. She said, "Well, the one I really love is L.A. Law."

She couldn't have picked an easier show for me. One of my best friends, Alan Brennert, was one of the Supervising Producers on L.A. Law. I phoned him up and twenty minutes later, my mother had a job. I told her I'd take the customary 10%.

It was also a good pick for geographic reasons. L.A. Law shot at the Twentieth-Century Fox Studio which was about five blocks from where she lived. When I resided in that house and had meetings at Fox, I sometimes walked to them. That is, by the way, a really good way to upset the guards at the gate. They always had a drive-on pass ready for me but there were no walk-on passes and they didn't know what the heck to do.

She was quite excited about her job. One of the things she said to me was "I wish I'd thought of this a few years ago before Jimmy Smits left the series. I love him. I'd love to have watched him work." I avoided telling her something Alan had told me; that the Special Guest Star on this particular episode was, as luck would have it, Jimmy Smits.

The day before the gig, she got her first inkling that maybe extra work wasn't something she would love. An assistant phoned and gave her a call time of 6 AM. She briefly considered retiring then and there but decided to soldier on. She was to bring several changes of clothes and report to a certain gate at that ungodliest of hours. Which she did. She drove over that morning and they told her where to park. It was on the opposite end of the lot from where L.A. Law filmed and getting from her car to the stage, she got quite lost. By the time she found where she was supposed to go, she was exhausted from hiking the length and breadth of a pretty big studio.

She was put in a room with the other extras, all of whom were seasoned veterans at this kind of work. They were cordial to her but not particularly welcoming, especially when they found out she hadn't gone through the usual extra casting process. Extras take great pride in their art or craft — whichever they see it as. The notion that someone could just waltz in and do it via an "in" seemed to annoy some of them. It was like, "Hey, we had to work to get here." But no one was rude to her. Not openly, that is.

An hour or so later, the director came into the Extras Room and looked them over. He made a few suggestions about wardrobe and makeup…and designated my mother to be the foreperson.

Now, understand: That just meant she'd be in a certain chair on the set. Other than that, nothing about her participation on the show had changed. But many of the other extras quietly (and later, audibly) objected. It is the dream of almost every extra in almost every job to be upgraded; to have the director or producer suddenly decide to give them a line or two to utter. It makes the money they're being paid go way up and it magically transforms them from Warm Bodies into Actors. They tell tales of it happening, just to reassure each other that it can — "Didja hear? Last week on that Clint Eastwood movie, Jody was upgraded to an Under Five." That is a very big deal.

My mother didn't want an upgrade. She never thought she was an actress. She was a little old lady who could look like a juror sitting there. That was the extent of her ability and she knew it and if they'd tried to give her a line, she would have said, "I can't do that. Give it to someone else."

Still, the other extras were worried. Picking her to be foreperson increased the chance she'd be given a line from…oh, about one chance in ten thousand to one chance in five thousand. Maybe not quite that much. But she heard one of the other extras go up to the Associate Director soon after and tell him, "Listen, that woman is not a professional. If they decide they need a juror to speak, it really should go to one of us." As it turned out, they never needed a juror to speak.

An hour or so later, they were herded onto the set. My mother just sat there in the jury box, delighted to be watching Jimmy Smits addressing the jury. They filmed for about an hour, then the extras were told to return to the Extras Room for a while. Mr. Smits had to rehearse his big, six-page scene before filming would resume.

They all settled back in for a while and my mother listened in on the conversation. It had turned to the topic of Recent Jobs From Hell. One extra told about having to work all night in a scene where rain was being simulated so they were hosed down every two minutes. Another told of a director making them run back and forth for hours in 100° weather, inhaling smoke from smoldering smudgepots. Yet another had a tale of bad food and no toilets on location. As my mother listened, extra work began to sound less and less appealing.

Just then, the Associate Director came in and said, "Mr. Smits would like you in the jury box while he's rehearsing." All the extras started to get up but the A.D. said, "No, just the foreperson," meaning my mother. Smits just wanted her there. As she made her way out to the set, she heard one of the extras muttering, "They'd better not give her a line."

She sat in the jury box for about 40 minutes as Jimmy Smits practiced his long, long speech, pleading his case to her. In the finished show, it wouldn't look that way at all. In fact, you'd never even know she was the foreperson. But on the set that day, Smits argued his view of the matter on hand as if his life depended on convincing Dorothy Evanier. She later told me, "If it had been up to me, he would have won the minute he opened his mouth."

When he was properly rehearsed, the rest of the extras were brought in and the cameras moved into position. Unnoticed by my mother, Mr. Smits went and changed his footwear.

The floor on the set was wood and in the earlier scene, his shoes had made a bit too much noise for the microphones. For just such an occasion, they had special socks that looked like dress shoes and the actors would often wear them to cut down on footstep sounds. Smits was wearing a pair of these as he launched into his big, impassioned, just-rehearsed scene with the cameras rolling. There was a shot of him approaching the jury box and my mother. It never got into the finished show but no one knew at the time it wouldn't. It would have been a shot of Jimmy Smits and my mother with him unburdening his soul to her. Imagine that if you will.

Just as he was reaching his emotional peak, my mother suddenly looked down and made a face as if to say, "What the hell is that on his feet?"

Someone screamed, "Cut!"

Someone else scurried over and told my mother she should be looking at Jimmy Smits, not at his feet. She was embarrassed. A few of the other extras grinned a bit and my mother later reported she could hear them thinking, "See what happens when they hire a non-professional?" But Smits himself told her it was fine; that they were shooting the scene a couple different ways and would be cutting from one take to another. She hadn't ruined anything…or so he assured her.

The rest of the shooting went without incident. They were in and out of the Extras Room a few times, sometimes waiting in there for hours unsure if they'd be needed again at all. But there was good food available and my mother had brought along a few books…so all in all, not a horrible day.

Around 6:30 PM, more than twelve hours after she'd reported for duty, the A.D. came in and released the extras, meaning it was time to go home. My mother was gathering up her things when Jimmy Smits walked in, handed her a rose and thanked her for helping his performance. I have never met Jimmy Smits but as far as I'm concerned, he is the most wonderful human being ever in show business…and that includes me. My mother called his gesture the best moment of her acting career.

It was also the last moment of that career. It was dark when she got out and she was exhausted and it took forever to make it back to the car. The next day, she told me, "If a nice man hadn't come by in a golf cart and taken pity on me and given me a lift, I'd still be there."

All the time, she recalled something one of the friendlier extras had said to her at one point. He'd said, "This show treats us better than any other show in town." Taken in concert with the horror stories she'd heard, that seemed to be true. When I asked her when she wanted me to get her her next job, she said, "Never. I figure if that's as good as it can be, I'm going to quit while I'm ahead."

When the show aired, she got a call from a friend back east who recognized her. That was probably the second-best moment of her time trodding the boards. She also liked a VHS tape I made for her of the episode. I don't think she ever watched it because she kept forgetting how to use her VCR but she really liked the special label I printed up for it. It said, "L.A. Law starring Jimmy Smits and Dorothy Evanier." She looked at that often and occasionally would complain to me about the order of the names. I found that cassette the other day when I was cleaning out a shelf at her house and I thought I ought to tell this story here.