The best job I ever had was doing Jane Wagner’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” on Broadway. When you’re on Broadway in a hit, New York is like a small town. Everybody waves or speaks to you on the street. And Jane’s play would cause the most disparate group of people to gather outside the stage door every night. The year was 1985/86 and kids all gothed out or punked out would be there with some gorgeous yuppie couple and three middle-aged women friends from Omaha. And they all wanted to hug each other and me because of the play’s universal embrace.

Favorite job: easy. Ten years on “Murphy Brown” with the best cast and crew on the wonderful Warner Brothers lot run by Bob Daly who was the most generous and best of bosses.

Stage mother when my stagestruck children were little and supering in operas and ballets at the Kennedy Center. Forget everything you’ve heard about stage mothers — the K.C. crowd banded together to impose strict rules requiring our children to know the music and understand the stories, maintain the work schedules without being nagged, inform one another about auditions, refrain from crying when not chosen, congratulate those who were chosen and keep up with their real jobs, meaning schoolwork, on pain of having their theatrical careers summarily ended. One time the children organized a job action against us, demanding the right always to stay through the entire show (our rule was that on school nights, they had to go home as soon as they were offstage) and we S.Ms. responded by threatening to refuse to drive them, to cut off their microwave money and not to hold onto their Capezio boxes while they were on stage. My son, who now represents management for the labor negotiations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, has learned something about negotiation since that experience.

The best job I ever had was in the late 1950s when this poor little socially deprived nose-against-the-glass Texan was catapulted into a job ghostwriting the Cholly Knickerbocker society column, a big syndicated important pillar owned by Hearst. The real-life Cholly was one Igor Cassini, a Russian Italian who was busy playing golf and sleeping with all the most beautiful women in the world. He didn’t have much time for over-seeing his column. So I had the fun, the glory and didn’t have to take the blame for whatever appeared in print. I was being royally paid $200 a week and I went out of Cassini’s townhouse office every day to lunch in places like Le Pavillon, Voisin, Quo Vadis and The Colony, on the cuff. (“Always tip a little bit,” advised Cassini.) At nights I arrived at El Morocco to observe the crème de la crème dancing under the blue palm trees and zebra stripes. And to dance myself with handsome well-dressed guys I’d never have met otherwise. There was more gossip in so-called society than there has ever been in show biz. I jotted everything down and it was total fun. I was there for the deluge when Society went downhill after JFK and Jackie. More drama when my boss, Cassini, was indicted and lost his column. By then I was a seasoned New Yorker who knew where lots of bodies were buried and who was who. My experience put me in demand. It was a heady, silly, wonderful job pretending to be Cholly and I have missed it ever since.

The one I have.

The best job I ever had was when I started the Children’s Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop). It was something I felt I was born to do and it was, during those early days when we were inventing something from scratch, a great adventure and a lot of fun. And I was the boss! I remember telling Forbes magazine, which headlined the quote: "I’ve been boss and I’ve been bossed, and believe me, being boss is better."

The best job I ever had was running my own advertising agency. It never ever bored me – it was like going to a brilliant school all the time; there was so much to learn and I was able to exercise ideas for clients that I could never have gotten approved by a boss. I was in Heaven and I knew it.