Failing (refusing?) to love one another. Thinking you are better than the person next to you on the subway, or in your office, or at the deli, or anywhere.

I have always said that I would be a terrible celebrity. I treasure my anonymity and this is one of the many reasons I love living in New York City. I hate it when someone knows who I am and I don’t know who they are. I have a job where this happens occasionally, and it always makes me extremely uncomfortable. I do Google myself every now and then, mainly to be sure that every single entry is still about other people with my same name, and not about me. I like that just fine. And guess what, my real name is not Kitty Webb! >^. .^<

Skydiving. Drugs. Driving down a mountain road with plenty of hairpin turns - but no guard rails - during an ice storm. Staring down the barrel of a shotgun when accidently stumbling across a still out in the woods with my photographer boyfriend. (I was the one who talked our way out of that predicament. “Didn’t you know my granddaddy?” And, astonishingly, the man with the shotgun actually HAD known my grandfather.) The old skydiver saying is probably accurate: you have a much greater chance of dying while driving to the airport than you do jumping out of the airplane.

This great man’s lesson of non-violence was so threatening to some that his life was ended by a violent assassination. Still hard to believe, still horrifying, forty years later.

MY FAIR LADY! My parents had the album and played it all the time. Then when I was twelve years old, they brought me to New York for the first time and we saw it on Broadway. That was 45 years ago. I still remember my mother telling me that the way you know the intermission is over is when the house lights blink. On that same trip, we went to THE SOUND OF MUSIC and we waited by the stage door afterward and saw Mary Martin get into her limousine. Because it was so crowded, I had walked around to the side of the car facing the street, and when Mary Martin got into her car, she looked out of the window directly at me and smiled and waved. Heaven!

I loved them both, and they’ve both been dead for over 25 years, but it’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head every day. She was a smart, strong woman who (as someone later put it, ignorantly) “worked even though she didn’t have to.” She told me once that every day since her own mother died, she remembered something she wished she had asked her, and that is true for me now too.

And another thing! Did any of you seriously believe that there actually WERE weapons of mass destruction or that the people of Iraq would welcome us with open arms? Those were big lies to be sure, but I never believed them, not even close.

Liz Smith, you are so right - “Just sign this. It’s OK. You don’t have to read it carefully.” That happened to me, too. It’s right up there with “I just need to borrow this money for a couple of weeks and then I’ll pay it all back.”

Taxis when the subway is actually easier and faster; gossip magazines; toys my cats don’t need because they already have plenty of toys.