I’ve noted for a long time that I am a weeper and I can’t exactly say why but I do know that I well up far more than I used to, often over things that I consider small, minor even. And that can be truly annoying.

It’s also annoying that when I’m mad I get weepy because I feel like it makes me look like I need patting - and when I’m mad, believe I don’t need patting. But it’s a standard with me – more so, I’ve discovered post 9/11. I filled out a survey a few years back that asked if anything was different in one’s life post 9/11 and I said yeah, that found that I cried more. MAN was that true. But it still is – seems a fact of life. I don’t think it’ age I think that for all of us, everyone who is aware of what happened, something in each of us shifted a little. My shift was to the teary side.

So things make me cry ore than they used to. They are often good things; when I read a story about someone doing the right thing – oh, that’s a big one. I mean I couldn’t even TELL Stu about the story in last Sunday’s Seattle Times about critic Jeff Shannon and Clint Eastwood that had a couple of moments which just stopped me and got me all messy. (short version; critic Shannon uses a wheelchair and Eastwood showed some true courtesy and awareness when Shannon was on set a while ago). (http://tinyurl.com/y42bb3) I just kept getting teary-eyed and getting this stupid annoying quaver in my voice. I HATE this but it seems unavoidably a part of me now.

Last night it was a tv show. DAMN. I hate having my emotions manipulated but I asked for it. I guess. I’ve talked here about how much I loved the tv show “West Wing” and how I think Aaron Sorkin is an amazing writer. His scripts don’t talk down; he throws in intelligent references – sometimes a little esoteric but then he explains them. And yet, before he does, I often get it and feel pleased because here is someone writing to a presumed educated aware audience. And last night I ended up in tears. At the commercial break, Stu came over and hugged me (he’s gotten pretty familiar with what sets me off even if I try not to sniffle too loud) and I just said, over and over, “that DAMN Aaron Sorkin”.

So rather than go through it all, I’ll just say “thanks, guy.” On behalf of Lucille Kallen, one of tv’s earliest and only female comedy writers. She wrote for “Your Show of Shows” for all of its four years. She was the equal of everyone in that room but never was the success that Neil Simon, Woody Allen or Mel Brooks or Larry Gelbart. She was also C B Greenfield, the mystery writer. There was no direct reference to Kallen, but there was a clear link at the end of the show, when the current guys looking at the photo of the old crew of writers ask the old guy (brilliantly played by Eli Wallach) to tell them who the people are. The writers from a huge show from the past, include two women. That’s one more than I think any show had of those times. And I so appreciated it.

And for Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner, Jr. Edward Dymtryk, Albert Maitz, and John Howard Lawson.

Or as they’re known to history, “The Hollywood Ten”.