Went to a terrific event last night with Dan, my mouthpiece. There's a new book by Harold Holzer on Abe Lincoln's 1860 speech at Cooper Union in NY, the speech that was instrumental in Lincoln's getting the Republican Presidential nomination. As a publicity event for the book, Sam Waterston delivered that same speech in the same hall at Cooper Union. The place was packed and what was amazing was the levels the event occurred at. We in the audience were, as at the theater, watching a wonderful actor pretending to be Abe Lincoln deliver a speech about slavery to an audience he -- Lincoln, when he delivered the original -- could be pretty sure shared his opposition to it. But I and everyone around me also heard a coded message about the out-of-power party with right on its side challenging the entrenched, not-so-good-guy government; and Waterston, a liberal guy, and Cooper, a liberal place, surely knew that. And on another sillier but no less resonant level, we heard Jack McCoy, the straight-arrow true-believer DA Waterston plays on "Law & Order," deliver a speech insisting that justice and the law of the land are completely compatible, if the law is properly understood: something some of us aren't too sure of anymore. It was disorienting and exhilarating, and the audience loved it. As they did the original.