The man I grew up with based his self-esteem on what table the maître d’ at Chasen’s chose to place him at. The support he found from battered police dispatchers in a world not his own made me giddy with pride. I laughed out loud when he described the night he watched the Academy Awards with Joyce and Nick Osika, who owned the only television on the premises. All they knew about Dad was that he was a writer counting his pennies, who lived in Los Angeles. When Elizabeth Taylor was presenting Best Actor, Joyce told Nick all the husbands Liz had been married to but got the order wrong. She
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