My 'When Harry Met Sally' Story

If my life in the late 1960s had its own theme song it would have been ALFIE. When I close my eyes I can almost see a younger verison of myself running around with my arms spread wide open, long flowing skirts giving me grace, and with a voice coming out of me that sounds like Dionne Warwick singing: "What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?" I see myself leaping and strutting around a city park belting out line after line. "Are we meant to take more than we give or are we meant to be kind?" I see the orchestra of Burt Bacharach running along behind me, trying to keep up with the pace that I set while still playing their instruments. Those piano movers are really working up a sweat. "As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie, I know there's something much more, something even non-believers can believe in. I believe in love, Alfie."

That's the Walt Disney version. During my "what's-it-all-about" era I was actually a dating machine, searching for love and the meaning of life in all the wrong places. It's funny how thirty-five plus years can make you forget a thing like that about yourself. I've been looking at old diaries today and when read 1969 I was actually shocked to see that so many guys' names had filled up page after page. Ten of them! All those guys were trading places back and forth as if they were race horses going around and around on a track. First one guy would be my favorite, then another. Break ups and makes ups and near-fist fights. One guy even turned out to be an undercover cop working on a case involving a shirt-tail friend of mine. As I read those diary entries I couldn't believe I was reading about my own life. I wanted to break out the pop-corn and get a score card.