My sister and I...

were not your typical Barbie-doll-playing kids of the late sixties and early seventies. We were raised in a house full of soap opera devotees (Search for Tomorrow, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, As the World Turns, Another World - and my favorite - The Edge of Night) and we re-enacted dramatic courtroom scenes, life-saving surgeries and murder investigations instead of Barbie and Ken dates, elaborate weddings and other typical girl stuff. I can remember being interrogated by my sister on several occasions: "Did you, or did you not, kill Danny Fargo?" And she was probably only about five at the time!

While my mother and grandmother introduced us to the soaps, my dad instilled in us a love of nightly newscasts and a fascination with all things political. We watched the news with Daddy while Eric Sevareid reported somberly on the day's casualties in Viet Nam while wearing his jaunty lemon-yellow sport coat. I have no idea how many times I heard Walter Cronkite say, "And that's the way it was." We were glued to the television by the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were probably the only kids on our block who understood the political ramifications of Teddy Kennedy's unfortunate auto accident on the bridge at Chappaquiddick and who Mary Jo Kopechne even was. But our real obsession was Watergate and Richard Nixon. We faithfully watched the hearings and reported on the proceedings nightly for my father. My sister did a dead-on impersonation of Sam Ervin who was constantly coming before America with a heavy heart, or so he said. We were familiar with Woodward and Bernstein even before Redford and Hoffman made them larger-than-life in All the President's Men. We had our own semi-weekly newspaper in which we chronicled current events, most notably the whole lengthy Watergate debacle. Oddly enough, I was always the more conservative Woodward and Debbie was the liberal Bernstein - especially odd because she is now an even more rabid Republican than Rush!

Yes, this trip down memory lane really is leading up to something. Something funny, actually. Over the past week, everyone who knew the late Senator Kennedy has spoken quite nicely about him, delivering heartfelt eulogies and anecdotes about having served with him in Congress. I was reminded of an essay by the late Lewis Grizzard which was published during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings during which Mr. Kennedy served as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grizzard wrote something to the effect that he didn't care if Clarence Thomas stripped naked and stood on his desk to read Anita Hill the letters from Penthouse, he was still a better man than Ted Kennedy. I had to laugh at that - even though, given Justice Thomas' performance on the bench (or silence thereon), I'm not sure his eventual confirmation was in the nation's best interests. I was also reminded that I have a Ted Kennedy anecdote of my own - well, sort of. In the mid nineties, my sister the rabid Republican, went to work in Washington. For the first several months, she was starstruck and called me every couple of days to tell me what famous person she had met. She was practically incoherent the day she was introduced to Sonny Bono. One afternoon she called and before I could say hello, she shrieked: "Guess who I met today!" I think I said something like, "The President?" No - she told me to guess again. "John Glenn?" Of course, I was thinking of people that I would have been thrilled to meet. No - one more guess. I thought for a minute and guessed, "Sandra Day O'Connor?" My responses were met with an exasperated sigh. Wrong, apparently. Debbie proceeded to tell me that she was walking from her office building to the Capitol through one of the tunnels and suddenly this golf cart appeared beside her. The gentleman in the cart stopped and asked if she would like a ride to the Capitol. I said, "That's nice. Who was this gentleman?" I know the pause before her answer was for dramatic effect - and then she said, "Ted Kennedy." I was gobsmacked. I could hardly speak. I sputtered, "You got into a moving vehicle with Ted Kennedy?" She laughed and replied, "It was okay - we didn't drive over water."