“I slept and dreamed that life was beauty / I woke and found that life was duty.” — Ellen Sturgis Hooper, from a book of poems called “The Dial,”
12 and 1/2 years ago I misattributed that line to David Mamet, who had used it for a Hill Street Blues episode called “Wasted Weekend.” I repeated the error in a 7.11.18 riff called “High Tower Drive.” So now we have it straight.
I first heard this line during the original broadcast of this episode on 1.13.87. The guy who said the line was Dennis Franz‘s Norman Buntz, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I was watching Steven Bochco‘s fabled series on a 21″ cable-connected color TV. I was living in a cool little pre-war studio on High Tower Drive, a few hundred yards from the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould‘s deco-moderne, elevator-accessible Long Goodbye apartment.
Reanimator‘s Jeffrey Coombs lived in the same complex.
I was working for Cannon Films publicity at the time, writing press kits. My future wife Maggie and I had either just returned from Paris or were planning a trip there. We got married the following October, and Jett came along the following June.