“I went to sleep dreaming life was beauty — I woke up knowing life was duty.” — written by David Mamet for a 1987 Hill Street Blues episode called “Wasted Weekend.”

I heard the line once during the original broadcast. I watched it from a cool little pre-war studio I was renting at the time, located on High Tower Drive in the old-time Hollywood hills, close to the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould‘s deco-moderne Long Goodbye apartment. Reanimator‘s Jeffrey Coombs lived in the same complex.