Michael Sigman

A former newspaper colleague knew how to combine creative loafing with grabbing credit where credit wasn't due. He'd stop for a beer at a local bar during crunch time for our biggest issues, and then show up at the printer just when the papers began rolling off the presses. When...

1.Terry Sigman (nee Berkowitz) was Louis Prima's Gal Friday, circa 1947. From the fifth floor of the Brill Building, she supervised his bets on the ponies, signed autographs on his behalf and met my dad.

2. A decade or so later, she provided her three sons with a singular interpretation of the Great American Songbook. The Arlen/Mercer gem "One For My Baby" is splendidly melancholic --"It's quarter to three/There's no one in the place/But just you and me/So set 'em up, Joe." She adds noirishness by changing one word -- "So stick 'em up, Joe." A single substitution also changes the valence of the Arlen/Koehler classic that begins, "I've got the world on a string/Sittin' on a Rainbow/Got that string around my finger." She turns the next line --"What a world/What a life" -- into a send-up of moon/June/spoon: "What a world/What a string."

3. A neighbor once came knocking with daughter it tow, asking mom if said daughter could come in and watch my dad write a song. Mom explained, "He does most of his writing on the john."

4. When her solution to a crossword puzzle clue exceeds the number of letters called for in the diagram, she adds extra boxes on the side and voila, it fits perfectly.

5. She often transcends conversational linearity. What an amateur might see as a loony non sequitur is, in Mom's hands, invariably connected to a point of discussion that arose earlier. Sometimes days earlier.

6. The screwball fairy stories she told us when we got sick pre-dated the wonderful "Fractured Fairy Tales" on The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. When Fairy Godmother tells Cinderella to "Look at that magnificent horse-drawn carriage," Cindy looks to and fro and says, "What carriage?"

7. Preparing gourmet meals rarely appeared on her "to do" list. Once, she overcooked a steak so thoroughly, no one could find it. Eventually, we discovered its shriveled remains under the grill.

8. She didn't spend time in the Deep South, but she was a devotee of Tennessee Williams and fell in love with the accent. For a year or so, she drawled like a debutante from Laurel, Mississippi.

9. On a drizzly evening 40 years ago, as my folks arrived at the famed Fillmore East to see my brother Jeff play guitar, menacing-looking Hell's Angels were hanging out in front of the theater. My dad was terrified. But Mom set a successful strategy in motion when she instructed Dad to put on his dark glasses and, using his umbrella as a cane, feign blindness.

10. One Christmas season, she hung the tree upside down from a hole in the ceiling, the result of my brother Randy's foot falling through the attic floor.

11. She decided many years ago that she'd call her autobiography, I Laugh Alone. She hasn't begun writing it yet, but as my dad used to say, getting the title is half the battle.

12. When the time comes, she'd like her sons to mix her ashes with my dad's and scatter them on the fifth floor of the Brill. But sentimentality goes only so far. She says, "I know I'll end up in a vacuum...

As my dad neared his 90th birthday, he took me to lunch at his regular eatery, a club overlooking a beautiful green meadow. A closer look revealed a number of flagpoles, pockets of white sand and old folks chasing little white balls.

My dad was a privacy-loving man, so...

"A nine-year-old boy comes home from school and says to his mom, 'Pretend you're surrounded by 100 hungry tigers. What would you do?' Mom says, 'I don't know. What would you do?' Kid says, 'Stop pretending.'" -- Meditation/yoga teacher Anne Cushman

While many a nine-year-old shifts seamlessly from playful pretending...

A friend's kids went to an elementary school where "Honor Student" awards were handed out alphabetically so that (as one of his daughter's teachers explained) "everybody gets the award, and there are no favorites: it's alphabetical!" When my friend pointed out that his daughter's last name meant she'd go last...

It's a drag that pop music has become so fragmented that we've lost the communal feeling of the culture-wide hits that used to fill the airwaves -- even Sometimes The Air That We Breathe(d). There was something comforting about knowing that just about everyone in the country was...

1. Before Rick Santorum was introduced at a revivalist-type church service in Baton Rouge last week, Baptist pastor Dennis Terry revived the timeworn trope, "America: Love It or Leave It." He said that those who don't believe that America "was founded as a Christian nation" ought to "get...

The Chicago Reader, for decades one of America's most respected and profitable alternative weeklies, is for sale again, its troubles attributed to dramatic declines in classified ad revenues. The proximate cause: free ads offered by such competing web outlets as Craigslist. "Once [classified revenues] dried up," commented Charles...

The Catholic Church seems ready to codify what music lovers have known for nearly a millennium: Hildegard von Bingen is a saint. Vatican Insider reports that Pope Benedict XVI will canonize the visionary Medieval composer this coming October.

Whether you're a confirmed Catholic, an apocalyptic atheist or a...

Rush Limbaugh will no doubt survive the outcry and ad cancellations over his vile comments about Sandra Fluke. Some observers figure that his 20-plus attacks on an innocent woman will simply make him more popular among his troglodytic fans, for whom ungentlemanly behavior is simply...

As the 2012 presidential campaign wears on, it's time for political pundits and headline writers to stop doubling down on "double down."

"Double down" -- broadly understood to connote any risk-taking behavior -- is the blackjack term for a player who doubles his current bet in return for which he...

I never thought Nico would make me feel 14 again.

That's exactly what happened last week when I caught Tammy Lang's performance of Chelsea Madchen, a fabulous show in which she eerily reincarnates the late singer and Warhol superstar Nico, who, with the Velvet Underground, made some of...

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
-- Albert Einstein

I'm no Buddhist. (Then again, neither was the Buddha.) But you don't have to meditate to see that...

What do folk icon Woody Guthrie, classical colossus Georg Solti, legendary bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins and relaxed pop crooner Perry Como have in common? And what do they share with the amazing singer/actress Marta Eggerth, queen of the Viennese operetta during that undervalued...

The right loves to bark about the "culture of the victim" on the left. But have you seen bigger crybabies than middle-aged white guys who don't have the authority they feel they earned by virtue of being middle-aged white guys?

Consider poor Newt Gingrich.

The guy...

Occupy! -- the 2011 Word of the Year according to the American Dialect Society -- confirms Ralph Waldo Emerson's insight that "Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words." Language maven Ben Zimmer, who chaired the organization's selection committee, said it was "remarkable...

It was, I have to admit, fun to watch Mitt Romney get a dose of comeuppance from his landslide loss in the South Carolina Republican primary.

Taking pleasure in Romney's drubbing has nothing to do with his party affiliation or his policy positions, however fluid they may be...

Among my many musical heroes, my diminutive grandfather looms large. Big Jack Berkowitz was a tailor, 4'11" before old-age shrunk him into the mid-fours. He didn't know a scale from an arpeggio but had that uncanny ability to play any song after hearing it once, even instantly transposing everything into...

"I like being able to fire people who provide services to me" may well become Mitt Romney's most memorable line, if only because he actually meant it.

Romney responded to criticism of his words of wisdom by playing the victim, outraged that a comment about the joys of changing insurance...

Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly recently asked Mitt Romney if President Obama is a "socialist." "I consider him a big government Liberal Democrat," Romney replied, reinforcing the mantra that Republicans are the party of limited government.

But are they?

Romney, who shamelessly courts the ultra-Right GOP base by claiming in...