Seattle

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" - John F. Kennedy, Ted Sorensen.

Yeah, I met this Ted Sorensen. His brother Bob invited me to live in his family's brownstone on the Upper East Side when I landed in New York. Bob was a Princeton professor at the time, but the person who recommended me to him and whose husband worked with him for the Radio Free Europe back in West Germany, told me that they thought he worked for the CIA. Could be, because Ted himself was a shoo-in for a CIA director under Carter, until Chappaquiddick came up. John F. I didn't meet, because he was shot dead before I came.

But later on, when I got bored with a library gig at Pace University and hired out as a busboy for the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, there was an old waiter there, Fred. Donald Trump, who bought The Plaza for a while for his then-wife paying her one dollar a year and for all the dresses she'd pick, would put up a plaque in the Oak Room right next to George M. Cohan's on Fred's 50th anniversary with the joint, pure Don.

Fred came from Italy as a kid and became a busboy, like me. One day he said to me, I like how you work, you have gusto. I didn't know the word but looked it up and it was good. And Fred told me that when he served John F. that John F. had pea soup and a Heineken. Pea soup and a Heineken, it felt like I got to know John F. too, just a little bit.

Anyway, I better start on the story because you ought to know that this way for you is out there too.