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gone to a mountaintop in Colorado and “projected” positively what I wanted; the success of Terms of Endearment , the Oscar, Out on a Limb , and my Broadway show. I had tried not to allow any doubt or fear to enter my mind. I needed to “know” that what I had projected would come to pass. Everything that I had projected happened. Now, as I stood before the Bantam crowd, I remembered my projections the year before. There was no mountain this time and I couldn’t be alone, so I stood on the chair and thanked everyone. I explained what I had done on my birthday the year before at exactly 3:57, and I asked everyone if they would please take one minute and, in a collective mood, send me some positive thoughts about the book I was going tobegin writing as soon as I left the building. No one bowed their heads, but nearly everyone closed their eyes. Some probably thought I was a lunatic, but they indulged me anyway, and I have had enough to do with audiences to know that this one genuinely wished me well.
    I sopped up the positive goodwill I could feel in the room and for one minute we were silent with each other. It was a kind of collective projection.
    When the minute was over and I was officially one year older, I applauded them for going along with me, thanked them, and went out to get some looseleaf notebooks and new smooth ball-point pens.
    Betty and Ian knew they wouldn’t have to nudge me and I was satisfied that I knew what I’d be doing for the next year.
    As soon as I got back to my apartment, I called Mort, told him what I was thinking, and he hung up the phone.
    “I’m very busy,” he said. “I’m writing my memoirs. I don’t have time to talk to you.”
    Betty and Ian Ballantine had been pressing me to write more about the relationship I had had with my mother and father. They said they were anxious to know how my childhood had contributed to my life, and what had been the interplay among us. I resisted because I didn’t want to invade the privacy of my brother, Warren. My parents never minded when I wrote about our life together; as a matter of fact, they seemed to revel in hearing how important they had been to me.
    I understood what Ian and Betty wanted, and had been exploring that approach. One’s fiftieth birthday is for sure a time for assessment. However, my thinking had gone along slightly different lines. I wasn’t interested simply in searching out more of my childhood, I was interested in discovering what my parents and I might have meant to each otherlong before I was born. That was why Betty’s title had appealed to me so much.
    Mom and Dad and I had talked about that too—believe it or not. It all started when I took them the manuscript of Out on a Limb. Mother had just gone through a cataract operation on her eyes and couldn’t read. I wanted them to hear simultaneously what I had written. So I sat them down for three days and read it to them myself. They promised they would keep their hearing aids turned up to maximum and that they wouldn’t argue, either with themselves or with me, until I was finished. I explained that I was going to dedicate the book to them so I wanted them to be the first people to know what I had written.
    “We are the first to know?” asked my mother. It was, as I had surmised, important to her.
    “Yeah, you sure are,” I answered, wondering whether they would be shocked to realize what their daughter was into now.
    “Gosh, Shirl,” said Mom, “this is wonderful. Your daddy and I will really concentrate because we know how hard this will be on your voice.”
    “Okay, Monkey,” said Daddy. “Do your stuff. What new things will you say about us this time?”
    He was smiling in such a good-humored way, as though he adored being a leading character in all of my books. He cherished the influence he knew he had been on me, and to have me state it publicly seemed to mitigate the disappointment he felt in the unfulfilled potentials of his own life. There