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lot of kids running the show. Everyone in TV is under thirty-five, and if they’re not they lie about their age. Luckily for us, Muffy is considered so un-hip that the age thing isn’t a huge issue.”
    Good Lord. At thirty-six years old, I was already prehistoric.
    “Something’s about to hit the fan,” Kandi said, reaching into her drawer and taking out her stethoscope. “The network guys never show up unless there’s trouble.”
    She put on the stethoscope and pressed the earpiece to the wall.
    Across the street a black transvestite with a blond afro hopped into a Volvo station wagon with a guy who looked like a charter member of the Young Republicans.
    Kandi started giving news bulletins from the wall.
    “Jim’s saying he’s testing poorly with the target demographics.”
    “Who’s testing poorly?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, shushing me.
    “Now Stan’s saying, How are we going to get rid of him?
    “And Audrey’s saying, As soon as his contract comes up for renewal, we can kill him off in a tragic automobile accident .
    “The network guy’s saying, Yes, and we can turn it into a lesson about the dangers of drunk driving.
    “And Audrey’s saying, And then Uncle Biff can adopt Muffy .
    “And now Jim’s saying, Let’s do lunch sometime .”
    Kandi turned to me, the stethoscope dangling from her neck.
    “They’re talking about Dale. They obviously want to kill him off. And have Quinn take his place as Muffy’s dad.”
    Just then I heard something rattling in the bushes outside Stan and Audrey’s office.
    “I wonder what Dale’s going to do when he finds out,” Kandi said.
    “Come see for yourself.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    I motioned her to my side and pointed to a figure crouched in the bushes, listening intently to every word of Stan and Audrey’s conversation.
    It was the future accident victim himself, Dale Burton.

    As it turns out, what Dale did was dust himself off and slink out of sight.
    “What a desperado,” Kandi said. “I can’t believe the man would hide in the bushes to eavesdrop.”
    “Look who’s talking,” I said, pointing to the stethoscope still dangling from her neck.
    She had the grace to look marginally ashamed.
    At which point, the phone rang. It was Audrey, summoning us back to rewrite duty. The Millers said nothing to us about Dale’s imminent demise. Instead, we went back to work on next week’s script as if no funeral bells were about to toll in Muffyland.
    By four o’clock, Stan was well into his third Evian bottle of the day. So I was shocked when, in spite of enough gin in his veins to keep a bunch of fraternity boys drunk for a week, he actually managed to come up with an idea.
    If you remember (and there are demerits for those of you who don’t), the script we were working on was the stirring saga of what happens when Muffy turns her biology teacher into a frog. In the script, Muffy keeps the frog in her kitchen sink. Stan suggested that when Muffy’s spell finally wore off, the audience would see the teacher, soaking wet, sitting crammed into Muffy’s kitchen sink. Okay, so it wasn’t Neil Simon, but it was an idea, one of Stan’s very few.
    “Not bad, Stan,” Audrey said.
    Stan beamed like a kid getting a gold star from his kindergarten teacher. It was pathetic how much he seemed to need Audrey’s approval.
    “Let’s go down to the set,” Audrey said, “and see if it’s possible for someone to actually fit in the sink.”
    And so the four of us went trooping over to the stage, where Audrey was annoyed to see that the actors had already left for the day.
    “It’s like The Actors Country Club around here,” she muttered. “I suppose we ought to be grateful that they put in an appearance each day.”
    Somewhere off in the distance, we heard a radio tuned to a Latin salsa station.
    “Must be one of the crew,” Stan said.
    “At least somebody’s working,” Audrey sniffed, as she led us over to the kitchen