This involved me using a phone with a stranger waiting for a turn.

Mary Ann and I were both Beatles fans. She loved Paul McCartney, and I had always been a John Lennon fan in the days of Beatlemania, but he was becoming harder to love, and she razzed me about it. When he was reported to have entered a New York City restaurant with a Kotex pad on his head, I got a "this is the man I respect" letter in no time:

We shared an interest in words themselves, too, in addition to writing. Here's Mary Ann's pre-accident handwriting. I did have a Yellow Submarine shirt just like that. And I was a big fan of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and its etymologies, so this is all real and was current.