BY WAY OF dealing with memories and "stuff", I will ramble. The photo is my son, Leo, done up as Morpheus, based on Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series/character. We had tried at last year's Balticon to get Leo and Neil Gaiman together for a photo op, since he'd colored his hair and they sort of resembled each other. We never connected, though I chatted with Conner Cochran and Peter Beagle about ANANSI BOYS, which Gaiman had claimed some influence by Thorne Smith (well, I didn't see it). I had just reread Thorne Smith's TURNABOUT, which is where a bickering couple wakes up and finds that their personalities have exchanged bodies, and they need to carry on their lives, and must do each other's "jobs" to much reader hilarity. Peter Beagle mused over it, mentioning a TV made movie, and the thought it ultimately would be largely unfilmable, since it's a book that lives in the mind's eye. The TV made movie sucked, and has not been re shown, let alone, to escape on VHS or DVD.

TURNABOUT, by the way, is still a fine book, and despite its age, still can turn your head around with it's still fresh revelations on male/female relations, status and presentation. And when the "man" gets pregnant, real internal bewilderment ensues.

Shortly after reading the Thorne Smith book, I read Heinlein's "Beyond Doubt" that terrible short story he wrote with Emma Wentz, and the dialogue in it seems an awful lot like Thorne Smith.

ANANSI BOYS is very good, but the dialog Gaiman is saying is homaged in it is more Monty Python than Thorne Smith.

Robert A. Heinlein's archives has an eight page screen treatment he wrote for a projected film for Abbot and Costello.