With careful nursing of the drinks I was only on my fifth light scotch when Ed McMahon’s “He-e-e-re’s Johnny!” reminded me why I was sitting alone at a bar, close to midnight, a habit I had broken a long time ago. The room was now filled with bodies and noise, and the bar was three deep with insurance salesmen who had just attended what must have been a lecture on perseverance in the main ballroom, because all of them were now trying very hard to get drunk before “last call.”

None of the life underwriters paid much attention to Johnny’s monologue or Charles Nelson Reilly’s maritime adventures or Jimmy Stewart’s U.F.O.s as they guzzled their Coors and compared their sales production. Only when Donna Theodore began singing did the place quiet down enough so that one could hear these community stalwarts making comments about Donna they would have been ashamed to repeat in front of their kids.

At last, above the din, I heard Johnny introducing “one of the world’s great criminal authorities as well as the most popular living detective-fiction writer of the century.” I ordered another drink. As the bartender was pouring it, he gestured toward the television set and exclaimed, “That’s you, isn’t it?”

Right then I should have paid the bar tab and hurried upstairs to my room to watch the rest of the show. Instead, I foolishly nodded my head, and word quickly spread from drinker to drinker that the guy they were watching on Carson’s show was sitting at the bar. I tried to hear what I had told Johnny about the Houston hammer murders but only managed to catch snatches above the crowd noise. Then the commercials ran, and I could feel myself becoming tense as the “More to come” billboard flashed on the screen.

More, and how! I thought.

It all came across far worse than I had expected. When I finally made my announcement that I had been unable to find any acceptable proof that Jesus had risen from the dead and that billions of Christians, I believed, had been taken in by a hoax for twenty centuries, the cameraman perversely zoomed in for head shots, alternating between my unsmiling face and Johnny’s perplexed frown. Even some of the hissing and booing was picked up by the boom mikes before Doc Severinsen and his orchestra mercifully put an end to the segment.