“No,” I would say gently with a polite laugh. “I’m not Matthew Perry from Friends.”

It was 1995 and I had graduated from college a couple years earlier. I had moved to Los Angeles to try to get a career in show business and at that moment, I’d actually had a small bit of success.

After my first job as, yes, George Carlin’s assistant, I had managed to get a job at a short-lived TV network (“The WB”) as a staff writer on an even shorter-lived sitcom called “Kirk.” It wasn’t a good show, it wasn’t a good network but, hey, for the first time someone was actually paying me to write, even if it was soft family jokes for former teen heartthrob and now conservative family man Kirk Cameron.

The point is, after years of getting lunches, driving all over LA and picking up laundry, I had finall

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