So, overcome with a sudden attack of parsimony, I took the train. Tapped my phone on the round part of the turnstile, the whole thing. Transferred onto the A train, headed to midtown, got out on 51st street and walked to my hotel, wheeling my suitcase in front of me like a tourist.

When I checked in they asked, “Do you need any help with your bags, sir?”

And I said, “No, no I don’t need any help with my bags. A few years ago, sure, when I was in the middle of a lucrative television studio production deal I would have pulled up here in a black Town Car and let someone else carry my bag but these days I’m trying to live a little simpler, a little smaller, trying to spend my money smarter.”

In my mind. I said that in my mind.

In real life, I just sort of grunted and a guy came and wheeled my suitcase up to the room while I fussed with the complicated wi-fi and kicked myself for only having twenty dollar bills in my pocket — no fives or ones — which meant I was going to look like a big tipper when current economic indicators suggest that I do not and should not belong in that category.

You see, I am at the stage in life when I react defensively to bad omens. Sitting in the airport in Los Angeles, I resisted the urge to upgrade my ticket from Economy to Economy Plus because according to recent polls, nearly 70% of Americans think the economy is already in a recession.

It doesn’t matter to me that a lot of too-smart-for-their-own-good economists insist that this isn’t the case, that we just think we’re in a recession. I have never understood that distinction. You just think you’re hungry, I have been told when I am hungry. You just think you’re unhappy, I have been told when I am unhappy. If a lot of Americans think we’re in a recession, I have news for the American Economic Association: put your calculators down. It’s a recession.

And then on the plane I read the recent remarks by Jamie Dimon, the CEO of monster-bank JP Morgan Chase. There are potential storm clouds ahead for the economy, he said. Recession is a real possibility, as is “something worse.”

That was all I needed to hear to get me out of the taxi line and onto the subway.

In Hollywood, where I used to make my money — or tried to — there is belt-tightening all over town. Productions are being cancelled, deals are being trimmed, and there’s a pervading sense that the party is over.

“If I ever get one of those fat studio production deals again,” a friend of mine told me recently, “I will do it totally differently. I will respect money.”

He was a producer at a major film studio for years, made a lot of big budget pictures. But a bunch of nice cars, a house in Hawaii, suddenly discovering the joys of private air travel — it all adds up to a pretty hot cash bonfire every month.

Which is okay until the bad omens start appearing — recession fears, “something worse,” streamers losing subscribers, cutbacks at every studio — and you suddenly find yourself pinching your few remaining pennies.

And pinching them in private, because in Hollywood — and in a lot of places, to be honest — it’s important to project a sunny and successful image, despite economic headwinds and a rapidly emptying bank account.

The night I got into New York, I had dinner with some friends.

“You took the subway?” they asked. “Really? You? Wow. Is your career in trouble?”

“No,” I said emphatically. “No. I just realized that I used to spend a lot of money on stupid stuff. On luxuries and frills I didn’t really appreciate. And if we’re facing tougher times ahead I want to live a lot smaller, a lot cheaper, because I don’t know how the next few years are going to be, financially. And that means being a lot more careful about money.”

In my mind. I said that in my mind.

In real life I told them that taking public transportation had nothing to do with money. I was just trying to do my part for the climate.

Which thank God they bought.

It’s a gorgeous day out here on the Quad, and I’d like to thank the Deans and the President of the University for inviting me to speak to you today.

Or, I would thank them had they invited me. To be honest, I’ve never been invited to give a commencement speech — another sign of the decline of America’s once-great institutions of higher learning — but on the theory that it’s always good to be prepared, I’ve given the task a lot of thought.

Like all of us, I’ve read a bunch of these things. I studied Jerry Seinfeld’s remarks which he delivered to the graduating class at Duke University. They were thoughtful and amusing, of course, but also apparently incendiary enough that some students walked out in protest. Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, spoke at a commencement ceremony at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Maybe you’ve read about that? He made some controversial points about men, women, the Roman Catholic Church, in vitro fertilization, and a lot of other things. The people who heard the speech are reported to have enjoyed it. Some of the people who read about it later weren’t so thrilled.

But that’s to be expected. It’s a difficult needle to thread — on the one hand, you want to say something important and memorable; on the other, it’s usually a hot day and people are sitting outside in black plastic robes that absorb the sun’s heat. The graduates are sweaty and sticky. Their parents are exhausted and broke from four years of endless expenses and the constant fear of seeing their offspring on CNN, shouting nonsense on the university quad or claiming to be part of a “Queers for…” something or other group.

In other words, they can’t all be George Marshall’s speech to the Harvard graduating class of 1947. In that unforgettable speech, the then-Secretary of State described the crisis of a shattered and chaotic post-war Europe and how necessary it was for America take a leading role in putting the pieces of the continent back together. To the Class of 1947, it was supposed to be just another commencement speech. To the rest of the world, though, it became known as the Marshall Plan. And to the American taxpayer, it slowly became understood as an endless, bottomless, never-ending tab they were responsible for.

My plan is to steer my remarks somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. I will neither opine on current and cultural matters, nor will I propose a global scheme that will result in a $34 trillion national debt. Instead, I will remind graduates of three basic and undeniable truths.

One: there’s no better feeling than having money in the bank. It’s a universal mental health guarantee and the quickest way to take charge of your life. Cash money in a boring old savings account will cure your anxieties, give you a great night’s sleep, and make you sexier.

Two: the trick to succeeding at your first job is to make sure that you get in a little earlier and stay a little later than everyone else. And to keep your mouth mostly shut when you’re there. Being available when you’re needed sends the message to your bosses that you can be relied upon. Being silent will unnerve your colleagues and mid-level supervisors. It’s not a bad thing for those people to worry that you’re up to something.

And three: when you come to the top of the stairs in the subway or airport, move to the side. This is the simplest way to instantly make the world a better place. When you find yourself tempted to lecture someone (probably someone older) about pronouns or sustainability or the evils of capitalism, ask yourself this: Did I move quickly to the side when I got out of the subway? The answer is probably no, so keep it shut until the answer is yes. And even when the answer is yes, it’s still a terrific idea to keep it zipped.

My commencement address, I realize, will be on the shorter side. The various provosts and deans might feel a little shortchanged when the whole thing is wrapped up in fifteen minutes, but I am convinced that the sweltering graduates and the exhausted parents will be grateful that the whole thing is over, which is the entire point of the ceremony.

It’s tiresomely fashionable these days to complain about New Year’s Eve. It always seems forced, people say. It’s too close to Christmas, it’s too expensive to go out, it’s noisy and fake and inconvenient. To which I say: all the more reason to throw a really fun party and give your far-flung and disparate friends someplace to go. Those who want to stay home can stay home. Those who want to dress up and drink and meet new people and perch on the arm of a sofa can come to my house and mix it up in a happy and convivial way.

But that, of course, depends on two important details: enough food and enough ice.

Drinks, I have covered. If somehow I run out of bottles bought for this specific event, there are enough boxes of wine and discount-brand liquor bottles squirreled away here and there that it’s impossible anyone in my house will ever go thirsty, even in the event of some cataclysmic worldwide disaster or societal collapse, which is why I have them in the first place. (There’s no need to face The End without a little something to unwind with, is my feeling.)

And food — well, that’s always a complicated set of calculations to make. You have to estimate how many people will be there and where they’re coming from, which of your friends will attack the smoked salmon, which will ravage the shrimp bowl, which are cheese eaters, and which are perfectly happy with a little nibble here and there in order to stay upright after a few glasses of my recipe for Chatham Artillery Punch, which has been lethal, according to legend, since 1792.

But the truth is, food is never as important to guests as it is to the hosts. People throwing parties often tie themselves into knots arranging just the right hors d’oeuvres, buying expensive charcuterie and lining it up in sophisticated curves, spending themselves into penury with exotic cheeses and delicate fish eggs and piles of raw vegetables nobody eats.

Guests, in my experience, just want something filling and comfortable to eat. For years, I would order up large muffuletta sandwiches from Central Grocery in New Orleans and I’d stack them in wedges and that seemed to do the trick. This year, I went to the local Wegman’s for a couple of “family size” smoked salmons and two enormous wheels of Camembert, which I sliced in half horizontally and filled with spiced mango chutney and onion-and-bacon jam, respectively. Put the salmon out with lemon and condiments and bake the cheese until it’s gooey and no one goes hungry. Even though I worry, in the back of my mind, that there’s a chance I’ll run out of food, I know deep down it’s impossible.

Ice, on the other hand, is an indispensable utility player at any party. It keeps drinks cold in the glass, wine chilled in the bucket, beer cold in the cooler, punch crisp and (thankfully) diluted, and just the sound of it being scooped or crushed or shaken is about all the music a party needs to really get going. When close friends send last minute texts — On our way! What can we bring? — I always say, Ice! And I never regret it. My rule is: you think ten bags of ice are enough? They aren’t. Double it.

In fact, one of the great lessons I’ve learned after a few decades of throwing parties — especially slightly unruly ones on Big Occasions — is that I often worry too much about the details. I think too much about the food and the wine and not enough about what really makes a party great and memorable, which is a relaxed and worry-free host mingling with guests of all ages, industries, wallets, and backgrounds, making sure everyone gets introduced to everyone else.

There are hundreds of books and thousands of magazine articles dedicated to “elegant” and “sophisticated” entertaining — most of which just make people too nervous and intimidated ever to host a party of their own — but what’s more elegant than two partygoers, wobbly from the punch, dipping into the wheel of melted cheese? And what’s more sophisticated than a room full of people discovering how much they have in common with each other? My wish for all of us — you and me both — is more parties like that. And more ice.

He suggested a book club.

There were five of us, scattered across the country, and the idea was simple: rotate choosing books, meet on Zoom once a month, talk about what we’d read. That was four and a half years ago. We’ve read 54 books. Nobody has quit, though there have been moments.

We try to keep the choices interesting — alternating fiction and nonfiction, classics and new releases, highbrow and, well, less highbrow. The idea is to keep it lively. But not too lively.

We bounce around. One month it’s Dante’s Inferno, the next it’s a Michael Lewis page-turner. One month it’s Flannery O’Connor, the next it’s a book about Bitcoin. The range is part of the point — nobody gets to plant a flag and declare the book club their personal seminar.

Except, it turns out, me. Since enrolling at Princeton Theological Seminary a few years ago, my picks have gotten — how to put this? — increasingly ambitious, though you could also say “pompous.” We’re talking Barabbas. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And most recently, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a dense, sprawling study of myth and archetype that I had always meant to read and never quite gotten around to. The book club, I have discovered, is an excellent mechanism for finally reading the books you’ve been meaning to read for decades — because now you have to. But, of course so do four other people.

My friends were polite about Campbell. Mostly. There was some eye-rolling at the more cosmic passages — it is, I’ll admit, a little woo-woo in places — but they engaged with it.

The important thing, I’ve learned, is not to take it personally when someone doesn’t love your pick. The book is just the excuse. What we’re really doing is scheduling time with each other — which, at our age, is harder than it sounds. We’re busy. We’re scattered. Left to our own devices, months go by. The book gives us a reason to show up.

So you have to hold your choices loosely. It’s not a referendum on your taste or your intelligence. It’s just a book.

I know this. I believe this. Which is why I’m a little embarrassed about what happened when one of our members — not me, I want to be clear, not me — chose Parker Posey’s autobiography, You’re on an Airplane.

There was trouble.

At our meeting to discuss it, one member was grouchy from the start, and then suddenly erupted. He declared it a waste of time, resented the hours spent reading it that were now “lost forever,” and announced that on his deathbed he would “shout curses” at the member who had chosen it.

The grouch was me. But you probably knew that.

What was clear, even in that moment, to the four faces in the Zoom squares watching me deliver my litany of grievance, was that I wasn’t really talking about Parker Posey. I was having a bad day — maybe a bad month. I was, to use the popular phrase, going through some stuff. The book, which is actually sort of charming now that I think about it, was just the nearest target to hand. My friends knew it. They let me finish. Then someone changed the subject, the way old friends do.

Every book club has a jerk in it. If you don’t know who that is in yours, well, I have some bad news for you. But I have some good news, too. The people in the club with you — if you’ve chosen your friends wisely over the decades — already knew you could be a jerk. They already knew you’d propose some pretentious titles and lose it over nothing. And they still want to be in the book club with you.

Because the best book clubs are never really about the books.

It’s a big reason why New Yorkers eat out so often. A city filled with small apartment kitchens means a city filled with restaurants. Eating out in New York can be a luxurious treat. It can also be a delicious window into another culture, a way to travel around the world for the price of a subway ride. It can also be annoying as hell.

“Have you dined with us before?” is one of those questions you hear sometimes at hip, noisy New York restaurants and the best way to answer it is to say, “No, and I’m not going to,” and then to walk out.

Because what’s about to unfold is sure to be one of the most irritating meals of your life. That question sends an unmistakable signal that you’re about to suffer through a cascade of additional red-flag queries, be hoodwinked into ordering way too much food, be forced to navigate a lot of tiny plates, and end up spending an enormous amount of money while still being hungry.

“Can I explain how our menu works?” is the next thing you’ll hear. If you’re like me, you’ll be tempted to ask if this menu, like every single menu you’ve encountered in your lifetime, is composed of a list of dishes offered for sale accompanied by a price. Don’t give in to the temptation to get a snarky attitude — the restaurant team will quickly peg you as a troublemaker, so it’s wise to remember that these people spend a lot of time with your food before you eat it. But that’s not what they mean in any case.

In restaurants like this, the menu works this way: there is a small section at the very top identified in the most baffling way possible — usually something like “For the Table” or “First Bites” — and often portioned out in impossible fractions. If there are four of you dining at the table, the restaurant will offer deviled eggs in threes. If there are three of you, a plate will arrive with four of whatever it is, so that there’s one lonely item sitting on the plate, with everyone too polite to snatch it up until the very last minute.

“The chef has designed the menu for sharing,” the waiter will tell you as you make confused stabs at the next two sections, unable to confidently identify anything truly shareable. How, for instance, does the restaurant expect you to divide a pork chop into four equal pieces, especially with the blunt butter knife they provide? Or, for that matter, the whole roasted fish, which arrives with a spoon and a fork and will look like a scene of unbelievable fish carnage when you’re done trying to cut it into shareable wedges.

“We recommend one dish from each section per diner,” you will be told, which will result in the weird, inexplicable experience of each diner getting barely two-thirds of a bite from only three-quarters of the dishes on the table. Did everyone get a bit of the pork chop? someone will ask. Half of the table didn’t know there was a pork chop. By the time that plate got around to them, it was just the cabbage garnish and some sauce. They thought it was what was left of the salad.

And also: the plates will be a little bit smaller than whatever is on them, so be prepared to scoop a lot of your dinner off of the table.

What’s infuriating is that the meal, when you manage to cut it and share it and snag a bite from the plates rotating quickly around the table, is often really good. As a rule, New York restaurants serve delicious food, but in the most uncomfortably difficult way imaginable. It’s enough to drive New Yorkers back into their tiny kitchens. And many vow to do just that, until the waiter comes to take the plates away and it dawns on us that the point of eating out isn’t the food or the experience. It’s that somebody else has to clean up. And that’s what keeps us coming back for more.

That’s silly, of course. The old rules work just fine, with some a few obvious adjustments. It’s rude to look at your phone during dinner for about the same reason it was rude to pull out a book, back when people read books. You’re signaling to your dining companions that they’re boring. Even if that’s true, it’s rude to point it out so baldly. We didn’t need an online magazine to tell us that.

And we didn’t need a “new” rule about sending thank-you notes. You still have to send them promptly and, whenever possible, in pen and ink. And for those of you under 30 years old, you also need to stop whining about it.

There were an unusual amount of new rules about how to handle encounters with celebrities, although I suppose they’re necessary because these days there are a lot of celebrities running around loose. If you live in a mildly populated area, you’ve probably already experienced a friend suddenly stopping mid-sentence to gesture discreetly at a nearby person — someone utterly unknown to you — and saying something like, Look, it’s that guy from that thing! The contemporary world is full of famous people that you and I have never heard of.

And when you don’t know who that guy from that thing is, your friend will look at you like you’re the crazy one, you’re the out-of-touch loner. According to the audience measurement experts at Nielsen, there are 817,000 shows on television, so you should feel zero guilt about not knowing that guy, or any guy, from that thing, or any thing.

When it comes to famous people, modern etiquette is practical. If you know who they are, don’t pretend that you don’t. Don’t say Nice to meet you, what do you do? to Brad Pitt. He knows you’re lying. But if it’s that guy from the thing, you can ask away.

And you’re not supposed to gawk, or take surreptitious pictures — but you knew that, too. The general rule is, be cool. But not so cool that you pretend to mistake CNN anchor Don Lemon for the maitre’d, as I did at a restaurant once.

He didn’t think it was funny, by the way.

But it can’t be easy to be famous. The few times I’ve been on the red carpet at an awards show, either directly behind or in front of a famous person, I’ve been really unnerved by how many cameras are whirring and snapping, and how the photographers shout out the name of the famous person. Harry! Harry! Courtney! Courtney! You know how it is when you’re walking in a crowd of people and you think you hear someone call your name and you look around, alarmed? That’s what it’s like to be famous, all day long.

If the rules of etiquette for normal people when they encounter celebrities are simple — no gushing, no mind games, no pics — the rules for the celebrities are even simpler. Famous people have to be nice to everyone, because everyone has a camera and a social media account and they are just one tweet away from becoming a world famous jerk.

On the other hand, it also works the other way. For instance, my top two famous people who I do not know are Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhaal because both of them were nice to my dog.

Jennifer Aniston was sitting outside a restaurant in Malibu where I was sitting with my dog, who was wet and sandy from the beach, and she remarked on how handsome he was. (And he was, too.) For the record, I didn’t pretend not to know her and I didn’t take a secret pic.

And not too long after, at another restaurant, Jake Gyllenhaal and I were sitting next to each other outside and he, too, was really nice to my dog. And not only did I acknowledge that I knew who he was, I also told him how much I enjoyed one of his early films, October Sky. To which he smiled and said, Hey, thanks man.

The outcome of both encounters is that I make sure to campaign for both of them for whatever awards they might be up for. I am a member of the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild and I have friends in the Motion Picture Academy and you can bet that everyone in my circle knows that Jake and Jen — that’s what I call them now — are certified Good People who deserve all of the statuettes.

And I guess that’s the most modern aspect of modern manners: the best reason to be polite is that it can really pay off.

It was a pretty busy day, so I missed the texts both sent about fifteen minutes into our lunch date. “Where R U?”asked one. The other texted a few minutes later: “R U Close?”

Where I was, at that moment, was enjoying a chicken salad sandwich and doing the crossword, which is how I prefer to spend my lunch hour. When I finally looked up from 3 Down — “Like jigsaw puzzle pieces produced by machines” Answer: “Diecut” — I looked at my phone to see those messages, plus a few more with increasingly hostile and furious overtones.

I didn’t blame them for being angry, of course. It was incredibly rude of me not to show up.

Or would have been, had I known the lunch was scheduled for Tuesday, instead of when I thought it was scheduled, which was next Thursday. And the reason I thought it was set for seven days from now, instead of yesterday, is because the person organizing the lunch sent me an email saying, “We’re CONFIRMED for lunch at 1:30PM on 3/26.”

I had, as the young people say, the “receipts.” But I waited a bit for a few more aggrieved and irritated messages to roll in — “Really disappointed you blew us off” and “Not sure when we can reschedule, sorry” — before I dropped the hammer.

I sent a screenshot of the confirmation email to both of them with what I consider to be the finest example of passive-aggressive language in history. “Here’s what I have re: lunch,” I texted. And then added: “Did I misunderstand?”

Boom.

It’s rare, for me, to have such a clear and resounding win. Often, to be honest, I did just space out and forget the lunch date. I’m usually the one who misses the email or gets the time wrong. But this was that elusive and unexpected opportunity to bask in righteousness, with a little disingenuous kicker. “Did I misunderstand?” I asked knowing that I did not, knowing that they now knew I did not, knowing that the guilty party would now have to swallow all of that prickly indignation and apologize.

Not bad for a Tuesday afternoon.

It doesn’t always work that way.

I once went to a local coffee shop and ordered a large coffee with room at the top for milk. Those are pretty much the words I used: “Tall coffee, room at the top,” and the surly girl at the counter, wearing all sorts of odd piercings and tattoos, nodded.

But when she put my coffee on the counter, what I got was a tall coffee with no room at the top.

So I went over to the little stand near the counter, where they keep the coffee additives and I poured a little of the coffee out into the trash slot and splashed some milk into the coffee cup and was halfway done when the girl behind the counter called out to me.

“Sir?,” she said, voice pitched in irritation, “Um, we’d prefer it if you didn’t pour coffee in the trash? If you want room at the top for milk, just tell us you want room at the top? Okay?”

That’s how she talked – every sentence ended with an upward inflection, sort of like how people talk to children or particularly slow adults, to make sure they’re listening and taking in the lesson.

Instead of responding, for some reason I sort of stared, frozen, into space. Which was when a much more emotionally-together customer barked out, “He did tell you to leave room for milk. I heard him. You weren’t paying attention.”

Things got very quiet in the coffee shop. The girl behind the counter looked at me, then at the other customer, then back at me again, and I prepared myself for an apology.

Instead, she turned to the next person in line. “Can I help you?”

The guy who chimed in got his coffee and sailed out of the shop happily. He had expressed himself, and was now fully satisfied. I hadn’t, and now I was still there, with all sorts of unresolved issues.

I was just a guy with a full cup of coffee blocking everyone’s access to the cream and sugar. I was a guy who had missed his moment for one of life’s little pleasures.

Lesson learned. When you’re entitled to a little moment of righteous triumph, make sure you take it. Always ask, “Did I misunderstand?” when you know for certain that you did not.

And that’s just the guys. The women are resplendent in sundresses and floral hats, leading well-scrubbed and dressed-up children by the hand down the aisle of the church. The organ thunders celebratory hymns, the choir trills majestically, and everyone pretends that they come to church on the regular, once a week, rather than twice a year: once on Christmas Eve and once more on Easter morning and then, well, we’re all so busy with kids soccer and summer plans and school starting and Sunday’s are our only day to sleep in…

I’m not here to judge. (Well, I am, and I’m very good at it, but in this instance, I’m holding back.) Easter Sunday, for Americans of the Christian faith — and, as a friend of mine puts it, Christians of the American faith — is a lovely springtime ritual when everyone puts on their very best clothes and nicest available manners and gathers in a dignified and orderly celebration.

It’s not like that everywhere. In Jerusalem, in the Church of the Resurrection — the very place, we Christians believe, that Jesus rose from the tomb — Easter Sunday is closer to an out-of-hand block party.

The church itself, and the surrounding courtyards and narrow streets, are packed with worshippers. It’s said to be as silent as a crowd of that size can be, with the low, constant hum of prayer and the shuffling of thousands of feet, filled with the electricity of the collective anticipation of the big moment.

At an appointed hour, several priests from the Orthodox sects that govern the church enter the small chapel built over the tomb, each carrying fistfuls of unlit candles. A moment later, to great shouts of joy and hallelujah, a priest appears from the tomb holding candles ablaze with the holy fire. It really doesn’t matter how those candles were lit — the assembled faithful believe that they ignite spontaneously, touched by the Holy Spirit; the party-poopers insist that one of the priests is carrying a Bic — because before you can start to apply rational, skeptical analysis the crowd erupts into whoops and cheers and hymns of every language and sobs of joy. The great mob surges forward, everyone thrusting their own clutch of candles and beeswax tapers towards the front, lighting them and passing them back until the place looks like one gigantic moving bonfire. It’s hard to maintain a science-first posture when you’re in the middle of that much living, breathing, powerful faith.

It’s mayhem. People wave their hands through the flames like it’s holy water. The crowd passes the fire back and forth until every candle is alight. Some candle-bearers are carried out on the shoulders of worshippers to spread the flame throughout the old city. Thousands of candles are lit from that one Holy Fire, including some lanterns that are spirited to the nearest airport to make their way to churches across the globe, lighting Easter candles from that first, special, one. It’s a metaphor that symbolizes God’s forgiveness and the love that comes from this one place and that one moment and spreads its warmth and joy and good news across the world. But it’s also a lot of people going a little nuts with candles and fire.

It’s a breathtaking sight — you can watch it live, on YouTube — but if you’re anything like me you’re wondering how the Fire Marshall feels about all of this noisy and unsupervised activity. You’re thinking, as a good Episcopalian might, about the liability of it all — How does this church get insured? And You’re telling me no one ends up with third-degree burns?

And you may also be thinking, especially if you’re a reserved Episcopalian whose idea of cutting loose is wearing a pink blazer on Easter morning, that all of that hollering and shouting and pyrotechnics are just a little bit too much. A little bit, um, Mediterranean, if you get my meaning.

All of that is true, of course. I couldn’t find any record of someone’s getting seriously burned during the Easter celebration at the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, but it’s hard to imagine it hasn’t happened. On the other hand, if you believe — really and truly believe — that what people say happened at that very place two thousand years ago actually happened, a pastel-colored bow tie or a straw hat with flowers may not quite cut it, celebration-wise. You may need to get out some candles and pass around the fire.

“Smoking, c’est permis?” I asked. I have no idea if that’s how you’re supposed to say it, but I was instantly understood. The waiter shrugged as if to say, oui monsieur.

“Même les cigares?” I clarified. (And if you speak French better than I do, which is no big accomplishment, and there’s a better way to put it, I’m not interested. I get by just fine cobbling together strings of nous connected by the simplest verb tense I can recall.)

The waiter shrugged again, as if to say, Yes of course please stop asking idiotic questions.

So I sat at a popular and storied outdoor cafe and drank mint tea — it’s hard to find a real drink on the first night of Ramadan — and watched the people and noticed them not noticing me, or the plume of cigar smoke rising above my head. I puffed away without hearing dramatic, over-the-top coughing in my direction or shout-whispered conversations about that jerk over there. Morocco, it turns out, is a delightfully civilized place.

What I saw was the old town of Tangier slowly come to life after the first full day of fasting. Observant Muslims — and sometimes just those who want to get-along-and-go-along — fast each day during the month of Ramadan, which this year runs from March 10th to April 9th, although in Morocco it began officially on March 12th, which no one could explain to me in a satisfactory or consistent way. Morocco just does things the Morocco way, I guess.

The first day is the hardest, I was told. And you could see that pretty clearly in the late afternoon, as I watched the same neighbors who had greeted each other (and me) with happy smiles and hearty handclasps succumb to hunger-related irritability and snappish tempers. Two guys got into one of those what did you say to me? No, WHAT did you say to ME? arguments that might have ended up in a shoving and grappling match had their friends not intervened. The whole neighborhood was, as they say, hangry, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as being “bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger.”

A few hours later, after a meal and some water — the truly observant abstain from water, too — the street was calm and quiet, and the former combatants were convivial and belly-full. Someone was playing a guitar, someone was leaning against a centuries-old wall gossiping with a neighbor, and I’m pretty sure two of the crankiest young men were squinched close together at a nearby table, watching a soccer match on an iPhone.

I watched it all, wreathed in blue smoke, and did what travelers have done for centuries. I smiled condescendingly at the locals, chuckled at their odd ways, and refused to see any connection between the behavior of the citizens of the casbah in Tangier on the first day of Ramadan and me, even though I have given up cigar smoking for Episcopal Ramadan, otherwise known as Lent, and it’s made me really crabby and a giant pain in the ass to everyone around me, especially around 4PM when I usually light one up.

Attentive readers will no doubt have noticed the issue here. So, for the record, yes I gave up cigars for Lent and yes, here I was smoking a cigar in Tangier. The only excuse I can offer is that the cigar I was smoking is technically illegal in the United States, and that’s where I made my Lenten commitment, so if you think about it, what I promised to give up for Lent were the cigars that were available to me at Close of Business on Ash Wednesday, when Lenten contracts are inked by the parties involved. That’s a pathetic attempt, I admit, to weasel out of a pretty minor commitment. But what’s important is that no one knew, as I reduced a fine Cuban cigar to a pillar of ash, that I was currently violating an oath I made to God. Which is not the case when it comes to Ramadan. In Tangier, in Ramadan when you eat during the day, everyone notices. And if you’re somehow cheerful and easygoing in the afternoon, the whole neighborhood is suspicious.

Episcopal Ramadan is a lot sneakier and a lot easier to wiggle out of. Which is why I won’t be converting anytime soon, even though cigar smoking on the terrace is a real temptation.

In journalism, an essay or article that lays out events in a chronological, step-by-step order is called a “tick tock” piece.

“Gimme the tick tock,” newspaper editors will sometimes say when they want the first-this-happened, then-that-happened sequence of events.

It’s one of those terms of art you hear when you’re in a certain industry that you don’t hear when you’re in another. For instance, nobody in investment banking talks about looking for a good “act two button.” But then nobody in comedy writing ever tried to “strip a criss-cross swap-tion.”

Pretty much every business has a shorthand lingo designed to animate and color something basic.

In screenwriting, for instance, we say “hang a lantern” on something when we’re trying to get away with a plot contrivance or coincidence so unrealistic that the only way to make it work is to have one of the characters actually remark on its total unbelievability, which shines a light—or “hangs a lantern”—on it, and, somehow, makes it all seem less made up.

Show business generates these kinds of phrases all the time. A few years ago, people started talking about this “space” or that “space”— television networks would be said to be investing heavily in the “drama space” — which always made me think of an actual room filled with people behaving dramatically. The “streaming space” does that, too, but it’s a more unpleasant image.

And it’s not just the entertainment industry. I have a consultant friend who tells me that when they present options to their clients—options, naturally, that always require retaining the consultancy for further services—they present them as “MECE” (pronounced “mee-cee”) meaning “Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive.

“Are these options MECE?” I expect executives to be saying to their terrified underlings in the years to come, replacing “win win” and “disruptive” and “diverse” as adjectives of choice.

Many years ago, when then-Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg was leaving that studio to start up Dreamworks, he said something in an interview that was philosophical and deep thinking. The transition from one job to the next had been tumultuous, but “at the end of the day, what do you want your life to be about?”

That’s not an exact quote— Katzenberg is a famously eloquent guy, I’m sure he said it much better—but he did use the phrase “at the end of the day,” which was not, at that time, a phrase people used a lot.

A month later, it was a phrase people used pretty much hourly. “At the end of the day” was like the kale of phrases. It was nowhere and then, suddenly, it was everywhere. Once a phrase is introduced into the general social glossary, it gets passed around in emails and Zoom calls and casual conversations until everyone is using it.

Sort of like how in recent years everyone has been using “R nought” and “infected fatality rate” and “no fly zone” and “top attack” and “Crimea.” Suddenly, we’re all savvy insiders.

Even though we’re the exact same stupid that we were last week. Only now we have some cool lingo.

This kind of language lasts long after it ceases to mean anything. For instance, on a movie set, immediately after the director yells “Cut!” someone else yells, “Check the gates!”

The “gates” are—or used to be, before filmmaking went digital—the part of the camera where the film slides in front of the shutter. When you “check the gates,” what you’re looking for is something wrong, like a single hair or a speck of dust, that’s going to ruin the shot when the film is processed.

If the gates are okay, you can move on. If they’re not, you’ve got to reshoot the scene, because once you’ve moved on, there’s no going back.

These days, of course, there really isn’t a “gate.” There’s a chip, or a disk drive or something. But “Check the disk drive!” isn’t as romantic or atmospheric, so we stick to the old phrase because sounding cool is a lot more socially valuable than describing something accurately. A lot of us — especially those of us in the media business, in front or behind the camera — happily substitute knowing what we’re talking about with sounding like we know what we’re talking about. And at the end of the day, that’s something to hang a lantern on.

A few days ago I went to buy a new computer. My old laptop has entered Elderly Senator territory — it’s slower than it used to be, the fan seems to run continuously, it takes longer to wake up from sleep mode, and I just no longer trust it to go the distance.

“This is probably the one you want,” said the guy at the Apple Store, pointing to a MacBook Pro with a large screen and a gigantic memory capability. “It has the fastest processor, can do pretty much anything, it’s really the best.”

It was also north of $2500, which would be acceptable if I needed “the best,” but what I really need is something in the “it’ll do” category.

“What do you have in the mediocre zone?” I asked.

Well, actually, I didn’t say that. What I said was, “I’ll take it,” and I walked out of there with probably the best computer on the market which is something that I completely and totally do not need.

Why did I do that? Actually, the right question is, Why do I always do that? At a restaurant, when I ask the sommelier for guidance and point out the kind of wine I usually like at the price I’m comfortable with — “I’m looking for something in this general area,” I say with a wry chuckle that I hope softens the this guy is cheap message — it is comically easy for me to be to talked into a wine that’s a little more expensive.

“This one here is one of the best wines on the list,” the sommelier will say, pointing to a wine that’s never less than 20% more expensive than the wine I picked out. (It’s also never more than that, either, because these wine guys know what they’re doing.)

“Do you have anything cheaper?” I will never ask, because I am weak and easily upsold. “The one you pointed to is uncomfortably close to my quarterly tax payment.”

Instead, I get the expensive wine, which like the expensive computer, is nearly always noticeably “better” but never really necessary. I get the pricey ear buds, because someone told me they’re better than the cheapo versions, and I am convinced that organic eggs are better even though the results of every taste test I’ve seen are that they are indistinguishable from eggs that come from hens fed an array of chemicals and neurotoxins.

I’m ashamed of myself, of course, but slightly cheered by the knowledge that I’m not alone. I have a very finicky friend, for instance, who does not like the smell of most laundry detergents — they make him itchy, he insists — so he buys extremely expensive no-scent laundry soap at the fancy pharmacy near his apartment. “It’s the best,” he says, pointing to the all-in-French label as if that settles that. He knows that the solution to his problem is baby detergent — Dreft, for instance, which is available at WalMart — but what he wants is “the best.”

I’m aware that some of you are rolling your eyes right now. And some of you are probably thinking rather smugly that when the revolution comes, it’ll be people like me and my Never Dreft friend who will be first on the scaffold. And that may be true, although in my case I have to say that you’d be underestimating my capacity for loudly and cravenly turning on my past lifestyle and publicly denouncing all of my friends.

But face it: we’ve all become spoiled fussypots. We each have our own set of gotta be the best categories that do not, even remotely, gotta be. Starbucks has nearly 40,000 stores worldwide selling a product (in various upgraded and super-premium forms) that people used to give away for almost nothing. If you’ve been to a Starbucks, you’re part of the problem.

What we all should do, en masse, is refuse to upgrade anything for the next six months. We should declare an immediate end to the quest for The Best, and learn to embrace the Just Okay. We should buy only the mid-range, so-so version of whatever it is we’re shopping for, and discover that we never needed the premium version in the first place. It will be liberating.

Except for the computer I just bought, which I’m using right now, and let me tell you it’s fantastic. I’ve got maybe eight applications running and a video going in the lower right corner and the thing is humming along. Glad I got the best.

I was meeting a friend for dinner at 8PM when I got this text at 5:30PM: “Hey there, I’m actually in your area now, mind if we meet on the early side?”

Did I mind? I didn’t mind at all! In fact, I prefer an early dinner. I know it’s unfashionable and brands me as irretrievably uncool, but a 5:30PM dinner suits me perfectly: it’s easier on the digestion, usually less crowded, and it means I can be in bed by nine, ten at the latest.

That’s what I thought to myself, anyway. But what I texted in response was: “What? Are we farmers now? But, sure, I guess. Very early for me but okay if that’s more convenient.”

Of course I was lying. But I didn’t want to seem like one of those sad, unfun types who eats early and heads to bed by 9:30, even though I am one of those types. What I prefer to do is project the aura of a man who is effortlessly cool, who dines at an aristocratic 8ish and knows how to pronounce “Gstaad. Someone who occasionally wears a cravat and has never eaten a Hot Pocket. What am I, in fact, is someone who prefers the Early Bird Special. Some kind of unsophisticated bumpkin, an undercover hayseed. A rube still deep in the closet.

And what’s worse, we’re now two weeks into Lent and this is the year I decided to give up something truly challenging for the season. This year I have vowed to stop acting like I’m too cool for school. This year, I told myself, I will eat dinner early, get to bed at a reasonable time, and let my uncool flag fly. In other words, for Lent I have decided to be my true and authentic self. But clearly, when the opportunity came to do just that, I crumbled like a coward.

In past Lents, I have forgone alcohol, carbs, cigars — all sorts of vices and treats — and the truth is it’s always been pretty easy. In the first place, Lent, technically, excludes Sundays, which means in past Lenten Seasons the Lord’s Day, for me, has been an orgy of tobacco, cocktails, and lasagna. And also: it’s only forty days! I start counting them down by week one and honestly, it’s not that hard to wait a few more days for a Montecristo, in cigar or sandwich versions. A Martini (gin, up, with a twist) is so much more delicious and satisfying when it caps off a disciplined and successful Lent I’m surprised I don’t do Lent twice or three times a year.

This year, though, I was excited by the idea of doing something truly difficult and character-building. Stop pretending to know things you don’t, I declared to myself. Stop acting like some raffish European duke. I knew what I had to do next.

The minute I sat down at the table, I confessed to my friend. “You know what?” I said. “I’m really glad we’re eating early. I love to eat early. I’m glad you were in the area this soon. I don’t know why I made that crack about your being a farmer, I’m sorry.”

He laughed and waved it off. In fact, he said, he is also an early-eater, and he always feels secretly judged by his more sophisticated friends who eat dinner at eight, and sometimes even nine o’clock! We both wondered at the craziness of that — eating so late, plus a couple of glasses of wine, how does anyone get up the next morning? And we resolved to support each other, unashamedly, as Co-Presidents of the Early Bird Dinner Club.

“I’ve got your back with this Lent challenge,” he told me. “And I know you’ll have my back with mine.”

Which was the moment the waiter came to take our drink order and I discovered what he had given up for Lent.

“I’ll have a Diet Coke,” he said. “No alcohol for me until Easter.”

Now, the right thing for me to do was to order a sparkling water or something “supportive” like that. But one of the joys of eating dinner at 5:30 is that there’s plenty of nighttime left to sleep it off, whatever “it” turns out to be.

“I’ll have a martini, gin, up, with a twist,” I said to the waiter. And then I turned to my friend and said, “You won’t drink a glass of wine with dinner? What are you? Some kind of peasant?”

Clearly, I have more work to do.

As misunderstandings go, that one makes a certain amount of sense. The phrase “scented millionaire” conjures up a powdered and cosseted rich guy — someone who is sure to have a net worth in excess of $100 million — so it’s easy to see how he could have misheard it. I imagine most centimillionaires do, in fact, have a certain smell, something along the lines of an expensive candle, a Loro Piana sweater, and no real problems to speak of.

What’s harder to understand is just how long it took him to figure out his mistake. He was well into his thirties, he told me, before the lightbulb went off. He was reading an article in the business section of the paper and came across the word “centimillionaire” and suddenly thought, Hey, wait a minute. And as he spoke it slowly out loud he realized his longstanding error, and his mind tried to replay each time he had used the word in the past — well, not “centimillionaire” but “scented millionaire.” Had he humiliated himself and not realized it? Had he used the wrong term and somehow missed the other people in the vicinity smirking and rolling their eyes at each other? He confessed that he was crippled with the anxiety that he had employed the term “scented millionaire” almost daily to the vicious delight of his so-called friends, who no doubt had some kind of secret group chat going where they hooted at each mortifying instance.

The thing to do when a friend is in distress is to share a moment from your own history when you experienced a similar kind of social embarrassment. When I was in college, for instance, I was trying to sound smart in an English class while discussing the familiar literary construction of the “hero’s journey.” The hero always rejects help and guidance initially, I said with great authority, It’s deeply embedded in the Western Tradition, I pompously continued, as we can see in Psalm 23 which begins, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

I sat back smugly and ignored the confused looks on the rest of the class. Unlike me, that had not misunderstood the opening lines of Psalm 23 since Sunday School. Unlike me, they did not think that those words meant that I do not want to have the Lord as my shepherd. They knew — had probably always known — that those words mean that with the Lord as my shepherd I don’t need anything, which for some reason eluded me and I never once bothered to notice that my interpretation made zero sense and just kept thinking, for about a decade, that Psalm 23 is about not wanting to be shepherded by the Lord. Which was easy to do because who talks about the Psalms, anyway? I had, in fact, not thought about Psalm 23 from Sunday School until that exact moment in Major English Poets: Chaucer to Eliot when I wanted to sound clever and well-read.

But the mind works awfully fast when it needs to. Somewhere between the moment I said those words and the moment I registered the looks on my classmates’ faces it suddenly dawned on me that the word “want” has a couple of meanings, and that I was using the wrong one. So I covered.

“Obviously,” I began, still sounding like a know-it-all college student desperately in need of a punch in the teeth, “the word want here has a complicated double meaning, both the literal textual one and another more psychologically resonant one that is in play here.”

I think I got away with it, though the fact that I remember it so vividly suggests that I didn’t. The thing to do, as I said, was to share that with my friend in a gesture of solidarity.

I didn’t do that. My mistake was considerably dumber, and I wanted to keep it to myself. Instead, I told him about another friend of ours who in a high school debate competition inveighed against the dangers of nuclear armageddon, which he pronounced Ar-MAGA-don. And we had a good, healing laugh at his expense.

A friend asked me to come to his birthday dinner next week. “That is,” he added, “if they’ll let you out.”

“Let me out?” I asked.

I have been a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary for more than a year. I’m about mid-way through the Masters in Divinity program, on my way — God willing and the people consenting — to ordination in the Episcopal Church. But I still have some in my circle who don’t quite understand what I’m doing with my time.

Some of them, like my birthday friend, hear the word “seminary” and assume that I spend my days in robes, cloistered in some stone tower, chanting away in a tiny room. When he asks, “Will they let you out?” I think he’s imaging some fearsome character of indistinct gender with a heavy ring of skeleton keys, guarding a heavy swinging gate. He imagines that I use the heavy ropes that are ordinarily wrapped around my cloaks to form a simple knot-ladder, which I use to slip down from the tower window and into the foggy night.

Instead, I’m a graduate student who spends a lot of time, voluntarily, in the Seminary library — it’s a gorgeous place to read and study, but still: it’s a library — and in my free time I do what other graduate students do, which is to drink espresso and complain about the reading.

It’s the word “seminary” that throws them. Our culture is now so secular that words which used to be in the common vocabulary now have an exotic and spooky vibe. The language of religion — which used to be as familiar and common as words we use everyday, like “upload” and “probiotic” — now have a weirdness that causes old friends to ask if “they” will “let” me come to a birthday party.

Religious people love their fancy language. In the Episcopal Church, for instance, the little space in between the front door of a church and the main part is called the narthex. And the room with the robes and various items necessary for Sunday services is called the sacristy. There’s also a chancel and sometimes even an undercroft, which makes the whole vocabulary sometimes sound like a medical procedure. How’s your sacristy? Better now, thanks, since they went into my undercroft with the chancel. The good news is that I didn’t have to have my narthex removed.

Church language, in other words, can be fussy. That may be one of the reasons people without church experience sometimes feel awkward or out-of-place when they find themselves in the pews — though it’s also probably what draws other people to the church in the first place — and it’s another indication that the world of church and church-going has been separated from our common, workaday culture. It’s exotic, like some kind of weird culinary thing. If you have a friend who is very into omakase-style sushi, you know what I mean. They start to talk about the circumference of certain grains of rice and you think, oh man get me out of here.

Of course, the whole point of church is to get you into here. One of the reasons I left my career in show business to come to Princeton Theological Seminary is because I believe that a lot of what people are searching for today — and let’s be clear: people really are searching — can be found on Sunday mornings. So some of the fancier language we use is probably counter-productive. The glorious and powerful language of the Book of Common Prayer — the foundational guide to the Anglican and Episcopalian tradition, and I have to write those defining words because apparently, for a lot of you, even a simple word like “seminary” is trouble — is nearly perfect as it is, so I might suggest to my future bosses in the Episcopal Church that we could dial down some of the language we use for the other, non-liturgical stuff.

I spend more than three decades in the entertainment industry, so I’m obsessed with how to get A. I. S. — Asses in Seats. Theater seats, church pews, whatever. You can’t do squat unless you got the A. I. S.

“So you’ll come?” My friend asked, after we had hashed out the whole Seminary-definition issue.

“No,” I said. “I can’t, sorry. I have a research paper due next week and I need to finish it.”

“So that’s the actual reason? It’s not that you’re, like, a monk or whatever, it’s that you’re a…”

“A nerd,” I said, finishing his sentence. “Correct.”

Which is a word that works for everyone.

An online magazine — are there any other kind? — recently posted a list of updated, modern etiquette rules. The theory, I suppose, is that the modern world is so vastly different from the world that existed a few years ago that the rules of social interaction need a top-down rethink.

That’s silly, of course. The old rules work just fine, with some a few obvious adjustments. It’s rude to look at your phone during dinner for about the same reason it was rude to pull out a book, back when people read books. You’re signaling to your dining companions that they’re boring. Even if that’s true, it’s rude to point it out so baldly. We didn’t need an online magazine to tell us that.

And we didn’t need a “new” rule about sending thank-you notes. You still have to send them promptly and, whenever possible, in pen and ink. And for those of you under 30 years old, you also need to stop whining about it.

There were an unusual amount of new rules about how to handle encounters with celebrities, although I suppose they’re necessary because these days there are a lot of celebrities running around loose. If you live in a mildly populated area, you’ve probably already experienced a friend suddenly stopping mid-sentence to gesture discreetly at a nearby person — someone utterly unknown to you — and saying something like, Look, it’s that guy from that thing! The contemporary world is full of famous people that you and I have never heard of.

And when you don’t know who that guy from that thing is, your friend will look at you like you’re the crazy one, you’re the out-of-touch loner. According to the audience measurement experts at Nielsen, there are 817,000 shows on television, so you should feel zero guilt about not knowing that guy, or any guy, from that thing, or any thing.

When it comes to famous people, modern etiquette is practical. If you know who they are, don’t pretend that you don’t. Don’t say Nice to meet you, what do you do? to Brad Pitt. He knows you’re lying. But if it’s that guy from the thing, you can ask away.

And you’re not supposed to gawk, or take surreptitious pictures — but you knew that, too. The general rule is, be cool. But not so cool that you pretend to mistake former CNN anchor Don Lemon for the maitre’d, as I did at a restaurant once.

He didn’t think it was funny, by the way.

But it can’t be easy to be famous. The few times I’ve been on the red carpet at an awards show, either directly behind or in front of a famous person, I’ve been really unnerved by how many cameras are whirring and snapping, and how the photographers shout out the name of the famous person. Harry! Harry! Courtney! Courtney! You know how it is when you’re walking in a crowd of people and you think you hear someone call your name and you look around, alarmed? That’s what it’s like to be famous, all day long.

If the rules of etiquette for normal people when they encounter celebrities are simple — no gushing, no mind games, no pics — the rules for the celebrities are even simpler. Famous people have to be nice to everyone, because everyone has a camera and a social media account and they are just one tweet away from becoming a world famous jerk.

On the other hand, it also works the other way. For instance, my top two famous people who I do not know are Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhall because both of them were nice to my dog.

Jennifer Aniston was sitting outside a restaurant in Malibu where I was sitting with my dog, who was wet and sandy from the beach, and she remarked on how handsome he was. (And he was, too.) For the record, I didn’t pretend not to know her and I didn’t take a secret pic.

And not too long after, at another restaurant, Jake Gyllenhall and I were sitting next to each other outside and he, too, was really nice to my dog. And not only did I acknowledge that I knew who he was, I also told him how much I enjoyed one of his early films, October Sky. To which he smiled and said, Hey, thanks man.

The outcome of both encounters is that I make sure to campaign for both of them for whatever awards they might be up for. I am a member of the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild and I have friends in the Motion Picture Academy and you can bet that everyone in my circle knows that Jake and Jen — that’s what I call them now — are certified Good People who deserve all of the statuettes.

And I guess that’s the most modern aspect of modern manners: the best reason to be polite is that it can really pay off.

“But I’m not doing this to get a pilot script out of it,” I always say. And they usually smile indulgently as if to say, C’mon now, we all know this is a good career move.

And then I try again to explain that it’s not really a career move. It’s a matter of genuine faith and curiosity. I say I am trying to make a significant change in my life — yes, at my age — and I impress on my show business friends that my motives are entirely spiritual.

Well, okay, I admit I was intrigued to learn that ordained clergy can apply for a placard to place on their dashboard which, in New York City anyway, allows for a certain leniency in parking law enforcement, but that’s not why I’m doing this. But it’s impossible to convince certain people that I’m here because I genuinely want to learn, to think, to serve.

“Faith-based content is really big right now,” a friend of mine said when I told him where I was and what I was doing for the next three years. “But you probably already have a pitch ready to go, right?”

“Um, no,” I said.

“Seriously? You’re telling me that you’re not writing a screenplay about this? I don’t believe you.”

As hard as I tried to explain, there was no way I could convince him. It was the same with a studio executive I know. “Wow, fantastic!” She said when I told her my news. “And just so you know, we’re getting into that area a lot more,” she added. “But my question is: are you working mostly in the comedy arena or the drama side?”

“I’m not on a side,” I said. “I’m getting a Masters in Divinity because I’m genuinely called to it.”

“Of course, of course,” she said. “But I just want to know if whatever you write about it is, like, going to be funny? Because there’s a lot of room for the comedy take of the whole religion thing right now. Basically, our research suggests that shows like The Chosen and House of David are kind of running the table with the serious angle. Might be interesting to look at the lighter version?”

I shouldn’t be surprised. The entertainment industry is deeply confused right now. Some traditionally sure things — Disney movies, shoot-em-ups, the usual — aren’t doing so well at the box office. And the streaming services are cutting budgets and programming after learning the hard way that most American households don’t want to spend upwards of $150 per month on TV shows they don’t even have time to watch.

Hollywood is in a process of introspection and retrenchment — a few bad quarters have that effect — so when I tell my friends and colleagues in the entertainment business what I’m doing, it’s not surprising that their first thought is, Hey, is there an angle in this? Is this a new thing we can turn into product?

Which is an odd question, because of course it’s not a new thing at all — in fact, it’s one of the oldest things in the world — and during the foundational years of Hollywood, religion and the Bible were constant sources of inspiration. They didn’t use the term then, but the Bible — both parts! — were great places for the old movie studios to find “content.” It makes sense: Jesus, Moses, David, Abraham — these are terrific franchise characters with great potential for brand advancement. Add into that various clan wars, cataclysms, healings, and revelations and you have enough solid material for a rich (and probably profitable) Bible Cinematic Universe, or BCU.

Again, not that this in any way is why I am here, at Seminary, studying for a masters and, I hope, a collar. But, you know, my friends have a point. As career moves go, it’s hard to beat.

A restaurant owner once told me that he considered anyone who came to his restaurant more than once a month to be a regular. If they came on a Tuesday or Wednesday night -- traditionally slow nights in the food service industry -- they were VIPs.

Once a month doesn’t seem like a lot, actually, but in the restaurant business -- which I’ve always thought of as “the show business that you can eat” -- once a month, especially on a Tuesday or Wednesday, is the kind of customer loyalty you can build a business on.

When I moved to Los Angeles —and it’s none of your business when, exactly, that was — I was a broke film student trying to break into the entertainment business. The only thing I knew about Hollywood was that former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were regulars at a restaurant called Chasen’s, which meant that I, too, needed to be a regular there.

Chasen’s was the headquarters of Old Hollywood. It was a cross between an elegant barroom and a continental steakhouse — lots of things were prepared tableside by pompadoured guys in vests and black ties — and in an era of white wine spritzers, Chasen’s was keeping the cocktail flame alive.

It was also expensive, which required some strategic thinking. Since Chasen’s was my goal, I decided to concentrate my going-out-to-eat dollar at that one spot. There were no exceptions to this — I either ate at home, or dined at Chasen’s. This system of focused spending allowed me to eat there about once a month. In other words, I became a regular.

Well, sort of a regular. Chasen’s was a large venue, so in those early years I was shunted off to the back of the restaurant near the large back bar and the rentable rooms, with the nobodies from wherever.

But after a year or so of monthly visits, and after regularly eating the chili and the hobo steak — both legendary off-menu items, both prepared table-side — my monthly table was moved gently to the booths closer to the magical front room.

Closer to the front room, but not quite in the front room.

The front room was where the Reagans sat. But I always thought of the front room as the Sinatra Room, because once as I was being led to my medium-cool table, I saw him sitting at a large booth with a crowd of people. They were all having a terrific time. Michael Crawford, who was then appearing onstage as the Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera,” was at the table, and every now and then I’d hear Crawford’s Phantom-like laughter drifting through the rooms. Ah ha ha ha ha haaaaaaah!

I was close. My strategy was working.

Here’s the Hollywood ending:

One Thursday night I walked into Chasen’s without a reservation. The maitre d’ apologized — he didn’t have me down in his book, the place was packed, there wasn’t a table.

That’s fine, I said, I’m here for the party upstairs.

Every year the cast and writers of NBC’s long-running hit comedy “Cheers” held a season premiere party in one of the rooms upstairs. I had just been hired as a staff writer — it was my first job in show business, I was 24 years old — and that’s where I was headed.

The maitre d’ looked at me for a moment, then touched my arm and said, rather gravely, “Congratulations, Mr. Long.”

I’d like to say that I was moved to the Reagan Room after that, and maybe I was -- it was a while ago, and my memory has been crowded with logins and passwords and streaming video options since then.

But what really happened was that I stopped making Chasen’s my regular go-to restaurant. I got distracted by the choices that more spendable money provides, and ended up wanting to try everything, go everywhere, become a regular at each new place.

But you can’t be a regular everywhere. You can’t make an impression, or find a home, or have a wise old Hollywood maitre d’ clap you on the back if you’re always after something new. Sometimes the right thing to do is, pick a thing and stick to it.

Chasen’s is gone now. It’s a fancy grocery store called Bristol Farms. The Reagan’s favorite red leather banquette was donated to the Reagan Library, where it’s often on display with a lot of other objects that prove, incontrovertibly, that Ronald Reagan was our hippest, coolest president. And I still have the blazer I was wearing when the maitre d’ told me I had made it. (Thanks to Mounjaro, it fits perfectly. Change, I guess, isn’t all bad.)

Here’s what I know: if I go to my local newsstand and take a copy of the newspaper without paying for it, that would be stealing and stealing is wrong.

But here’s what I also know: if I subscribe to home delivery of a national daily newspaper, and if for some reason that paper is delivered every morning — every morning — to a different, hard-to-locate patch of asphalt nearly 100 yards away from my front door, then the only way to get a resolution to this problem is to go to the newspaper’s customer service webpage, lodge a complaint about a “missing paper,” and demand a credit on my subscription. I have done this every day for several weeks.

Yes, of course, I do eventually locate the paper, but I’ve discovered that the only reliable way to get any action on any customer dissatisfaction is to withhold payment. And while that is technically “stealing,” if you’re a stickler about these things, it’s part of a larger strategy for justice so I give myself a pass.

It doesn’t help the newspaper’s case that every interaction that is permitted on the site is through an infuriating chatbot, who reminds me daily that it is very sorry for my inconvenience and wants to make sure that this issue is resolved quickly. (It isn’t.)

“What’s the big deal?” A friend asked me when I complained about this. “So you have to walk a bit to get the paper. Seems like a small thing to get so furious about.”

I listed the many ways in which this kind of thinking, in which we all put up with small indignities and bad service until we’re nation in decline (or a nation that’s even more decline-ier) and suggested that my form of rebellion was properly using the levers of free-market capitalism, which is the very best kind of capitalism, to get satisfaction. And then I added that I was also using this experience as what some people call a “teachable moment,” because whoever delivers the paper now knows that details matter, and this will be a lesson that will surely have a positive impact on that person’s life. And then I apologized for using the phrase “teachable moment” because I know it’s annoying and pompous.

I also mentioned that it’s been getting very chilly lately, and a five-minute search for a newspaper at seven in the (frigid) morning isn’t a great way to start the day.

“I’m sorry, when?” My friend asked.

“You know,” I said. “In the morning.”

“You said ‘seven.’ Do you actually get up at seven?”

My friend knows me well enough to know that I often work late — less these days now that I have morning classes, but occasionally — and even when I don’t, I’m a slow-riser. His point was that when I actually go out to get the paper is probably closer to eight-thirty or even nine — at which time the sun is up and most people are busily marching into their day.

I insisted he was wrong and moved to change the subject but, honestly, he was onto something. The truth is, I’ve always been a little ashamed of my late-sleeping habits. Instagram influencers, neuroscientists, self-help gurus — and these groups often overlap, unfortunately — nearly all agree that mornings are for up-and-at-‘em, tackle the day, hard stuff first, etc. When the morning paper is delivered to a remote location, it sits there for hours broadcasting to my neighbors that I am still asleep, that I am lazy, indolent, and good-for-nothing. This impression is amplified when I finally head out to collect the paper in some ragged combination of t-shirt, shorts or sweatpants, old shoes, and a rat’s nest of hair. Look at that bum, I can hear them say. It’s nearly nine AM!

Of course, they’re not saying that. It’s an often-forgotten rule of the universe that no one is ever paying as much attention to you as you think they are. Mostly, in fact, they don’t even notice you. But I make a much smaller target of my neighbors’ admittedly imaginary disdain when all I have to do is dart out to my front steps and dart back inside. In the summertime I could even do it in my underwear. I mean, I won’t (probably) but I could, as long as the newspaper is delivered to the right spot. And until that moment, I will continue to teach the newspaper and its delivery service a lesson about free-market capitalism and steal the newspaper daily. If I have to humiliate myself in front of my neighbors, I shouldn’t have to pay for it.

They’d take your picture and post it next to the register and you’d get free coffee for that week.

There were other perks. You could bask in the approval of the pierced, non-binary baristas. The people directly behind you, and the people directly behind them, noticed that you didn’t have to pay. For a week, you were a celebrity.

One morning I walked into the store and took my place in line, and as I gradually moved to the front I saw my best friend’s face on a photo stuck to the wall. He was “Customer of the Week.”

Must be some mistake, I thought. Why is he customer of the week? What has he ever done? We come here together most of the time. They see us together, and yet they chose a favorite?

I’m not proud of this, but I feel I must be honest. I was not happy for my friend. Quite the contrary. I saw his face looking smugly into the camera, enjoying his free coffee. and I was really mad.

I’m not sure what it was, specifically, that was at the root of my jealousy. When my friend sauntered in a few minutes later, I tried to make a joke out of it—“Hey Customer of the Week. If only they knew about the bodies in your basement, ha ha ha”—it may not have been those exact words, but something equally lame.

But I gave the game away moments later where I suddenly barked, “I don’t get it. Why you?”

He made the right choice —the friendly choice —which was to pretend that I couldn’t actually be so childish as to envy him his Customer of the Week status. I’m a grown man. I’m his best friend. How could I be so petty? Impossible!

So he pretended that I was pretending to be truly furious, that it was just a funny game I was playing. A joke. A thing.

But it wasn’t a thing.

It was the sudden realization that I am not affable. I don’t joke with the baristas or ask the cashier at the grocery store how her day is going. I don’t say, “hey, you guys busy these days?” to the waiter when he comes by for the drink orders. I don’t fish through my pockets and say, “Wait. I think I have a dime and two pennies,” just to make it easier for whomever to make change.

I’m not rude. In fact, I’m the opposite — I’m scrupulously polite, which often comes off as unfriendly. Most of the time I scuttle around town doing errands or going about my business and I don’t really engage in an avuncular or friendly way with the world around me.

My friend, though, is a classic Customer of the Week. Friendly, charming, engaging. If I was a non-binary barista with a tongue piercing going clickety-clackety and he came in every day, I’d make him Customer of the Week, too. I’d ignore the other guy he comes in with, the guy who mutters and looks down and never quite seems to be there.

The week when I was not chosen as Customer of the Week, I did a lot of thinking about who I am and what my expectations are for myself and the people around me. To use a phrase I’ve heard on the way into yoga class, I thought a lot about the “energy I was putting out there.” And I made a small resolution to try to be more like a Customer of the Week in every way.

Which lasted about a week. Being affable is exhausting, and I would find myself drained and ready for a nap after a couple of minutes of friendly banter. And also: I prefer paying for my coffee. I like the antiseptic and transactional quality of the exchange. In fact, I’d like to up the antiseptic and transactional quality of my life in general.

I learned to accept that the “energy I’m putting out there” is “I would like to pay you money for goods and/or services and I would like to leave it at that.”

In other words, I am a customer, not a Customer of the Week, which is good enough for me. And should be good enough for the person who makes my coffee.

I once read an interview with the famous, late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. He was describing a room and complaining about the way it was decorated.

“It was a lot of Louis Quinze mixed with Louis Seize,” he said. And then added: “Ugh!”

So what he didn’t like, just to be clear, was when people mix up furniture from the period of Louis the Fifteenth, roughly 1700 to 1750, with the furniture from the period of Louis the Sixteenth, roughly 1750 to 1800.

I looked it up. Here is the chief difference — the Ugh Factor, you might say — between the two: the Louis XV chairs are curvy and oval-backed and the Louis XVI chairs are curvy too, but sometimes have shield-shaped backs.

Apparently when they’re in the same room together, the only civilized response is, Ugh!

It’s impressive to have a pet peeve that specific — and also one that I’m pretty sure very, very few people share. It’s unlikely that any but a handful of people reading that interview, when they came to the “Ugh!” part, nodded and smiled in recognition. “So true, Karl, so true,” said nearly no one.

Stand up comics, of course, become famous for identifying and describing things that bug all of us, or at least a plurality of us.

Don’t you hate it when…is how a lot of comedians still get their starts. They connect with audiences by sharing the common irritations of life — the guy behind you who honks his horn one nanosecond after the light turns green; trying to buy apples at the supermarket without making the apple pyramid come tumbling down; putting your credit card into that thing and it says DO NOT REMOVE CARD and then it suddenly says REMOVE CARD and beeps alarmingly, so that you always feel like however you’re doing it you’re doing it wrong and too slowly. And of course the entire universe of complaints around printer ink.

Don’t you hate it when… they mix up Louis Quinze with Louis Seize, is probably what we might call niche comedy. Something for Hulu, say, tightly targeted at decorative arts historians and museum period-room curators.

But if you’re Karl Lagerfeld, maybe it is irritating to see all of those chairs, some oval-backed and some shield-backed, all mixed up and jumbled together, higgledy-piggledy style. If you’re someone like Karl Lagerfeld, all you think about, presumably, is the way things look, the style of stuff around you, the design choices that have been made. If you’re Karl Lagerfeld, mixing up the Louies might really be hard to shut up about.

But I’m not Karl Lagerfeld, and neither are you. Although, speaking for myself, I get into Lagerfeld like patterns all the time.

I was watching a show last week with a friend of mine, and didn’t realize that I was being Karl Lagerfeld about it.

“Oh no,” I said, out loud, “this part is so clearly a response to a network executive’s note.” And then later: “Okay this part is stupid, but I bet the actor insisted on it even though it’s a detour from what the episode is about.” And then later: “See, I think they had agreed to do seven episodes but they only really had five episodes worth of plot elements so that’s why these two episodes are so slow and not funny.” And finally: “That whole story resolution comes in a phone call? Ugh!”

As I said, I didn’t realize I was Lagerfelding until I looked up and realized, from the expression of the person I was watching it with, that I was slowly removing all of the pleasure and the joy out of the show.

And doing it to myself, too — in the way that I imagine Karl Lagerfeld, seeing the chaos of Louis Quinze and Louis Seize, prevented anyone else from enjoying the canapes at the fashion show (or wherever) but also prevented himself from enjoying them, too.

Karl Lagerfeld was probably correct that mixing your Louies is a sub-optimal move, just as I had valid points to make about the overuse of some tricks of the screenwriting trade.

Sometimes, though, it seems like we are all Lagerfelding each other all the time — on social media, in politics, on cable news. Half of the problems we face right now are caused, in a way, by one group looking at something that’s basically okay — not perfect, not ideal, but okay — and dismissing it with a Lagerfeldian Ugh!

“Am I ruining this for you?” I asked my friend.

I didn’t get an answer, which is another way of getting an answer. We watched the rest of the show together in silence and, honestly, it was pretty good.