Sometimes I hear her on the phone to my dad or her parents. “Oh, the Drama Queen?” she’ll say. “This week she seems to be in an Edward Albee play.” The twins must hear her, too, because sometimes they do call me Drama Queen to my face. Not that I’m blaming my siblings for their limitations. Pam and Paula are only eight and, like our mother, they’re hopelessly ordinary. Since we have different fathers I can only assume that my uniqueness is due to some latent gene in the Ceps that skipped about twenty generations till it finally emerged in me. In my family I’m like a flamingo in a flock of pigeons. Expecting them to understand me would be like expecting a cat to understand Hamlet. I mean, really… Do tortilla chips fly? Is the moon made of cheese?

Anyway, we used to live in New York City, in this great old building on the Upper West Side, but last year my mother moved us to a ranch house in the soporific suburb of Dellwood (or as I affectionately call it, Deadwood), New Jersey. New Jersey! At first I thought she must be joking. After I was forced to accept that my mother was grotesquely serious, I consoled myself with the fact that at least she wasn’t moving us to Nebraska. You can’t even visit New York from Nebraska.

Like most truly creative people, I loathe the suburbs. Living in the suburbs is like being dead, only with cable TV and pizza delivery. In New York, you live with your finger on the cultural pulse of the universe. Plays, operas, dance, books, music, films, artists – everything’s there and happening. People in New York get excited when there’s a new exhibition at the Met or if Scorsese’s filming in Brooklyn. In the suburbs people get excited when they have their kitchens redone.

And besides the constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation of the greatest city in the world, there are always a zillion things going on in New York, and tons of famous people around. You may not believe this, but I once bumped into Johnny Depp in the East Village. He was coming out of a restaurant, and I didn’t see him because I had these really sick sunglasses on and they more or less made me legally blind. Usually, though, if I wanted to meet an actor I’d find out where they were shooting a movie. I met Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer like that. I got all their autographs.