---

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, January 20, 1992                   TAG: 9201180169
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

---

YOURS TRULY JUST CAN'T SEEM TO GET OUT OF THE RAGS STAGE

I wouldn't tell this to just anybody, but it looks like I have been passed up again for the Horatio Alger Award.

I can't understand it. If there's anybody in this country who has shown more pluck and luck than I have, I wish they'd step forward.

For all of you people, and you know who you are, who have been ruining their brains with MTV and talk shows, Horatio Alger wrote all of these books in which poor boys rose to the top.

To tell you the truth, Horatio was not Ernest Hemingway, but his books did catch on.

One of the nominees this year is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who likes to tell about how hard he had it as a kid.

Well, I had a hard time as a kid, too. I may not have made it to the Supreme Court, but I'm still alive.

Which is more than we can say about some of the guys on Arch Street.

I guess you also know that another year has gone by without Jack Kent Cooke inviting me to watch the Redskins from his personal box.

It also is true that nobody from Playgirl magazine has contacted me about being a centerfold.

If they did, I probably would say: "No, madam. I am not a piece of meat to be dangled before frustrated females trumpeting their litanies of lust and desire."

I would probably find out how much they were paying before I said that, though.

I mean, none of the Horatio Alger kids was backward.

You give one of those a centerfold in Playgirl and, wham, he invests the money and gets rich.

Owns half the corporations in Texas.

Sure, those little guys were virtuous followers of the free-enterprise system, but they never let a buck get away from them.

And they ignore me because I'm not on the Supreme Court or a chief executive officer with all these nice ties and shirts they wear when posing for Fortune magazine.

I'm tired of waiting for the Horatio Alger Award. To tell you the truth, the whole outfit sounds like a bunch of stuffed shirts to me.

If that means retreating into fantasy, that's all right with me.

Fantasy, as in waiting for Kim Basinger to invite you for the weekend at this ski lodge.

You can see that this would be more fun than going to any old Horatio Alger Award Dinner.

I understand that Kim is one helluva conversationalist.

---