• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In the nearly ten years since Mike first approached me at Starbucks, we have made two albums and sung at dozens of events, including one for hospital workers held in Anaheim. When I noticed that women in their sixties and up comprised most of the audience, I turned to the other guys in my group, all at least half my age, and warned them that these were my groupies.

Sure enough, after the show, the women rushed the stage, albeit slowly and politely. We had to make a run for it.

At the end of June 2010, we took the act to Washington, D.C.’s, Ford Theater and performed at a pre–July Fourth celebration for a crowd of dignitaries and politicians led by President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. At a reception beforehand, Michelle Obama gave me a great big hug and said, “Yours is my favorite television show of all time.”

President Obama, standing next to her, chimed in, “She’s not kidding. She won’t miss it.”

I asked if their daughters were going to attend the show.

“No, they have school tomorrow,” Michelle said.

“But we’re singing songs from Mary Poppins,” I said.

“I’ll make sure they see the tape,” she said. “But they can’t miss school.”

The next night, our act went like gangbusters. When we sang “A Spoonful of Sugar,” I threw in some special moves and noticed the president sliding down in his seat, laughing. Afterward, he came onstage and said, “You have to teach me some of those moves.” He wanted to know how I still did it. Laughing, I said, “I don’t have to get up in the morning and run the country.”

Of all the presidents I have met (Johnson, Nixon, Clinton), Obama has been my favorite, though Bill Clinton was a lot of fun, too. Michelle and I met him when Carl was honored with the nation’s Mark Twain Comedy Award in 2000. All of us got to chat with him in the Oval Office. We were ushered in two at a time. When Michelle and I walked in, I might as well have been invisible.

“At last we meet,” he said to her, and that was it. The two of them spoke the whole time. I could have broken into a dance and they would not have noticed. Carl and his wife, Estelle, spent that night in the Lincoln Bedroom, and around midnight, shortly after they had gone to bed, there was a knock at the door. It was the president of the United States, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. He sat down and talked to them until three A.M.

It was a very different side of the president, Carl told me. He was relaxed and even smarter than he appeared normally.

I had my public and private sides, too, but they are less different than I thought. The public saw a smiling, nimble-footed performer while my family and friends were served up a more contemplative loner, a man who many said was hard to know. Even my brother once said it was “difficult to get close” to me. I am not going to dispute any of that, though for the record I will say that it was not intentional. I was not even aware of it. But I have an explanation.

Throughout my whole life I have pondered the big questions. I’ve thought more like a philosopher or perhaps a minister, a career I briefly considered when I felt the calling as a teen. If I was hard to know, it was because I would disappear into this abyss of questions and debate. I would read the great thinkers and try to figure out what it all meant—my life and life in general. What was the point? What was I supposed to do? Was I getting it right?

I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t asking those questions. But since losing Michelle and Margie, I’ve looked back on the years with a new perspective and considered the lessons I have learned as well as those that may have slipped past, and I’ve concluded that the answers I searched for were not that complicated, not nearly as much as they seemed. In fact, I may have known more than I gave myself credit for.

A few years ago, I told Esquire magazine that the Buddhists boiled it down to the essentials. They said you need three things in life: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. The message does not get any clearer. I heard Walt Disney, Dr.