About 4:15 p.m., while getting ready to leave for a press conference/reception for PBS' "The Blues" at L.A.'s House of Blues, I'm tracking down Sam Dash, who's reading by the pool, to check a quote he'd given me for my Monday column on PBS' July 30 special looking at Watergate 30 years later.

The former chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee - who was Philadelphia's DA in the 1950s - is helpful, gracious, and wearing a pair of bathing trunks. As I'm leaving, I think about all the reasons people assume I love my job - the getting paid to watch TV, the rubbing elbows with stars (though the elbow thing is usually an accident), the trips to Hollywood.

But in the past two days, I've talked twice to Dash, one of the heroes of my politically obsessed adolescence. It doesn't get much better than that.