It may have been awhile since "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin's been at an NBC press party, but he's back now, promoting "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," and as many reporters seem to want to talk to him as ever.

And why not? He's smart, funny, quotable and disarmingly frank about a past that, as I've said before, you can Google if you really need the lurid details.

Tonight, though, he was accompanied by a tall, worried-looking blond woman who, a minute or so after our recorders started humming, began pulling him away from a small group of us, to take him out of the air-conditioned lounge out into the party, where the temperatures were still likely in the high 90s.

As we followed Sorkin and his companion out to the hotel's Horseshoe Gardens -- because that's the way the game works -- someone whispered to me that the "Pat" who was with him was Pat Kingsley.

You may have read about her on the gossip pages: Uber-publicist to the stars, she's probably most famous for the 14 years she spent making sure Tom Cruise didn't jump up and down on Oprah's couch and intimidating magazine editors.

Now, it appeared, she was trying to protect Sorkin, who couldn't stop talking about his "bad crack" remark of the day before (see "QUOTE OF THE MOMENT"), from us. After squinting at our name tags -- I'm not sure what publication she was hoping for, but I apparently don't work for it -- she soon had him on the move again.

To be fair, she might have been trying to protect Sorkin from Sorkin.

Too late, I suspect. He's a speed-talking original, and he's probably always going to be eating his words faster than even the most protective publicist can move in to keep him from saying them in the first place.

The good news is that Sorkin's work is even more interesting than Sorkin's life, and that in a party full of people who love TV, he's a lot safer than Kingsley probably thinks.