Tune. (Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan)

“Taps, Tunes and Tall Tales” is the perfect title for Tommy Tune’s cabaret debut at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency, and he delivers plenty of all three. You know you’re in for an evening of savvy show business sass the minute the lights dim and he sails in singing “I’ve Got Them Feelin’ Too Good Today Blues” in a red suit the color of a tomato surprise.

Treetop tall and chlorophyll fresh, the dancer/actor/director/choreographer who Gene Kelly once called “too lanky for a legend” reduces his life story to one hour of handpicked tales and take-home tunes, punctuated by nifty tap routines executed to tumultuous applause on a stage the size of a forever stamp. He talks about meeting Fred Astaire on the opening night of  the long-running My One and Only, then backs up to his chicken-fried beginnings in Texas, saying goodbye to women with big hair and men with big boots—not to mention, chiggers, rodeos and moon pies. You don’t have to be from the Lone Star State to get the message. Then, like a movie montage, the action transports him to New York City on St. Patrick’s Day in 1962. He went straight through the painted green line down the center of Fifth Avenue and auditioned with the song “Heart” from Damn Yankees. Wouldn’t you know it? He got his first job, on his first audition, on his first day in town. And those feet been doin’ their stuff ever since. They took him to Moscow to meet Gorbachev in the middle of the Kremlin (he loved tap dancing!) and they led him to Hollywood movies, Broadway shows and Las Vegas showrooms, and most recently a three-year tour of his own musical memoir Steps in Time, pieces of which he’s sharing in the current sold-out show at Feinstein’s (through Nov. 26). Ably accompanied by Michael Biagi, his pianist and musical director for nearly four decades, Mr. Tune's show is a celebration of 50 years in show business, the artifacts of which, preserved in a downtown storage space, were turned to toast by Hurricane Sandy. Weep not. He stores his memories safely in his heart now, and shares them warmly, generously and bountifully in a show that leaves his audience begging for more.

In “Sand in My Shoes," he demonstrates the exquisitely nuanced tap steps taught to him by his mentor and favorite dance partner, the great Charles “Honi” Coles. The best story he tells is a deeply touching personal reminiscence of this man, who stopped My One and Only cold for over 1000 performances until the day Mr. Coles suffered a stroke onstage. He forgot his song, his lyrics and his lines, but when Tommy cued the conductor to start the dance music, Mr. Coles revived, danced to perfection, and died. You don’t get stories like that every night in the tired old cabaret whirl, or the best dropped names from Gwen Verdon to Twiggy, or the quality songs by Berlin, Rodgers, Coward, Porter, Bachrach, Mercer, Kurt Weill and the Gershwins. One of them, titled “I Love It”, sums up the passions of Tommy Tune better than any other:

“I’ve played the Palace

And I’ve played the sticks …

I can do shuffles

And I can do kicks …

I’ve taken my bows

And I’ve taken my licks …

Lord help me, I love it.

I’ve danced for a fortune

I’ve danced for a buck …

In front of the Queen

On the back of a truck …

Been up at the White House

Been down on my luck …

Lord help me, I love it.”

You could hear the applause out on Park Avenue. Lord help us, New York loves Tommy Tune.

rreed@observer.com

Mr. Sorkin at another thing years ago.

The Transom spun around as a feminine (but firm) hand slapped our ass.

“You’re a reporter, obviously?” said a woman well into her second of something strong, in a first-floor room of the University Club on Tuesday afternoon.

We answered in the affirmative and then were told that an introduction to E.F. Hutton’s 84-year-old daughter was available if we wanted. And that Tommy Tune was standing right over there (he was). We then asked: “Is this the Young Men’s/Women’s Real Estate Association luncheon?” It was a reasonable question.

After being answered by laughter, we moved briskly out of the room across the club’s lobby and into another space, where The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, he largely of Dealbook fame, was about to speak at the association’s monthly gathering. The real estate types greeted Mr. Sorkin like a rock star. Most of them, we gathered, had at least seen the recent HBO version of Too Big to Fail.

Mr. Sorkin talked about the birth of the book that begat the movie.

“I had just gotten home,” Mr. Sorkin said of the wee small hours of Sept. 16, 2008, the day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He had just finished a front-page story for The Times. “And I was very desperate to talk to somebody about it—I just couldn’t believe what was going on—and given the hour, and given I had nobody to talk to, I woke up my wife.”

An excitable Mr. Sorkin recounted to his love all the machinations involved in the financial world’s collapse, replete with his heroes, villains and plot arcs.

“You’re not going to believe it. It’s like a movie!”

“No, Andrew, it’s like a book.”

Toward the end of his speech, Mr. Sorkin turned serious. Morbid even.“Things are not going to get better any time soon,” he said, referring to sluggish job growth. “I’m expecting a remarkable bloodbath on Wall Street, with layoffs in the fall.”

Tommy Tune, where are you now?

"Lady Gaga?" asked another reporter.

"No, no. Ooooh, yes! Dita Von Teese, love her. She's the real thing."

The flame-haired Ms. Zemeckis descended the stairs robed in a floor-length metallic brocade gown, a matching brocade stole, black fishnets glimmering through the thigh-high slit and a tiara perched on her crown. She was accompanied by her husband, Robert, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump in 1994. "I give her a few ideas," he said.

"You know, Leslie, Sharon [Stone] and I have the same manager, Chuck Binder, so we all know each other through him," actor Steve Guttenberg told the Transom-other Binder clients are Robert Wagner, Jacqueline Bisset and Daryl Hannah-"and I've heard from him how talented Leslie is, so I wanted to come. And I was excited Sharon was in town. We did Police Academy 4 together. Whenever she's in town, a big 'S' is written in the sky."

Ms. Stone arrived also in fishnets, a sleek Dior tweed suit dress and bicep-length black leather gloves. "An evening about striptease and nudity," she said, introducing the film. "I couldn't imagine why they asked me to host."

After the screening, the whole flock traveled by foot to the 21 Club three blocks away. In a strategically rumpled pink dress shirt and matching hair, Wall Street star Michael Douglas greeted Mr. Zemeckis with a hearty back pat. "Those women were so candid!" he added to Ms. Zemeckis. "You were so good at getting them relaxed." And, during a lull in the conversation, "So, my son is being sentenced tomorrow"--to which the couple responded with somber sympathy.

The Observer's Max Abelson reported in June on Mr. Tune's quest to buy the tower apartment at the Southgate at 400 East 52nd Street. It took him a year and a half to get it, which he did, for $1.29 million.

The six-and-a-half-foot-tall Mr. Tune, a nine-time Tony Award–winning actor and dancer, paid $1.29 million for the tower apartment at 400 East 52nd Street, called the Southgate.

It had belonged to the late interior designer Christopher Gallo.

A year and half ago, Mr. Tune first visited the building to see its penthouse. “The ceilings weren’t high enough,” he said. “I need head room, of course, obviously.” But he spotted a narrow passageway: “And I do not have a pioneering spirit, but I took off the chain and eked up the little narrow staircase. And suddenly I saw this place; I was like a peeping Tom.”

But the tower apartment he discovered wasn’t on the market, so he told a neighborhood florist (named Zeze—really!) to keep his eye on it. A year later, Zeze phoned Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy broker Patricia Scott Berkule to say the apartment was available—and that she should get Mr. Tune to see it.

Even though Mr. Gallo’s estate already had another potential buyer, Ms. Berkule and her partner, Mary Nealie, arranged for Mr. Tune to visit the one-bedroom, 750-square-foot apartment.

“It’s magic beyond belief,” he said. The place has a wrap terrace and cracked walls: “Absolutely romantic, in the Roman sense of the word. I’ve fallen in love with the walls in Rome—they don’t paint them, they let them live. There’s history in these walls, so I’m not touching them.

“I don’t want many things—I honestly don’t. But I looked at this place and said, ‘I want this place.’ And—ahem—I have it.”

Met: June 9, 2002

Engaged: Dec. 24, 2002

Projected Wedding Date: April 2003

Ladies and gents, we present long-legged entertainer Tommy Tune as … Cupid!

Jeffrey Laurence, 50, is a New York City oncologist, head of the Laboratory for Aids Research at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell, and former Rhodes Scholar with a weakness for showbiz. (His "medical detective comedy," Many Happy Returns , ran Off Broadway for a couple of weeks in 1982.) Two years ago, he divorced the mother of his two young daughters, an intellectual Ph.D. type, and decided he wanted someone a bit more Liza-esque. "I was a lot more Broadway than people were giving me credit for," said Dr. Laurence-a strapping 6-foot-2 with graying sideburns and a large philtrum. To prove it, he threw a "Coming Out Chansonnière" in the ballroom of his 12-bedroom mansion in Greenwich, Conn. This got him invited to a franks-and-beans gathering in Manhattan the next week-hosted by Tony Awards' head Isabelle Stevenson-honoring the cast of Private Lives . Mr. Tune showed up there with a tub of cole slaw and his personal assistant, Susan Paley.

Ms. Paley, a six-foot-tall former Chanel model with a platinum pixie haircut, had also been married before (at age 18, for five months, to a man she'd met at Studio 54 when she was in her aspiring-actress phase) and was in the midst of a self-imposed dating hiatus. "I was on a spiritual journey, getting to know myself," she said. Accustomed to dating muscled blond he-men, she didn't even speak to Dr. Laurence that night. "He wasn't my type," she said. But her boss thought otherwise, using his Texas friendly to get the physician's number and then insisting she call. "He said, 'Just keep an open mind and run with it,'" she said.

That open mind came in handy when Dr. Laurence took Ms. Paley to his all-male monthly book-club meeting at the Harvard Club, followed by belly-dancing at Chez Es Saada. "I was just bowled over," he said. "I'd dated a few models before, and it always became a chore. There was always the idea that they're better-looking than you are, and you're almost an appendage. But with Susan, it was different."

Ms. Paley didn't warm to him physically until their fifth date, dinner at "92," a restaurant near the 92nd Street Y, after a lot of torrid correspondence from the AIDS 2002 Conference in Barcelona. "I think I used to look at a man the way men look at women," she said. "But with Jeffrey, I went straight to the core. He's charming, he's funny, he's an incredible father, he's trying to save the world. He's a quality man. The more I got to know Jeffrey, I was very attracted to him and found his look to be incredibly handsome …. Tommy said, 'Hang on to this one.'" Mr. Tune proclaimed him "a saint."

Within months, they were each other's one and only, and Ms. Paley began making preparations to move from her studio apartment across the street from Mr. Tune's Upper East Side penthouse to the 'burbs. After asking both her father's and Mr. Tune's permission-the latter cried-Dr. Laurence proposed at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, Calif., where the bride-to-be's mother is hospitalized with lymphoma. Ms. Paley took one look at the classic-cut diamond with two baguettes set in platinum from Harry Winston and promptly called her surrogate grandmother, Carol Channing.

The wedding will be a modest affair for 20 guests at Las Brisas Restaurant in Laguna Beach, Calif., but Dr. Laurence couldn't resist a flamboyant "Going Back in Chansonnière" party on Feb. 14. Ms. Paley wore a low-cut red silk frock from Saks picked out by Mr. Tune, who did a touching rendition of "My Funny Valentine."

Amir Bronstein and Jackie Silver

Met: Fall 1999

Engaged: Jan. 2, 2003

Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 25, 2003

"I loved her since the day I laid my eyes on her," said Amir Bronstein, 26 (and no relation to Sharon Stone's Komodo-dragon-dodging newspaperman hubby, Phil; he runs his family's electrical-contracting firm). The lucky young lady is Jackie Silver, a voluptuous brunette in her final year of the John Jay School of Criminal Justice's forensics program. Cue the Crossing Jordan theme music, please ….

They met on Long Island University's C.W. Post campus. Ms. Silver, then a sophomore, kept noticing the slim, muscular, spiky-haired Mr. Bronstein lurking around in a manner that seemed almost stalkeresque. "I was very strategic about it," he said. "I would stay in a place where I knew she was going to pass."

Chatting, they discovered they were both of Russian-Jewish extraction. "I was 18 years old, and I said to my mom, 'I met my husband,'" Ms. Silver said. "And she said, 'You're crazy!' And I said, ' No! You don't understand!'"

Ma Silver could be forgiven: It seems Mr. Bronstein, while thoroughly enchanted with her daughter, wasn't quite through with his collegiate skirt-chasing career. "I knew what was good for me," he said. "I knew I wasn't ready to settle down and start my life. But I knew that when I was ready, I'd want to start it with her."

"I cried so many tears over him," said Ms. Silver, who resembles a prettier Jamie-Lynn Sigler.

After he graduated and she had transferred colleges, they reunited over apple martinis at Bliss Bar on East 49th Street.

"He starts telling me how he's always loved me," Ms. Silver said. "I was, like, stunned. I couldn't believe what he was saying. I was like, 'Oh, my God.'"

By last summer, she had moved into his large one-bedroom in midtown and they were wearing matching good-luck Kabbalah red-string bracelets (like the one Winona Ryder wore to court). But, said Mr. Bronstein, his girlfriend was "getting 'itsy.'"

They visited the Bahamas over New Year's and went to dinner one night at Graycliff, a five-star restaurant frequented by moneyed preppies.

"This would be a nice place to get engaged," she remarked during the meal.

"I'd prefer to do it at a dance club," he said. "With our friends around."

Ms. Silver began to weep. "I'd known him to be so romantic!" she said. "A girl's engagement is very important to her," she told him. "It has to be really special-and if it's not, that's terrible!"

But Mr. Bronstein was just messing with her. As a phalanx of waiters descended with disposable cameras and a $1,000 bottle of Cristal champagne, he dropped to one knee and busted out a radiant-cut diamond with two yellow trillions (3.4 carats total; Russians like the bling-bling!) and a phone card. "Go call your mom," he said.

They'll be married at Oheka Castle on Long Island. "I've done a lot in my life when it comes to dating," said the bride. "I basically partied myself out. It's so done ." (Yes, dear reader, she's 22. ) Instead, the pair likes to plunk themselves in front of the boob tube and watch American Idol .

She "understands me," Mr. Bronstein said, "in terms of cuddling when it's time to cuddle."

Jonas Karp and Stefan Lehmann

Met: April 1999

Engaged: Dec. 28, 2001

Projected Wedding Date: May 31, 2003

J onas Karp, 29, is a hard-core employment and labor lawyer with a large collection of Ken dolls: Harley-Davidson Ken (has stubble, tattoos and chest hair), Movie Date Ken (comes with popcorn), Big Brother Ken (hangs out with "little brother" Tommy, a sort of male Skipper) and Earring Magic Ken ("The Holy Grail," said Mr. Karp, with its purple vest, purple mesh T-shirt and earring). A city kid, he attended Fieldston and then Brown. "I was straight freshman year, celibate sophomore year, then by junior year I was gay," he said.

He met Stefan Lehmann, 27, a tall, bespectacled Cornell grad and analyst at Morgan Stanley, through a mutual friend at G, a lounge in Chelsea. They exchanged numbers and went shortly thereafter on a date to Hell, a bar on Gansevoort Street, where they remained until 2 a.m. "Neither of us wanted to leave," said Mr. Karp, who is 5-foot-7, with muscular arms, "but neither of us was forward enough to invite ourselves over." The night ended with a tame smooch.

As they got to know each other better, an important contrast emerged. "I know every episode of Saved by the Bell and the lyrics to the Facts of Life theme song," Mr. Karp said. "He knows nothing about 80's culture. He was too busy, like, playing the violin and learning languages and being smart. That intrigues me … .He's just a solid, traditional good guy, plain and simple."

"It sounds trite, but he's always smiling. He's always in a good mood," said Mr. Lehmann, who has green eyes and a wide, boyish grin. "We've had big disagreements, but even during those times, he's been my best friend," he added.

Although he held onto his West Village pad until 2001, Mr. Lehmann more or less moved into Mr. Karp's Chelsea studio just weeks into the relationship. The Chelsea love nest was featured in the movie Election as the epitome of a "Small Manhattan Crap Hole."

One cold morning, Mr. Karp announced to his surprised roommate that he wanted to take a little jaunt to midtown. "I thought he just wanted to go to the Toys 'R' Us there to hang out in Barbie's Palace," Mr. Lehmann said.

But they were bound instead for the bird sanctuary at the Central Park Zoo-where, amazingly, "there was no poop on the ground," Mr. Karp reported. Mr. Lehmann was then handed a rolled-up computer printout detailing several styles of Cartier rings and asked to make the relationship official.

They later decided that Cartier was a little too pricey, and went to a jeweler friend for matching platinum bands engraved with a line from one of their favorite movies, Amadeus : "Uoy Evol I Tub." (Read it backwards, you ninny.)

Their commitment ceremony will take place at the W Union Square Hotel with a female rabbi, lots of orchids and a Sylvia Weinstock cake trimmed in purple. Both men will wear Brooks Brothers tuxedos.

"It's a good feeling to know that we're formalizing our relationship," Mr. Lehmann said, then gave his best attempt at a pop-culture reference: "We're not just dating from here to eternity."

"He's my Ken doll," Mr. Karp said adoringly. "But he's cuter and smarter."

He intends to provoke and goad audiences into a response- any response (including rejection). In principle, I'm for those who risk just that. I'm for all those who create whirlwinds in our complacent theater. But, alas, I find myself unconvinced by Mr. LaBute's boldness. The Mercy Seat , directed by the author, with Sigourney Weaver and Liev Schreiber, at the MCC Theatre, is a sensational example of his reaction to Sept. 11. On the one hand, he's daringly reacted against the P.C. piety of our times. On the other, we actually end up with a lesser version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that's built on an opportunistic premise.

Ben, who's in his 30's, and Abby, older by 12 years, are lovers at war, and we meet them in crisis in Abby's downtown loft the day after 9/11. Mr. Schreiber's memorable performance makes the flawed drama more powerful than it actually is. His brooding, dangerous, fiercely introverted Ben is an archetypal LaBute hero. But I'm afraid the two leads aren't the equal adversaries they should be. Ms. Weaver's unexciting Abby is no match for Mr. Schreiber's combustible portrait of soullessness. Her performance needs more firepower and emotional bite-more presence -unless Mr. Schreiber is to go it alone. Even so , The Mercy Seat has opened up a can of worms-or, as Mr. LaBute puts it in the preface to the published edition of the play, "I hold up the mirror higher and try to examine how selfishness can still exist during a moment of national selflessness." He vividly puts it this way in the best exchange of the play:

" ... do you honestly think we're not gonna rebound from this?" the spineless Ben argues. "And I don't just mean you and me, I'm saying the country as a whole. Of course we will. We'll do what it takes, go after whomever we need to, call out the tanks and shit, but we're gonna have the World Series, and Christmas, and all the other crap that you can count on in life ... I'm saying the American way is to overcome, to conquer, to come out on top. And we do it by spending and eating and screwing our women harder than anyone else. That's what I'm saying."

"That's really moving," his lover replies dryly. "It's like seeing a Norman Rockwell for the first time."

It turns out that the lovers missed the 9/11 catastrophe because Abby was giving Ben a blowjob at the time. (My irreverent laughter at that turn of events, I ought to add, was stifled by the solemn silence surrounding me). Mr. LaBute is funnier than his misanthropy can make him seem. But The Mercy Seat grows rocky on its own blatant Ground Zero-the emptiness of its two unlovely, bickering protagonists.

There are pro forma power plays and diversions. "You're the fucking guy in this relationship, let's face it," says Ben. "You're like a complete cultural moron," says Abby. She's a ball-breaker who's a secret sentimentalist. He's smarter than she is, I thought, in his defensively inarticulate way. Sublime self-interest like his is unconquerable. There are sexually prurient details, par for the intercourse with Mr. LaBute. (Ben makes love to Abby most frequently from behind-nothing, she protests in so many words, to build a Taj Mahal around.) But the fatal flaw of the piece resides in its own emotional cant. Will Ben tell his wife and children at last that he's leaving them, as he's promised his lover? Or will he play dead by pretending he was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and begin a new life with her someplace?

The problem with accepting Ben's first dilemma is that Mr. LaBute's sullen, childish anti-hero is an unapologetic shit who would have left his wife years ago if it suited him. His favorite word is "Whatever," his calling card a shrug of narcissistic indifference. "This is me," Ben tells the unshocked Abby. "I always take the easy route, do it faster, simpler, you know, whatever it takes to get it done, be liked, get by. That's me. Cheated in school, screwed over my friends, took whatever I could get from whomever I could take it from."

The man's an empty shell. We don't believe for a second he's the kind of guy who would be concerned about dumping his wife. That Mr. LaBute gives him a very belated little outburst about loving his unquestioning children is begging for sympathy in all the wrong places.

As for the feckless hero taking on a new identity and running off into the sunset with his lover-how does he propose to disappear into the void? We learn that everyone in the office already knows about their affair. How, then, do they hope to get away with it? Why would she go along with his insane plan, anyway? She's a powerfully independent lady-an important Wall Street executive of some kind. (He works for her.) How will they live their new outlaw lives? (No credit cards, no bank accounts, no trace.) They're tantalizing questions, but Mr. LaBute doesn't trouble to provide us with any answers.

He doesn't provide them because, in the end, he can't. It's a shallow game he's playing, ending with a lame trick. Mr. LaBute's plot, which repeats and circles itself, has led us to believe all along that our hero's internal crisis is between fleeing or telling his wife about the affair. Surprise! It wasn't his wife he was going to leave. It was Abby!

The revelatory curtain line is a cheap device. We've been set up (and we feel shortchanged). Mr. LaBute protests peculiarly in his preface, "I have no idea why I wrote this play. Really, I don't." Really, he does . Forget his coyness. He set out, as he says, to explore a drama between battling lovers in the context of 9/11. The daring catastrophic context could have been liberating, but the manipulative drama itself is small and doesn't ring true.

Tommy's Tall Tales

A note on Tommy Tune's prematurely closed Tommy Tune: White Tie and Tails , which inaugurated the splendid new Little Shubert Theatre on 42nd Street's Theater Row. The 6-foot-6, almost 64-year-old Tommy has been starring in Las Vegas of late, and may his bank account always swell.

But to bring what appeared to be a Vegas lounge act to Broadway wasn't too wise. There were also three short geezers who shared the stage with him, who are known as the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, and one of them played the kazoo during Tommy's beaming rendition of "When I'm 64." And there was a 16-piece orchestra who played the music of the Gershwins and Irving Berlin, and so on, and everyone in the orchestra dutifully applauded Tommy at the end. All things considered, Tommy didn't sing too badly, and he tap-danced, too, in his sequined tails and diamante tap shoes. One of the rousing lyrics went "Everything old is new again," and even though I'm not so sure that's true, what the hey.

But Tommy's question time was new to me, although it's normal to have a question time in Las Vegas, where if there's anything you want to know about Engelbert Humperdinck, say, all you have to do is ask. The geezers from the Manhattan Rhythm Kings came out into the audience with microphones as Tommy nestled down cozily to sit on the apron of the stage like Judy Garland used to do. And his fans asked various questions, such as: "How do you walk quietly when you're wearing tap shoes?" (The answer is: Carefully.) Or: "When are you going to do a big Broadway show again?" (Which seemed to irritate Tommy a bit.) But then a middle-aged lady emerged from the shadows to ask him, "Do you remember me?" and the night was suddenly fraught with possibilities.

Tommy looked blank, but amid the giggles and happy applause, he invited the trembling lady onstage to meet him. She was tongue-tied. "What do you do?" Tommy asked her. She stammered that she was a speech therapist! And everyone laughed because they appreciated how awed she must be in Tommy's presence. But where had they met? It was at Tommy's school in Texas, where he taught a dance class, and she was in the same class all those years ago-more years ago, anyway, than Tommy was prepared to say. "I was crazy about you," she cooed, looking up at him as, I thought, he wiped away a tear. "Well it's never too late!" Tommy exclaimed cheerfully.

And so it went, this unexpected, teary reunion between the middle-aged housewife with kids and the boy she knew who became a star. Yet I couldn't help noticing that Tommy didn't seem too thrilled to see her. The hugs seemed a little token; Tommy's sudden memory rush when he miraculously remembered her name was surprising; the adorable tap dance they performed together was possibly programmed.

My goodness, I thought in my cold-hearted way, what if she's a plant? What if-and here we get to the philosophical nitty-gritty of the Tommy moment-all reality is fake?

I was still brooding about the matter when the curtain came down on an image of Tommy's hands releasing Picasso-like doves of peace. But as soon as I returned home, I called a friend who'd seen Tommy's show at a previous performance.

"Was there, by any chance, a sweet old lady who went up onstage during question time?" I asked him.

"The one who said, 'Do you remember me?'" he replied.

"That's the one. They were at school together in Texas."

"Yeah, sure," he said.

You know something? People are getting very cynical. I never expected it from Tommy, though.