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Disclaimer: Should the following seem a wee bit familiar, it is because I have blatantly turned to our May column of nine years ago and shamefully reused a good part of it! It says very nicely everything I wanted to say this time, and therefore please accept, slightly abridged and modified, this renewed tribute to Motherhood…

Welcome, dear friends, to our special Mother's Day column! I am reminded of my father's mother's mother, who I actually knew, and who passed from this mortal stage in the early 1960's while raising a glass of champagne in toast.

Now, I have always thought that that was just about the coolest possible way to go, and in her memory let us therefore raise our own glasses, at whatever Mother's Day celebration we find ourselves.

(I should point out that the jacuzzi comment goes back to the late seventies, when I had a band and frequently needed use either of Mom's car, or of Mom's 15 year old son David, who was our bass player. When once I needed such a favor from my sainted, long suffering mother, I promised to buy her a house the very instant we became millionaires. The next time I needed something, having already promised said house, I offered to add a swimming pool. The next time, now owing her both house and pool, I threw in a jacuzzi. It escalated from there.)

At any rate, a toast to mothers everywhere! They carry with them the great secrets and mysteries of Life Itself, they nurture and mold us, they loan us cars and little brothers -- and they rarely demand anything in return outside of the occasional folklore column.

Moving along to the more important toasts, here's a special toast to every mother reading this, and if you're not one, then a toast to your own mother!

And I must toast my father's mother -- a Wild Irish Rose from Iowa who came of age in Hollywood during the Roaring Twenties -- and my mother's mother, born in Hawaii and not a little wild herself as she grew to adulthood in Los Angeles. Both women were extraordinarily loving and supportive, and both defied great odds (and parents) to marry the men they wanted to -- a very good thing, since there would otherwise be no Me to type these very words!

(And I must in that spirit take a minute for a special toast to my amazing father, who has now sadly passed on. There will be a column just for him in the near future.) A toast as well to my mother-in-law, Gloria, who has not only continued to give me many ancestors I would not otherwise know about, but also of course produced my wife!

And a very very special toast – the one you all saw coming -- to Mom, my own Mom, Sheryl Anderson, still the proud owner of Book Again for an even more astonishing number of years, to whom by my own calculations I now owe 79 swimming pools and 186 jacuzzis.

Lastly, the Toast of Toasts to my wife Lisa, who, just three months after this column first appeared, became…

A Mother.