Maude season 2

I had occasion to meet producer Norman Lear in the spring of 1978, when I was a freshman in college. He was coming to our university to give a brief lecture, and then a select group of students were joining him at a local restaurant for dinner. I have no memory of how those particular students were chosen, but as a lowly freshman, I was not among them. But this was at a time when my ambition was to write for television, so I was not about to miss the chance to meet Normal Lear — and having been raised on ‘60s sitcoms, I wasn’t going to let anything as trivial as the lack of an invite stop me. In true Lucy Carmichael fashion, I managed to convince the school newspaper that they needed to do a story on Lear’s visit, and even though I had never written for them before, I persuaded them that I was the one to do it. And then I made the case that part of covering his visit meant covering the dinner, so they snagged me an invite.