Less than 60 minutes later ...

No sooner had we seated ourselves for dinner, than Morley Safer made a beeline for our table and the one seat still available there. I avoided my friends' eyes; we were all fighting back laughter.

Sadly, this is as good as the tale gets.

Morley was a perfect gentleman, a bit of a mumbler but an overall fabulous conversationalist. And a snappy dresser to boot, attired in a royal blue dress shirt, suit jacket with what I can only assume was a silk kerchief peeking out of its breast pocket.

My friend Lane, sitting closest to him, asked him several questions, which he answered without hesitation and in detail. Friends Stephanie and John struck up an immediate and lively conversation. The other woman at our table, another invited guest at the academy, also interjected several pithy comments. He made eye contact with each of them, giving them what appeared to be his full attention.

Me? The one dying to make an impression, the one who threatened to be outrageous ... I sat there like a bump on a log, unable to think of a single thing to say - captivating or otherwise. I tried drinking more wine, and quickly, but this did not provide my hoped-for inspiration.

In short, I suppose I owe Morley a blog apology. My attempted Safer smear campaign has been halted in its tracks like a punched stopwatch. Morley is once again simply the television news correspondent with the everyman face and the voice warm as a flannel shirt who was a weekly guest in my childhood home.

There's still a small spark of hope. We'll stay here the night before our plane departs later this month. I don't expect any more potentially emotional encounters with Morley. Instead, I'm keeping my fingers firmly crossed in the wild hope that Parker Stevenson has an unpublicized artistic streak.

It is now 10 days until we return. The clock, once again, is ticking.