Dollar A Sea Gull

March, 1986

It's worse than bad--it's half good," Dashiell Hammett told his girlfriend, Lillian Hellman, after he'd read the first version of one of her plays, and it's a crack that has ridden around with me ever since I read it years ago in Hellman's An Unfinished Woman.I remembered it while I was watching television the other Saturday afternoon, just dialing around. Didn't want any football, didn't want a Western, wasn't even sure I wanted TV; then, all of a sudden, he was there: hunched into his can...