No interviews tonight, dear, I have a headache.

BOSTON—Being a reporter at a political convention is a lot like having sex. Hey there, gorgeous, would you like to interview me? The American people this, the American people that. Oh … cliché. Cliché, cliché, witticism, cliché, insight borrowed from the New York Times. Fact retrieved from an appropriately obscure … please keep ask-ask-ask-ask-ask-asking … Oh yeah … cliché—don't stop asking!—evasion of difficult … Yeeeeeesssss!

(Pause. Smoke cigarette. Straighten tie.)

OK, now I'll interview you. What do you think of this dubious claim, do you agree with that empty generalization. How would you compare … what does Joe Sixpack … what does the Bible belt … what do minority groups … was the candidate trying to, trying to, trying to ….

Did you sum up?

Then tell me how the new campaign finance lim—Oh. My darling. You are so pithy. So very, very pithy. Your succinctness—it moves me so.

(Pause again.)

Now what do you say we try interviewing eachother?

The preceding re-enactment explains why reporters attending conventions always say that conventions can't get too much press coverage. I even heard myself say something like that yesterday on National Public Radio's "Day to Day." How did I come to believe that, I wondered, as I listened to the segment. I didn't remember believing it before. And what did I tell Ken and Daria Dolan on CNNfn this morning? How many drinks did I have last night? None? That's right. I'd worried that the Distilled Liquor Council, which hosted a party I was crashing, would feel insulted because all I wanted to drink was water. All that interviewing and being interviewed had left me dripping with sweat.

So I tried to steer clear of other journalists today.

Shambling out of the FleetCenter after my TV interview, I saw a man who looked like Robert Altman, the film director. This being the Democratic National Convention, it was Robert Altman. He'd been there since 5 a.m. shooting additional footage that will provide some sort of coda to his wonderful TV miniseries, Tanner '88. I asked him what he thought of last night's speeches by Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. He pronounced himself well satisfied. He said that in the predawn drive to the arena, "I opened my New York Post and I thought, 'Where the fuck were they?' " Searching the Post later, I couldn't find anything that looked like the piece whose obtuseness would have offended Altman and so concluded he must have meant the Boston Herald. (They're both right-wing tabloids.) The Herald's Page One screamer perversely bypassed the nominating convention underway in the Herald's backyard for "Teresa's Ted K Tirade," wherein John Kerry's wife called the senior senator from Massachusetts a "perfect bastard," thereby revealing herself to be a serial potty-mouth. (Earlier this week she very sensibly told a reporter for a Richard Mellon Scaife-owned newspaper to "shove it.") The catch was that the damning quotes dug up by the Herald came from Myra McPherson's book, The Power Lovers, which was published in 1975—when Heinz was married to Republican John Heinz, then a congressman and soon to be a senator—and had been published by the Herald back then.