POSTSCRIPT.(The Talk of the Town)

Wendy Wasserstein, who died last week at only fifty-five, was one of the few Pulitzer Prize winners to be recognizable by her first name. If you said "Wendy," theatregoers, and everyone else in the theatre community, knew instantly whom you meant. Wendy was beloved to an almost alarming degree. Her fans were passionate not just about her work but about her; strangers would constantly leap out, hug her, and offer heartfelt advice about her love life, her family, and her weight.

I first met Wendy when I was an undergraduate props person on a Yale production of the Feydeau farce "Hotel Paradiso." Wendy, who was enrolled in the graduate school's playwriting program, was moonlighting as an actress, and playing a haughty French maid. I quickly discovered two things: that Wendy was irresistible, onstage and off, and that she could manage to lose all of her props at every performance. Later, I appeared in a workshop of one of her earliest plays, "Any Woman Can't," playing a huffy choreographer named Bob le Bob; like everyone else, I would do anything for Wendy, even tap-dance in public in black tights. Wendy also wrote a piece, with Christopher Durang, called "When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth," which featured a musical production number entitled "Welfare Mothers on Parade."

Wendy was ...