There were perks to being a jazz columnist. Free records, no cover charges, and awesome seats at the Hollywood Bowl were nice. And having lovely women in tight sweaters say Hi! and smooshing their boobs against me in a bear hug as they planted big smooches on my cheek and/or lips was always sort of disconcertingly pleasant. I say disconcerting because I could never tell if I knew the ladies or not. You see I’m epileptic, and epilepsy comes and goes in severity, sometimes it’s mellow and other times it roars in like a violent summer storm. Thus my epilepsy flared up suddenly in 2006 and had severely impaired my facial recognition skills, indeed had done so literally overnight. In fact, it had done so so suddenly that I couldn’t recognize many people at first, even close friends and siblings, people I’d known for years and saw every day could look like complete strangers and those I did recognize immediately looked different. People who were acquaintances I couldn’t recognize at all. So you could come up and give me a big smile and squeezy hug and a big wet smooch and unless I knew you really well it was likely I wouldn’t have a clue who you were. Such things happened in the oddest places. I remember once in the lobby of the ABC building where I worked a leggy knockout in a miniskirt and skintight top yelled Hi Brick! and gave me a full body boob smooshing hug with the big smooch on the cheek in front of the big lunchtime crowd. I’d learned to not look surprised by then and we chatted for a minute. She was on her way to some meeting or broadcast or something, she said, and was late already, and as her frantic manager or agent or whoever finally got her into the elevator and the doors slid shut behind her and those long, lovely legs, I wondered who she was. I really had no idea, not the slightest. I mean, I’m sure I did know who she was, we’d obviously met, met long enough to rate a smoosh and a smooch, I just couldn’t recognize her. The people all around me in that ABC lobby who’d seen that smoosh had no idea who I was either. Just somebody, obviously. Nobodies never got full body boob smooshing hugs with big smooches, not from leggy miniskirted dolls to die for. Only the somebodies got those. So all the nobodies in the lobby pretended not to wonder who I was, as one does, and I pretended such smooshes and smooches were a normal thing, just part of whatever job it was I must be doing. That’s show biz. Once packed safely into the elevator for the ride up to my floor I figured the incident was already forgotten. As we ascended an attractive woman next to me whom I didn’t know looked at me and grinned, pulling a Kleenex from her purse. Now Brick, she said, that won’t do at all, and she reached up to wipe the cherry red lipstick from my cheek.