Musical accompaniment: Just One of Those Things, composed by Cole Porter and performed Ella Fitzgerald.

People toss around the word “great” a lot today. But in Dorothy Parker’s case, it’s misapplied only in that it falls short.

I’m such a fan of Dorothy Parker. She was famous for her acid wit and her love of martinis. Like most brilliant writers, Dorothy had a lifelong struggle with her personal demons — loneliness, drinking, stormy relationships, in and out of financial distress, to name but a few. In spite of all of that (or because of that?), she produced a tremendous amount of enduring work in the form of columns, short stories, and poems.  I have a collection of her columns in a book called A Month of Saturdays and it’s one of my favorites.

Parker was a legend in her own time. She knew everyone. She’s featured in the very first line of today’s song, It was Just One of those Things.  This is Edward Steichen’s photograph of the great Dorothy Parker, circa 1932.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker and I appreciate an intelligent audience.
• He’s a writer for the Ages; the ages of four to eight.
• It was written without fear and without research.
• [On Katharine Hepburn’s stage performance] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.
• This is not a book to be tossed lightly aside. It should be thrown with great force.
• As I was saying to my landlord only this morning, “You can’t have everything.”
• That woman speaks 18 languages and she can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.
• You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.