 A woman named Janet Wolfe, again one of these unsung backstage players, she had a job as the executive director long time of the New York City Housing Authority Symphony, who knew there was such a thing but was an orchestra comprising residents of New York City housing projects, workers in the housing department, and some professional ringers who played in the projects all over the city, but she was also just one of these people who had been everywhere, done everything, knew everyone, and she had been a recurring real life character in the New Yorkers talk of the town columns under the heading Our Friend Janet, and so every few months for like 20 years readers would read Our Friend Janet did this or that, and so the Times put it on page one, and if you think about the lead of a conventional obit, it's John Doe who was the corporate executive of the Acme Corporation, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan, he was 99, well that's a great big yawn, it's the way we were all taught to write obits. Here's how we started on page one of the Times, the obit of Janet Wolfe, the headline is Janet Wolfe, 101, a gleeful gadabout who got the town talking is dead, and we start so about Janet, it's discursive, it's gossipy, and we never knew until a generation ago that it was possible to write obits that way, and that's why it's become the best job in the paper.