Somebody fell down on the waxed floor; there was a little flurry of screams and laughter. I found myself being joggled, and managed to put away an inch of the collins to save it. Then I thought I saw Art Greymbergen, my favorite publisher, but before I could get anywhere near him Carrol's clear Sunday-school voice began calling, "The program is about to begin--please take your seats!" and a moment later people were moving sluggishly through the bar archway. I looked at my watch, then hauled out my copy of the little mimeographed sheet, full of earnest jocularity, that the club sent out every year to announce the Party. It said that the program would begin somewhere around 10, and it was that now. This was impossible. The program always pivoted on Bill Plass, and Bill never got there, or anywhere, until the party was due to break up. But I looked when I got down near the bandstand, and by God there he was, half as large as life, gesturing, flashing his Charlie Chaplin grin, teetering like a nervous firewalker. He saw me and waved hello, and then went on talking to Asa Akimisov, Ph.D. (A-K-I-M-I-S-O-V, please, and never mind the Akimesian, or Akimsiov.) Maybe it _was_ them atom bombs, I found a vacant folding chair with a good view of the platform, and a better one of a striking brunette in blue. Akimisov got up on the platform, with his neck sticking out of his collar like a potted palm (he had lost forty pounds, again) and began telling jokes. Ace is the second funniest man in Medusa, the first being Plass; the peculiar thing is that Plass writes humor professionally, and delivers his annual set-pieces the same way--the rest of the time he is merely a perfectly fascinating morbid wit--but Akimisov, who writes nothing but the most heavily thoughtful fiction in the business, bubbles with humor all the time, a poor man's Sam Levenson. I was going to write an article once proving that a writer's personality on paper was his real one turned inside out, but I fell afoul of some exceptions. Like Tom Q., who was still flashing his bulbs over at the side of the platform, and being noisily suppressed--you could paper him all over with his published stories, and never know the difference. The program was good, even for Medusa. Ned Burgeon, wearing a sky-blue dinner jacket and a pepper-and-salt goatee, played his famous twenty-one-string guitar; a dark-haired girl, a new one to me, sang in a sweet, strong contralto; there was a skit involving Punchy Carrol as a dream-beast, L. Vague Duchamp as a bewildered spaceman, and B. U. Jadrys, the All-Lithuanian Boy, as a ticket agent for the Long Island Railroad. Then came Plass's annual monologue, and there is just nothing like those. I'm not exaggerating out of parochial pride (once a year is enough Medusa for me): the simple truth is that Plass is a comic genius. He had his audience laid out flat, gasping and clutching its sides. Why should a man like that waste his time writing fiction?