ON SAVING MADONNA AND LIVING THROUGH TURBULENCE: I'm writing this while sitting on a flight from Newark to Chicago, watching an "NBC Inflight" segment. Right now it's Matt Lauer interviewing Madonna, and you know what: This chick is totally ape-shit. Her accent is even odder and more profound than ever. She's really struggling with Matt's questions about Kaballah. (She's ostensibly on here to promote some bizarre children's book, and Matt's unveiling the fact that it's basically a Kaballah parable in illustrated clothing.) She looks uncomfortable, overserious, and shut down.

Okay, okay, now Madonna scores with her cockiness. Matt holds up a recent cover of something like LADIES' HOME JOURNAL where Madonna looks matronly, then juXtaposes it with a ten-year-old cover of ESQUIRE where she's wearing leather undies. He asks, referring to the LHJ cover, "Can you really be a pop star with this image?" Madonna easily fires off an accent-invisible, "Watch me," and for just a flash she's that cheeky babe who was smart, savvy, and sexy all at once, the one that mesmerized me rather than sickened me.

This tiny verbal parry seems to relax her, and she does much better with the rest of the interview. She smiles more, she gestures and improvises and becomes nearly real. I could swear her accent fades as her comfort level becomes more palpable.

I have the odd thought that if I could just show her this little leap -- from ice queen back to pop princess -- I could not only help her career, but I could remind her what it was like to be happy. What an odd thing to think. I know I'm shackled and driven by a desire to save the world and everyone in it -- that old "savior complex" you hear about -- but now I'm even plotting Madonna's emotional rescue.

Thank God. Now it's Conan O'Brien, who's probably the funniest man in America. And now we're bumping around like crazy. Big bumps. Yuck.

If this post makes it to my blog it means we made it through.