Life is What Happens While. . .

you're busy making other plans.

That's what John Lennon said, and it's a saying that I often quote.

Here's an example, from today's New York Times -- (the obituary section, unfortunately).

Georgelle Hirliman, ‘Writer in the Window,’With Answers, Is Dead at 73

Georgelle Hirliman, whose innovative solution to writer’s block a quarter-century ago gave her a national career as a performance artist — and a book to boot — died on Jan. 29 in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 73 and a Santa Fe resident.

The cause was cancer, said Devon Ludlow, a longtime friend.

In 1984, hopelessly blocked on a novel, Ms. Hirliman hit on the idea of setting up shop with her typewriter in a Santa Fe storefront. Beside her, she placed a sign:

Help Me Cure My Writer’s Block — Give Me a Topic.

People stopped and stared. Before long they began scribbling questions on slips of paper and taping them to the window. (Q. Where do the ducks go when ponds freeze over?) Ms. Hirliman fired off brief, aphoristic replies and taped them back up for all to see. (A. Warm, chlorinated pools in Miami and Beverly Hills.)

She never wrote her novel, but it no longer mattered: Ms. Hirliman was soon appearing in windows across the United States and Canada, her work widely reported in the news media.

In Manhattan she wrote in the windows of The Village Voice, Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper West Side and B. Dalton on Fifth Avenue, among other places, sitting daily for eight hours at a stretch. Store owners paid her $50 to $100 a day, New York magazine reported in 1985.

As Bugs Bunny used to sometimes lament: "It's a living."

(Extra credit if you can tell me the literary reference embedded above.)