I’m a few minutes from heading off to Brookside in Kansas City, my next show… 11 hours of driving without a stereo… aaaahhhh! and then 11 hours back… aaaahhhh! The insurance requires that I wait for their stereo “voucher.” But one of my best friends, Mary Ellen Lloyd has loaned me her boombox, and I have my iPod. I stay at her place when I’m in Ann Arbor. Mary Ellen is the most generous person I know… by far. When I first met her, she had 3 homeless kids staying with her.  They stayed for 3 years!! Her son Phil  (my assistant) came home one day with a homeless teenager and she immediately set him up with a room. The others followed soon after. She is also one of the most courageous and positive thinking people I know. She had Lupus for years, which was slowly destroying her. Then she underwent an experimental stem cell transplant, and has become one of the treatment’s most successful patients. Her lupus is cured. I was in the hospital with her, and her kids when they re-injected her stem cells into her blood stream - the syringe tube was the size of a large tube of toothpaste. Many patients at this point go into shock and some die. She knew this, but throughout the transplant, she just made jokes and laughed heartily. I aspire to this kind of positive thinking.Me and Mary Ellen at the Monkey Bar pool hall in Ann Arbor