When I was 8 years old, I watched my trial-lawyer father play Horace Vandergelder in the Livingston, N.J., community-theater production of "Hello, Dolly!" He entered wearing an enormous marching-band bass drum (the character is in a parade), and he roared to his sobbing niece, "Dammit! How am I supposed to play 'Yonkers My Yonkers' with all that bellowing in my ears!" It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. I was a melancholic child. Worried, anxious. I never felt as if I belonged anywhere, as if I were a foreign exchange student living among the other kids, who seemed predestined to love sports. Add to that alienation the fact that my parents were going through a divorce, and I was truly treading water. But in that junior high school auditorium, I felt like I'd discovered a secret I didn't even know was being whispered. There was a place where