Back in the Rat Pack days, Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin often looked out over the nightclub audience, and said, "Who are all these people and how did they get in my room?" Lately, I could say that and mean it...in my own home. It is called the SLEEP-OVER! My wife and I have four children but some nights it swells to five or six or more and other nights that number shrinks to one or two. I know that sleeping over at a friend's house is nothing new but, at least in our house, it seems to happen more frequently than when I was a kid.

I was not a great sleep-over guest. Once, I went to a friend's house for a long-planned not-too-much slumber party. We were going to stay up late, eat lots of junk and look up naughty words in the dictionary. (Webster's was about as close to adult content as we could get.) About 10:00 p.m., I got homesick. I wanted to be in my own bed. I didn't want to stay up late because I knew bad things happened when you were up past midnight. I was sure the pastor, in Sunday's sermon, would refer to us as examples of warped young minds if we used the dictionary in a sinful manner. I missed my dog. I felt so far from home. So, I made up an excuse about having forgotten something...leaving the impression I'd be coming right back. I made the long trip across the street to my house and stayed there.

Part of my problem with sleep-overs, when I was young, was that I just couldn't seem to stay awake late enough. Even on New Year's Eve, when my parents would be out and my grandma stayed with me, the two of us would settle in to watch Guy Lombardo and his orchestra from the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. (Lombardo was sort of like Dick Clark's Rockin' Eve but wearing tuxedos instead of t-shirts and having sponsors like Geritol instead of Mountain Dew.) Grandma and I didn't even make it to the New Year Eastern Time. When my parents got home, they would wake us both up...we'd toast each other with the grape juice we'd poured about three hours earlier. Since we were both mostly asleep, the toasts went something like this "Frappy Schmoonear." "Shtame to yourff!" "ZZZZZZZZ." Sadly, this described my New Year's Eve blowouts well into my college years. Well, that's not exactly true. My grandma remarried and was out on the town on New Year's Eve and I have boycotted TV on December 31 ever since Guy Lombardo died.

Despite my problems with sleep-overs, I kept trying. Usually, the events were scheduled for Friday nights. School nights were obviously out and Saturday nights were unlikely because everyone was expected to be up and awake for church Sunday morning. Sleep-overs were also a rare deal so, after much planning and anticipation, when the big day arrived it was not taken lightly. My best friend and I had a couple of modestly successful sleep-overs. We would make sure we were stocked up on Cheetohs and chocolate and ice cream. We'd watch all of the shows on ABC. (Note to Channel 9 management: even as a child, I was a loyal employee.) The Brady Bunch was up first...I liked Jan...my friend liked Marcia. Years later, I interviewed "Marcia" aka Maureen McCormick. I told her her nose seemed to be mostly healed after that football throwing incident, asked her if she stayed in touch with Jan and said I thought cousin Oliver was a twerp. As the security guards dragged me from the room, I whined (do it with me) "Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!" Later, Room 222 made us feel socially relevant and The Odd Couple let us feel like we were in the big city. (When I had the chance to talk with Jack Klugman, I thanked him for being a good companion on those Friday nights and wondered why I'd never received my winnings from the poker games we'd played with Murray the Cop. He smiled a Quincy-like smile and said, "I know you...Maureen McCormick warned me. Security!") The show we liked best, though, from the ABC prime-time line-up, was Love, American Style. It seemed pretty racy to a couple of grade school kids with all those bedroom doors slamming and women wearing pajamas and men making comments about the birds and the bees. Besides, we knew all the words to the opening song.

After filling our heads with TV...we filled our stomachs with goodies. Ah, for those days when you could eat anything without heartburn or weight-gain. Now, if I eat a hot-fudge sundae after 6:25 p.m., I automatically gain 12.7 pounds by morning. We played some cut-throat games of Monopoly and talked about making crank phone calls. It was all talk since we were scared to death that someone would know it was us. Once, we pretended like we were going to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night but it looked pretty creepy outside at 2:00 a.m. and what would we do once we were out there? Mostly we just ate and waited for midnight when Lenny's Inferno sponsored by Crazy TV Lenny, would hit the air. It was hosted by a ghoulish looking fellow named Mr. Mephisto and featured really bad horror movies. Not the ultra-violent stuff. Just visits from your friends Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein. The movies were incidental...it was the silliness of Mr. Mephisto that made us watch. He'd come up out of a coffin and start cracking jokes. Many years later, I'd find myself laughing at something Mr. Mephisto had said...just then getting the full meaning of his jokes. The movies didn't usually scare us, but one time, after Dracula A Go Go or something like that, I awoke at 3:3o a.m. to find my friend, pale as a ghost, staring right at me. "You look like a vampire! You really do...are you still Joel...are you going to kill us all and drink our blood? Answer me!" I leaped from the couch, spread the blanket out like wings and ran around the room...laughing maniacally. Until his father came in and told me to pipe down. When a father entered the room, then, you knew real fear. Still, from that night on, my friend got would eye me nervously whenever I opened a ketchup packet at the A&W. Ironically, this same guy earned spending money in college by selling his plasma.

Like I mentioned, when I was a kid, sleep-overs were a very "sometime" sort of thing. Today, it seems to happen almost every other day. This morning, for example, I went downstairs at 2:15 a.m....on my way to work...and I discovered our youngest son on the sofa, playing a hand-held video game...Game-Boy DSPlus-extra-super-dooper or something and half-watching cartoons. "Hi, Dad...be careful driving to work, " Harrison happily chirped. I was half-way downtown when I realized there had been another kid sitting in the living room, also playing a hand-held game. Now, it is quite possible I was told someone was sleeping over but I don't remember. A couple days ago, it was our daughter that had someone over for what seemed like several days in a row. She also stayed at other kids' houses for a few nights. At some point, mark my words, we are all going to sit down for breakfast and have other peoples' kids staring at us over the cereal bowls, while our kids are making small talk with some other set of confused parents.

There was one time, last fall, when Harrison went to a friend's house...Taylor was staying with his buddies because they had an early start at some forensics tournament the next day....Alex was out of town on a field trip...my wife and I thought we'd be down to just one child for a Friday night. In fact, we encouraged her to stay with a friend. She had other plans and ended up inviting two or twenty friends over to stay at our house for the night. We went from three boys and a girl to a sorority house.

Honestly, I do, occasionally, feel I am trapped in a full-size, human shell game...never too sure whom I may encounter when I walk into my own kitchen. Most of all, I'm a little jealous by how many times my kids are the invited or invitees and how comfortable they all are with the whole sleep-over scenario. In fact, I feel inspired. I'm going to try and recapture that youthful moment and, this time, I will not get homesick. So, if your doorbell rings, and you see a pudgy, graying, 45 year old man, standing on your front porch with a sleeping bag and a sack of M&M cookies, before you dial 911, please, make sure it's not me.