Mario Lopez's Underwear Dis

My favorite li'l honoree at the Songwriters Hall of Fame last week was Loretta Lynn, the coal miner's daughter from Butcher Holler, Kentucky, who trailblazed country music while singing hard-hitting female-p.o.v. songs with lots of parentheses, like "Don't Come Home A'Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)." Lynn chit-chatted with me by phone before the event, adding some all-new parenthetical thoughts while proving to be as utterly down-home and charming as a quince-pie tin in a quilted cozy.

"I'm so pleased about being in the Songwriters Hall of Fame," she gushed (admitting she hadn't quite heard of the other inductees). "I'd rather write than sing. It's kind of an escape. I don't know what else it could be!"

But performing, Lynn said, can be something she wants to escape from. "When I first started out, they had to push me onstage," she admitted. "I was so bashful. I'm not really over that. But when you get over that completely, you need to quit!"

Not only hasn't the woman done that—at 73, she's still butcher-hollering up a storm—but she's recently worked with newfangled producers Jack White ("a great kid") and now John Carter Cash, whom Johnny and June used to let her babysit when they were busy walking the line. But it's her songs, Lynn told me, that she considers to be like her children. "I remember writing each one of them," she said, "and I know what state of mind I was in when I wrote them. My husband ['Doolittle' Lynn] was one of my greatest inspirations. I'd come off the road and he'd done something else, so I'd write about it." Wait, had the man done something good or bad? "Something bad!" she squawked. "What do you think 'You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)' is about?" God, men are such state-fair-variety prize pigs. With parentheses.

"Every song I've ever written has something in the back of it that I know but nobody else does," the new Hall of Famer went on. "Sometimes I get lost in the remembering." Lynn especially loves singing "Dear Uncle Sam," her anti–Vietnam War tune that is sizzling hot again because of the situation in Iraq. "It's not old," she told me. "It's still fresh today—I hate war!"

But don't think my new best friend Loretta Lynn is always mad at the menfolk; the country legend assured me that she can do happy songs, too. "One's on the way!" she informed me, laughing. By natural childbirth!

A Television Hall of Fame legend, Carol Burnett started her Q&A show the other night at Caesars Palace's Circus Maximus in Atlantic City by praising a man: her recently transitioned co-star Harvey Korman, who she said through tears "made my game better." She needed to be in top shape to field questions from this audience of kooks and fanatics, including a young lady who stood up, put on a graduation cap, and announced: "Guess what school I just graduated from? Carol Burnett University! Everything I learned in life I learned from you!" Rather than yell "Security!", Burnett was gracious as always and even thanked the girl for the elaborate truffle cake she'd sent backstage (which another audience nut was angling for a piece of). The star was also charming about the microphone battery pack that she said was lodged in her butt and had been wrapped in a condom in case of perspiration. "We call it safe sound!" said Carol Burnett, laughing. I bet it can prevent what Paula Deen so delightfully calls "a butt biscuit."

Wearing a battery pack with no protection whatsoever, I went to a party for John Leguizamo's Hamptons magazine cover story and asked the co-star of The Happening how he managed to act as if the foliage were Charles Manson. "You've had bad weed," he replied, smirking. "It's terrifying!" So true—but even scarier, what was M. Night Rama-lama-dingdong like to work with? A complete pill? "Shyama-lama-dingdong," Leguizamo corrected. "The other one is a holiday. If we were in Denmark, we'd be in trouble!" Pause. "But I enjoyed him. He's got this wonderful laugh, and then he gets deep and philosophical. At the end of the shooting, you know what he gave crew members? A trip to Europe! It was like Oprah's Big Give." And what did Leguizamo get, pray tell? "A great part with a great monologue!" he said, beaming. Better than a potted plant.