I WILL BE KEEPING MY STUFF, THANK YOU: After Billy Crystal's 860, The Junk Drawer is Staying

Billy Crystal's new one-man show, 860, is named for the address of the house he and his family lived in for forty-six years, the one they lost in the Palisades fires in 2025. It's a devastating premise for an evening of entertainment, especially if your usual approach to devastation is to plop down and watch When Harry Met Sally again.

Fortunately, Billy Crystal is in charge, and he's so damn funny. You'll feel deeply, sure, but oh, how you'll laugh, sometimes both at once, before you've had a chance to fix your face.

This is a brilliant man you can trust with an evening. You don't spend the first twenty minutes laughing encouragingly because you're sitting close enough to become responsible for his self-esteem. He knows where the laugh is, and he doesn't hover over it like a waiter with the check. And there's real affection underneath. When he makes fun of people, they seem to end up liking him more. He impersonated Muhammad Ali at a roast and came away with a friend for life. I can lose one by texting "Omg, have you even left yet?" I'm perfectly capable of finding people irritating on my own (I do it recreationally), but being reminded why they're worth the trouble takes real talent.

He even surprises you with a scene you know by heart. I practically memorized When Harry Met Sally from the tan leather sofa in my basement den, and it turns out the paprikash-and-pecan-pie bit at the Temple of Dendur was sprung on an unsuspecting Meg Ryan. That little glance off-camera is her checking with Rob Reiner before playing along.

As a native New Yorker and Nora Ephron loyalist, I love that a now iconic movie moment came from actual spontaneity, one person being funny and another caught off guard and joining in, which is more or less how the city works. Now every time I pass the Met, I'll hear "paprikash" and start laughing, which gives me another reason not to get anywhere on time.

The set is a re-creation of the office he lost, rebuilt from photographs, and he shows you around it like a proud homeowner, which, for ninety minutes, he gets to be again.

And then he tells you about the front door. It survived, along with the stone around it. The house behind it was gone. Forty-six years of coming home, and you could still get to the door.

I was already a little defensive about my belongings. After that, I certainly wasn't going to let someone with matching storage bins tell me which ones should matter. Entire careers have been built on persuading us that happiness means owning fewer sweaters, and somewhere along the way a shoebox full of old Playbills became something you were supposed to work on. I understand the appeal. I, too, would like to open a closet without having to catch something. But I'm less sold on the advice to photograph the object and let it go, as though we'll someday scroll past Grandma's handwriting somewhere between a selfie of me in a dress I didn't buy and forty-three pictures of a rash.

There's a difference between deciding you're finished with something and having no say in the matter. You can believe people matter more than possessions and still ache for the things they touched, gave you, left behind. Not just the remarkable things (and a man who hosted the Oscars nine times has a few), but the unremarkable ones, too, the kind whose primary value is a good story or a bit of family lore. The trinket that sat on a shelf so long it became part of what coming home looked like.

You're laughing the whole time, enjoying his company, and somehow you end up thinking about your own kitchen, which in my case usually has someone standing in front of the drawer I need to open. I'm rarely overcome with gratitude about this. But listening to him, I could feel how much you might miss an ordinary evening spent mostly trying to get someone to move.

Normally I'd resent being made to feel this in public. I'd put on mascara. But he knows when to give you a laugh, and he never uses it to pretend everything is fine now. He's lived through something shattering and devastating, and he's still looking after our evening.

Go see him. Bring someone you love. Then go home and be a little more forgiving of whatever they refuse to throw out.

As for me, I'm keeping the Playbills, including this one. I'm keeping the blurry photographs in which everyone looks happy and nobody would approve the picture for posting. And I'm keeping a few things whose value I'd have trouble explaining to a professional organizer.

Billy Crystal: 860 is at the Imperial Theatre.