Barbara Walters once famously asked Katharine Hepburn if she were a tree, what kind of tree she would be.
The question, we know now, was more memorable than the answer. (For the record, Hepburn said, “Oak.”)
In case you are wondering, I’d be a Japanese maple: florid in the summer, sapped in the winter.
But nobody asked, me, right?
In years of interviewing, I’ve actually never popped the tree question. But that’s not to say that personification doesn’t have a place in journalism.