Speechless

Unless our mind is playing tricks on us, we seem to remember hearing Sir Richard Burton read the phone book on The Tonight Show back in the 1960s--the white pages, no less. We remember his voice as low, intimate, seductive, urgent.

That old canard that "His voice is so beautiful that he could make the phone book sound good" has been dusted off in support of the Writers Guild strike. For the Speechless campaign, friends of the striking writers create a series of vignettes which demonstrate how the industry is literally "speechless without writers."

We love episode no. 16, in which actors Patricia Clarkson and Amy Ryan read the yellow pages with pathos verging on the tragic.