I was picking tomatoes in my back yard yesterday afternoon when the phone rang. Caller ID said it was my manager. I picked it up and said, “Mister Black! What’s up?”

“Seth Macfarlane wants to work with you tomorrow,” he said.

The next thing I knew, I was looking into the concerned faces of my wife and kids, while a machine behind me went ping!

“What happened?” I said.

“You answered the phone, screamed like a little girl, and fainted,” Anne said.

“So it wasn’t a dream!” I said. I leapt to my feet, doffed a Fedora, twirled my mustache and added, “Quickly! To the auto-gyro!”

Minutes later, I was airborne, soaring over the Los Angeles basin, while striped-shirt-wearing nogoodniks chased after me in pedal-powered flying contraptions. It was perilous, to be sure, but my superior piloting and my trusty manservant Kwame’s peerless skill with curare-tipped darts assured my escape.

My brief and unexpected foray into a 1930s pulp novel concluded, I returned to my home, where I got back on the phone.

“What just happened to you?” He said.

“Um. Nothing,” I said. “What am I doing tomorrow?”

“Seth Macfarlane has a new online project called Cavalcade, and he wants you to work on it.” He said.

“Seth Macfarlane wants to work with me? Are you sure he didn’t mean the other Will Wheaton, the well-known jazz singer?”

“Yes, you.” He said. “I’m e-mailing you the script right now.”

The script arrived, I laughed myself silly, and called my manager back. “This is hilarious! There isn’t a single thing about this that I don’t like.”

“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “I’ll call them now and confirm you.”

. . . and that’s the story of how I got to work on Cavalcade this afternoon, where Seth Macfarlane complimented my beard and told me I was funny.

I am, without a doubt, the luckiest guy in this room right now.

Some parts of this story have been mildly exaggerated for dramatic effect.