The Swan Ballroom of the Sands Hotel is an appropriate place for nearly 200 writers to flock. The ballroom where the legendary Chris Peterson performs his spot-on Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Judy Garland on summer evenings looks different in the light of day.

The occasion: Writers at the Beach, a conference that brings together writers, published and unpublished, with mentors and readers.

One of my favorite lines of the whole weekend describes a writer’s lot: It’s like "having a term paper due for the rest of your life." And those assembled said they wouldn’t change it for the world.

On this particular Friday, the wind was howling, the rain was horizontal and I was late. As I walk through the crowded ballroom, past steaming buffet trays, a poet is reading something to the effect that "in her coffin, my mother looks OK in her red suit but we hadn’t quite pulled the outfit together and here we were sending her off into eternity not quite right." BOOM! The bad weather was outside, but the lighting bolt was generated inside the ballroom.

The poet got me thinking. If time travel were possible, Chris Peterson could peek around the curtain and fix mumsy’s outfit quicker than you could say RuPaul. Can you think of a better example of Creating a More Positive Rehoboth than to have a drag queen fix your mother’s imaginary makeup?

Then my mind drifts back to the poet laureate’s mother in the coffin and I think of every funeral I’ve attended over five decades and how the conversation at each of them was about how "peaceful" the dearly departed looked. In retrospect I saw a whole lot ofpeople sent into eternity not quite right. If we merged the old Six Feet Under with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, we could pilot Queer Eye for the Dead Guy.

There was a lot of creativity in that Atlantic Sands Ballroom and there I was, beginning to invent things myself.

Not knowing that Fleda Brown is the poet freakin’ laureate of Delaware, I breeze over and tell her how brilliant I think she is. She nodded, no doubt thinking how moronic the big homo freakin’ sexual was.

Time for the breakouts. Twelve happy women (and me) sit around a conference table and discuss Death. Blindness. Lupus. Prosthetic legs. Drug addicted daughters. And this was the comedy writing breakout in the Crane Room. Murder was down the hall in the Mallard Room.

So I want you to picture for a moment some of the story topics discussed. There was a not-so-bright seeing eye dog who "gets distracted," especially on the boardwalk. A woman whose kitchen appliances may or may not be haunted. Or a daughter who went from being Courtney Love-like to Ann Coulter-esque, complete with a right wing Republican boyfriend and future in-laws. The only problem is that the bride-to-be has a tattoo left over from her Love days and it’s permanent. You can’t make this stuff up. I’m feeling so sorry for the fiction writers fumbling around for stories.They should come to the non-fiction session and take dictation.

The dearly departed—Molly Ivins, Art Buchwald, Wendy Wasserstein—were all with us, too—each and every fabulously funny one of them. We quoted them and laughed. A wise woman once said "Don’t die with your song in you." And to think what songs they sang and the gems these people left behind. We were discussing their work, and I got distracted wondering how their outfits looked before they went into eternity.

We headed back to the Swan for the keynote. Marian Fontana, a 9-11 widow, tore my heart out of my chest and stomped all over it. She told of the news from ground zero. It grew bleaker and bleaker, as she took her young son out to a country house, loaned by a neighbor, so she couldtell him his father was in the rubble of the towers and there’s no chance of finding him alive. Mother and son stop for lunch along the way and she finds herself in a fast food court, confronted by the little guy about his father lying at the base of the Tower. The story slowly and achingly broke my heart.

I stayed frozen in that food court the rest of the day. As if you needed another reason to yank that Ann Coulter bald. Meet Marian, who’s writing, processing, agonizing, teaching and surviving 9-11. Enjoying her husband’s death? Hell ain’t hot enough for you, Ann.

Having heard from incredible published authors who’ve polished their craft over years and years, I was on the fence about going to the final session—a right (write) brain exercise that awaited us on Sunday morning. But there in a crowded beach house adjacent to the hotel, I watched in awe as 27 assembled aspiring authors spun stunning stories in real time—often less than 6 minutes! As an essayist, I wondered, "Can the right brain fight the rabid right wing?" Let’s see: General Peter Pace Picked a Pack of Perfect Privates.

Here’s the important part: We flocked to the Sands for a reason. We are one with Maribeth Fischer, the genius of organization who put together this third annual writers’ conference. Her nephew Sam died of Mitochondrial Disease—a horrible death. All proceeds from the conference go to United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation (UMDF). Simply log on to WritersattheBeach.com, learn the story and contribute today if you wish. Perhaps you’ve read his book I Am Sam. The writers who flocked to the Swan Ballroom collectively say, "We Are Sam." Readers should join us.

And thanks to this incredible conference, I won’t die with my song in me. Nor will I die without Chris Peterson on contract to create my final going away suit.