Dan Glickman: Best Original Song

"Like a showman," he offered. "I fully recognize I'm not Pavarotti."

But the worse Dan sings, it seems, the more people love him. If his life were a movie, Dan said, it would be called "The Kansas Boy." Opening scene: Wichita, Kansas, young Danny, the son of a Jewish junk dealer, charms the gentile neighbors by singing "Swanee!" on his knees. At Danny's bar mitzvah, after he chants from the Torah scroll, his grandfather, the synagogue president, says: "Maybe your brother Norman should finish the service for you."

Undeterred, Dan went on to the University of Michigan, where he tried out for "Wonderful Town" and played a conga dancer. He fell in love with another chorus member, Rhoda. Dan went to law school and ran for Congress from Kansas. "But secretly, Dan Glickman had a plan," joked his son, Jonathan, a Hollywood producer, in a 60th-birthday video he recorded. "Great actors had always been able to become politicians, so why couldn't he do it in reverse?"

Dan's theatrical antics actually helped him in politics, Dan said. In 1992, Dan was tarnished by writing 105 check overdrafts at the House Bank.

"It was murder -- I was getting hell," Dan recalled. "I had a clean-cut, honest image." He glanced at Rhoda, "Then you wrote that song."

Rhoda wrote a parody to the tune of "Hey Big Spender." At a Kansas political dinner, Dan performed it wearing a giant Uncle Sam hat, showering dollar bills. Fourteen years later, he could still bang it out: "The minute I walked in the bank, they could see I was a man with good credit . . ."

"It inoculated you," Rhoda said, and disarmed his critics.

Of all of Dan's vaudeville fantasies, one remains unfulfilled: singing at the Oscars.

"That would be a real hoot," Dan said.

"That would be embarrassing," said Rhoda.

Last year's Oscars were embarrassing enough. He backed into Reese Witherspoon and stepped on her foot.

But a man can dream. The next morning, Dan drank his weak coffee and knotted his dark, spotted tie. He swung open the front door, squinting into the pale spotlight of a sun. A woman passed by, walking her dog. If she listened closely, she might have noticed: "Home, home on the range!" The lawyer in the stiff, drab overcoat was humming.

Off Camera is a monthly column featuring Washington's top decision makers in their off hours -- outside the office and inside their lives.