I'm Proud Of All My Songs, Even The Ones I Stole From People I Heard At Open-Mic Nights

I do thoroughly enjoy Paul Simon. And this Onion column is ha-larious.

This habit came in handy when, in 1967, Mike Nichols asked me to contribute music to his new film. I was pretty busy at the time, but I licensed a few of my songs to him, including "Scarborough Fair," a nice little public-domain ballad I had copyrighted in my own name a couple years back.

Around about the hundredth time he asked me to write a song for this character called Mrs. Robinson, something finally clicked in my brain and I went scrambling through my tapes until I found it: a song called "Mrs. Jorgensen" I had illicitly recorded God knows where. It was full of gibberish about cupcakes and Joe DiMaggio that had nothing to do with the movie, but hey, I change the woman's name and it worked!