Photo:Lorenzo Bevilaqua/TBS, Inc.

When I was younger, unmarried and idealistic, I had—oh dear, this is embarrassing—an idea. In the future, when I was married, I was not going to shout at my husband, which would only make him upset. Instead I was going to yell a chair. My husband would watch me chewing out this chair and be able to listen and understand the point of my view, since my fury would not be directed at him. He, of course, would do the same thing to me. He would yell at a bedside table or a lamp or a toothbrush. And I would listen.

Now of course I am older and married and clomping around the house, yelling at everything except our chairs—creating a kind of dark mommy Muzak that is understandably ignored by all of us. I need no more yelling in my life and neither does my furniture—a problem which, of all people, Conan O'Brien has solved by inventing a sofa that hugs you. You sit down on the bright red seat and the arm physically moves to embrace you, while a robot voice says, among other things, "Let's hug it out." Meanwhile, the pillows massage your derriere and back.

Right now, the sofa has been set up in the Time Warner Center in New York City as part of Conan's Coco Moca Museum which features very funny but also surprisingly well executed art that pays homage to his face, but I am thinking that the genre of furniture should join the great panoply of standard furnishings that comes in every home. Imagine the real estate agent, moving from room to room of your empty new townhouse, saying "And here is your microwave. And your light fixtures. And your bathtub....and of course, your love seat that loves you."

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