I keep five kinds of references between the bookends on my desk at the newspaper: two dictionaries, three thesauruses, the collective bargaining agreement governing the conditions of my employment at the Post-Dispatch, and a small book with the Holy Scriptures (just in case).

Among them also is volume called Reading Lyrics, a collection co-edited by Robert Gottlieb and self described as “a celebration of our greatest songwriters…and an appreciation of an extraordinary, popular art form” containing “more than a thousand of the finest lyrics from 1900 to 1975.”

Appearing at page 581, and for the next four pages, is the entry for Fran Landesman. It precedes by two entries the sampling of lyrics for Stephen Sondheim, and follows by fifty odd pages that for Allen Jay Lerner.

The biographical part of Ms. Landesman’s entry reads:

Fran Landesman was born in New York and educated at Columbia and Temple, but her entry  into the music world took place in St. Louis, when she, her husband, and her in-laws opened a hip hangout called the Crystal Palace. There, in 1951, she began her brilliant collaboration with composer Tommy Wolf….Landesman wrote the words for such anthemic songs as “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men.”

“…Landesman moved to London in the early sixties, and has worked there ever since, both as a poet/songwriter and as a performer.”

Ms. Landesman was in St. Louis last week, for 4 nights of performances at The Gaslight Theater on North Boyle Street in the Central West End, around the corner from where her career took flight — in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square.

(Full disclosure: The Gaslight Theater was built by my younger brother, William Roth, but the Landesman program was produced by Cabaret St. Louis, not him, and I paid full admission).

The video above gives you a glimpse of her performance. It involved talk, poetry, and some singing and included accomplished guitar accompaniment and loving prompts by her son, Miles Landesman.

It also was punctuated by polished performances of Landesman standards by actor and cabaret artist Anna Blair, who, along with Joe Dreyer, a terrific pianist, offered an achingly beautiful rendition of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.”

I write about Fran Landesman, though, because above all she is a writer.

I turn to Reading Lyrics at my desk, from time to time, not to quote or paraphrase brilliance. Rather, it’s to prime the pump with rhythm and concision of greats. Because whether your topic is pathos or politics or public affairs, you don’t stand a chance if your prose isn’t alive.

I sit in a room with a group of terrific writers. Don’t think for a minute  we don’t aspire to convey our editorial ideas in something approaching the animated and lyrical fashion of writers such as Fran Landesman.

Boy was she great. Because her writing was great, and the way she shared it so captivating.

Were she ever to have an extended run here in St. Louis, Ms. Landesman might become the white, ironic but still sentimental octogenarian counterpart to Alberta Hunter, and her great revival at the Cookery.

A note about age.

Ms. Landesman either is 81, or will turn 81 this year. She revealed some physical frailty and a little forgetfulness.

But one of the pleasures of the performance was how thoroughly bully and nonchalant she was about age, not hiding it, not caricaturing it.

There are some lessons in that, too.

The late Kurt Vonnegut claimed that he wished to have as his epitaph: ”The only proof he ever needed of the existence of God was music.”

Maybe the good writing of great lyricists is the only proof we need of the existence of angels — of all dispositions.