So. About Janet.

We feel within our rights to call her Janet because it was by that single name that Janet Wolfe — gleeful gadabout, archetypal Gothamite and the longtime executive director of the New York City Housing Authority Symphony — was known to readers of The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” department.

In those columns — more than two dozen, from Ms. Wolfe’s debut in 1969 to her last bow nearly a quarter-century later — the anonymous author, Susan Lardner, chronicled, in the first-person-plural style that long typified the department, the daily doings of “our friend Janet.”

To the magazine’s readers, Ms. Wolfe’s life — rife with routine calamities like tax audits (“I have no intention of using up my life savings for war. My argument is that they owe me money”), hospitalizations (“I asked them to put me in a room with a middle-aged man, but they refused”) and lost passports (“I ran over to the embassy to get a new one. I did a Greek dance. Then I showed them all my pictures of celebrities. They gave me a passport within the hour”) — became an avidly followed picaresque.

There was also a variegated cast of supporting characters, generally strangers who had been pulled into Ms. Wolfe’s gravitational field by dint of sitting beside her on the subway, sharing a taxi with her or even driving one.