By E. BRUCE HALLETT PRESIDENT

A good obituary is always hard to write. Celebrating well-lived lives, marking the passage of exemplary men and women--this is a journalistic task with a whiff of the sacred about it. At TIME it is made even harder by the extreme concision of our Milestones section, where newly admitted angels (and devils) must dance on the head of a pin--100 words or less. That's why we're fortunate to have Michael Quinn, who specializes in animating those angels with a few deft strokes.

A playwright and former opera singer, Quinn uses his love of stage and song to leaven the weekly mix of prime ministers and corporate titans with a sprinkling of actors, jazzmen and radio stars. "He lobbies hard for the most obscure people, then does them proud," says assistant editor Sidney Urquhart. "Sometimes we have to remind him that a head of state has passed away and we don't have room for that long-forgotten mimic."

To Quinn, lawyer William Kunstler had a face "ready-made for a radical's Mount Rushmore." Actor Don Brockett was remembered for his astonishing range--the amiable chef on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood also played a deranged inmate in The Silence of the Lambs. Quinn's favorite obit: soprano Ina Souez, who starred in operas in the '30s and then, after World War II, joined Spike Jones' bizarre musical-comedy troupe, cheerfully warbling under a hat adorned with live pigeons. "Now there's a full life," says Quinn.

Quinn, 41, began savoring the cracked pageant of pop culture as a boy in Teaneck, New Jersey. He honed his writing at the Yale School of Drama; one of his farces was collected in Best Short Plays: 1983. But good notices don't pay bills, so he turned to journalism, joining TIME in 1985 and writing the People page before moving to Milestones three years ago. (He also serves up the cheeky Winners & Losers box in Chronicles.) His rambunctious sensibility, says senior editor Bruce Handy, "prevents Milestones from becoming gloomy or sterile. These are rich lives, and he's able to evoke them in a flash." For a sample, just look at Quinn's obit of Orville Redenbacher, America's prince of popcorn, in this week's section.