JOE KEENAN is an American screenwriter, television producer and novelist, born on this date. In 1991 Cheers creators James Burrows and Glen and Les Charles, having read Keenan’s novel Blue Heaven, invited Keenan to create a new sitcom for their production company. The resulting pilot, Gloria Vane, starring JoBeth Williams, was not picked up by a network, but it led to a writing post on Frasier. In 1992, his first play, The Times, a musical that charts the course of a seventeen-year marriage between Liz, an actress, and Ted, a writer, won the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1993, the lyrics for The Times won the Edward Kleban Award.