Saint John the Divine in Iowa Returns, Part 2

I finally figured out what my play is about.

I know, two years after the first draft may seem a little slow on the uptake.  But that’s how it is, you keep digging beneath the surface, and then something rises toward you suddenly.  Ah-hah!  This is the story I’ve been trying to tell myself, this is the next truth I’ve been trying to see.

Of course, the digging in this case was the script analysis I did as an actor.  I am forever grateful to Kevin Confoy, a brilliant teacher at Sarah Lawrence who developed this technique called Breaking the Code.  His theory is that all answers to an actor’s questions can be found in the text; all inspiration comes from marrying your own experience to the world the writer has created.  (That the writer is me makes little difference in my experience.)

I was doing the script analysis questions–an older version that I’d made my own, 16 questions.  And as I wrote I realized that while it is true that the play is about learning how to love, it is also about exile.  And that perhaps you can’t write about one without writing about the other.  In the play, my character, Reverend Alex, is exiled by her own hand, by the demands she has placed on her own life, and in some very sad moments, by her ability to meet those demands pretty well.  But the other characters are exiled too–Sarah, by her secrets, Young Alex by the hurt society has dished out to her, Charlie by his gender in a world of women and also by his blindness to the way judging the people around him has created the very walls he rails against.

Marrying my own life experience to the play–sometimes I think my life is just a pattern of exile and return.  In any one moment, I feel tossed out of the human family by some small thing–an off-handed criticism, a laugh at my expense, a friend not sharing, my partner’s tiredness when I’m excited to talk, tell, be.  And then I’m pulled back in a moment later–a colleague smiles across the room, a friend IM’s me a joke, I get a voice message from someone close enough to know why one day might be more challenging than another.  Inside, outside, over and over again, days, moments, years.  Oh, how I want to stay inside that connection, to cement it, hold it, but my life, the one I’ve been dealt, the one I’ve made from that, rarely allows such consistency.  In, out.  My partner, who unlike me, never moved as a child, calls it ebb and flow.  A friend in 2nd grade grows distant in 3rd, returns in 10th, shows up on Facebook 20 years later.  Ebb and flow, not frightening, not exile and return, but the nature of things.

I thought, yesterday, about how early tragedy makes us long for perfection from others.  How we want people to be safe, honest, true.  How we want to be able to change them.  Because ebb and flow is hard to ride.  And even without tragedy, we build walls to protect ourselves from loss, from the nature of life itself.

Oh, Don, how you teach me again and again, that loss is inevitable.  How powerless I am to prevent it.  And so I enter this story, a woman who knows about exile and about return, about the ridiculous behavior we have when we are frightened of either.  They call it, in couples therapy, intimacy issues.  But really, it’s just the human condition.

Tonight I’m tired, so I have been on the couch, re-reading The Riddle Master of Hed trilogy, which I have loved for thirty years.  There’s a quote in it about the way a thing returns, always, to its own nature.  I read that quote for the I don’t-know-how-many-eth time and I thought, I have been most at home in the world when I have grounded into my own sorrow, my own joy, every experience I have ever had, what it’s made of me, what I’ve made, and just accepted it all.

I enter the story I wrote as if it belongs to someone else, as if I am a new diver into these words, and I become Reverend Alex, a woman who has, in the pursuit of a spiritual life, unknowingly exiled herself from her own family and community.  When I was in graduate school, I asked Kevin Confoy what I needed to do to become a better actor and he told me to bring all my passion to the story as well as the strength of my intellect.

I’m glad I wrote this story.  I will give it all my passion.  Or I will give it, and then pull back, and then give it again, in the nature of things, in the way that I am, in the ebb and flow my partner teaches me, over and over again.

Saint John the Divine in Iowa RETURNS!

I don’t like fast-up productions.  I like to take my time and make sure everything is as perfect as possible.  I like to be over-organized with charts and calendars.  I like to not rush, or have stress or adrenaline.  In the world of theatre, this seems to make me weird (in film, not so much…you have to plan like crazy for film).

But, when the Boston Playwrights Theatre offered me 4 weeks in March, there were 2 people on full go ahead, so I allowed myself to be convinced that a fast-up production wouldn’t drive me insane.  This fits under the category of, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.”

HOWEVER!  While it has driven me crazy, while there has been stress and adrenaline and I have compulsively organized everything trying to make up for lost time, I have also had this kind of weird surrender.  So I’ve watched as things have oddly fallen into place…the hard-working Pattersons coming on for marketing, producing and Assistant Directing, the right cast (my partner, who has never acted, and who is terrified of the stage has somehow ended up in this play, and that felt right while being so irrational it took the limits off all definitions of insanity…but the director loves her and she’s great in the part so…), Julia Short stepping in as director (I love Julia), a sound designer, an actor, a production manager who are so invested in the project for very different reasons.  I am wondering after the hell year of 2011 whether this isn’t a gift.  I keep feeling like in some energetic cosmos weird thing Don is steering this…giving me what I have wanted, which is to tell this story of what it means to love and be human, and to tell it with people who are actively being good to each other.

I miss Don, but he respected Julia a lot, and the last time he and I directed she was our lead actress.  I keep thinking he would be nodding away, happy at her choices, happy with how she sees.  Joan Mejia, who was her co-lead, is playing Jesus, so I should maybe ask him if he’s seeing Don hanging around.  To top it, Alan, who plays my husband, is an actor I met through Don, when Don brought me on to do acting coaching on a sitcom pilot.  A confluence, a coming together…

I do have to admit that I wrote the first draft of the play in a week.  I didn’t sleep much, of course.  But it was really fun to do the adaptation.  I love anything creative–I’m really kind of a one note person, made of little else but creativity–and I love creative challenges, when you have limits and you have to create new ideas to fit them.  Screen to stage is like that.

Of course, everything about fast-up is terrifying.  Is the play really ready?  (I think it is…)  Are the decisions correct?  Do I have time to settle into my role as an actor?

Or perhaps what is terrifying is this–often theatre production has been very disappointing.  Not slams, they’ve gone well and they weren’t something I was doing for myself anyhow.  But the two times I’ve produced my own work before this were challenging and disappointing.  Often my own fault it turned out that way, or partly my fault.  I couldn’t get what I wanted from a play I loved, because I was so new to producing and I did too much (as I always do).

And now here I am. This story, Saint John the Divine in Iowa, is my watershed work.  I’ve been a writer all my life, and I could never quite get to singing the song at the center of me until I wrote a memoir in 2006-08.  The memoir opened a door out of well-trained crafts person into wildness.  I started to really sing in my own voice.  So…SJDI is my ultimate song.  It’s a song to joy, to healing, to redemption, it’s a belief in love and love’s power, it’s a song to morality and human goodness.  It is frightening to me to think that this fast-up production, full of risk, might not sing the song.  Of course, I’m risking because I think it will.  Obviously.  I’m even thinking these weird thoughts about Don…about leaning back into Don’s belief in me and love for me, and letting that carry me through the hard places that are, of course, inevitable.  Because it’s taken 30 years to get to sing this.  There was dirge in the way, and lament…and while dirge and lament can be beautiful, moving, they tell the story of life’s pain and difficulty, even when there are moments of redemption.  We all know that life is painful and difficult.  But the song of belief in goodness above all things, however idealistic it might seem, is also beautiful.

And me.  Joy is a part of me, along with dirge, lament, cry.

So, the damn play is already funny with these lovely actors.  It’s already beautiful.  I am settling into letting each moment unfold, I am setting into the temporal nature of theatre, making something that happens and then is gone.  Beauty.  A play is a tree dropping its leaves.  Gold on the ground.  Then gone.

Just right.

I AM SUPPOSEDLY NOT WORKING

Today I was supposedly not working while I organized a photo shoot, wrote 2 contracts, filled out the ticket types on another contract, applied for insurance, wrote ads for Meisner classes, etc, etc.

I am supposedly not working right now.

The suckiest thing about being the oldest of six children is this overinflated sense of responsibility.  I wonder if there’s a contest for enabler of the year.  I could apply.  On the application there would be certain catagories:

1. What you’ve done that other people could have done just as well.
2. What you’ve done that other people could have done better if you admitted you didn’t know everything.
3. What you’ve done that kept other people from facing the consequences of their choices and actions.
4. What you’ve done that went so far beyond the call of duty it entered into the ridiculous.
5. What you’ve done badly because your tendency toward multi-tasking led you to try to juggle fourteen tasks at one time.

I would like to state for the record that I hate over half the things I’m good at.

I would like to state for the record that I don’t know everything.  And that doesn’t mean I don’t think I’m right.

I would like to state for the record that I have only told my partner that she should obey me without question twice in the last two months.  (She didn’t tell the couples therapist.  I think she thought I was joking.)

I would like to state for the record that I need a personal Shiatsu massage therapist to move into my house and give me massages instead of rent.

I would like to state that I am always terrified things won’t get done.  I blame my German mother for this, as I do for pretty much everything.

So, as I continue to supposedly not work, I will also state for the record that the NE PATRIOTS ROCK!  And they obeyed me without question when I told them to sack Tim Tebow.  And the Broncos obeyed me when I told them to fumble.  Seriously, I made these statements out loud, and then they happened.  I would believe that I am crossing over into omnipotence except I couldn’t mentally get my partner to do my dishes today while she was home sick, so obviously I’m still falling short in that catagory.

I would also like to state for the record that I hate the last two weeks of December and can’t wait until they are over.

I am grateful for Julia Short and Joan Mejia.  I don’t really feel a whole lot of metta today, but if meditation counts as work, I guess I’ll go do it.

 

The Stork Bites Again

I have a birthmark on the back of my neck, commonly referred to as a stork bite.  It’s just a red mark that I’ve had all my life.

Mr. Stork, I would not have minded if you had skipped Cleveland Clinic, and dropped me off somewhere else, bite or no bite.  German mothers are a pain in the ass.

That said, we now have a couples therapist named The Stork Man.  Two sessions ago, he had a conniption fit and rolled around on the floor for a while.  (This is a slight exaggeration.)  So I wasn’t enthusiastic about returning yesterday.  I asked my partner to help out.  She got him to sit outside the back window so I wouldn’t be scared of another conniption (this is also a slight exaggeration).  Then she told him to please not have any more conniptions and that he talked too much and took her side and spoke for her.

I would like to state, for the record, that I may have to stay with her for another several centuries now.  Whether I like it or not.

I told him his conniption fit scared me so much that I had fourteen heart attacks within an hour of leaving (this is also a slight exaggeration).  Then I told him how much I hate therapy, which I have told him several times before.

At which point my partner and I did this couples communication model.  You say what you saw, heard, felt in your body at some moment in your relationship, what story you told yourself about that, what you felt about it, what you did about it and what you would have preferred (like, I’d prefer to be God most of the time).  Your partner repeats back what you’ve said intermittently–just to show she’s listening (I almost got caught spacing out twice).  In other words, we actually talked to each other in couples therapy.  After interviewing five therapists, for a total of 14 sessions, we actually had a conversation.

Well, they say, “Progress not perfection.”

Perhaps we’ll talk to each other again in a few sessions.

In the meantime, I came home last night to do marketing with the lovely, wise and ancient Patterson twins (who are both in their twenties, but are more efficient and intelligent than 40 somethings and have more insight than people who have lived for 400 years…okay, another slight exaggeration).  Instead of working, we talked a lot.  They listened to me rant for quite a while, but I made them apple cake, so I hope it evened out.

And then I went to sleep.  And woke up thinking about Don, because I will call his parents today and maybe go see them tomorrow.  I miss Don’s voice.  I have always been such a sucker for gentleness, and Don’s voice was very gentle.  It made me feel cared for.  Even if we weren’t talking about anything very personal, just the sound of his voice…

Couples therapy, productions, mishagas, my own insanity…I just wish, every day, I could trade something to get him back.  I’m not okay about him dying, I am not my normal self (or my abnormal self, which is the same thing), I am not over anything.  Sometimes everyone I know seems to be standing on the other side of a river.  I’m on the side where Don used to be, and they’re on the side of not knowing he’s gone.  They look at me as if I’m not followed around by this absence, they look at me as if the absence is over, and I am an invisible woman, a silent woman, a woman alone on this riverside.  Except when I visit his parents.  They’re on this side of the river.  They might even have to build a house here.  I hope not, but they have been through so much, who knows.

I wish we all wore armbands.  I wish to say kaddish for Don Foley, every day.  I wish for it to be heard.

Metta, metta, metta.  That there may be kindness for me, for who I see, even for who cannot see me.

The Beauty of Not Knowing

For the last few months I have been in situations in which I am convinced I am right.  Other people are also convinced that they are right; and they disagree with me.  I would like to state for the record that I am righter than they are.

Good, I won.

And so it goes.

The problem is how to live with each other once you’ve both decided how right you are.

I mean, I can defend myself pretty well.  In some cases I’m arguing with people who have never been married about what marriage is like (I’ve been married for 24 years).  In another, I’ve been arguing about how my thursday group should proceed when I have 7 years of experience with variations on this group and they have 6 months.  So, righter, righter, righter.

But I have grown suspicious of righter, if for no other reason than it’s a great relationship killer.  We can both be so right that we can’t stand each other kind of thing.  And there’s so much subjectivity.  I understand, for example, that while I know a lot more about marriage than someone else who’s not been married, I don’t necessarily know what marriage will be like for any one person.  I know what marriage is like for me.  I know the problems my partner and I bring to each other, I know our baggage, I know all the things we try to get closer without getting too scared, I know that we keep trying to figure out what distance is good for love.  But maybe the idealism of the never tried will lead to something I can’t even see.  I mean, it’s likely that I’m right, but it’s not certain.

At the same time, it is so hard to give up being right.  At least for me, obsessed with the truth as I am…and believe me, I am!  I have a nearly photographic memory, I can quote back whole conversations, I seem to memorize events as they happen, because I want precision, I want truth, and I’m willing to dig up whatever muck, whatever darkness I have to withstand, to get to it.  (I can miss the lighter side of life at times, but my great sense of absurdity–therapists with PUPPETS!–helps balance that out.)

I have a great deal of trouble letting other people have whatever truth they have.  I have a great deal of trouble dealing with denial.  I am not patient.  I get frantic when I think my partner isn’t seeing something for what it is.  (I was always the Emperor’s New Clothes kid growing up, and I don’t seem to have gotten over it.)

The problem with other people’s denial is that when I try to go to the place of not being right, of not knowing, I feel utterly crazy.  That’s one of my tests–if I’m calm when I admit I don’t know, the other person is probably every bit as right if not more so, or else it doesn’t matter.  But if there’s denial, I lose all my quasi-Buddhist acceptance and become a maniac raving for truth.

I become someone who is right.

It’s so strange.  Even when you really are right, being right is dangerous.

I love to say, “I can always be wrong.”  I have to go on my own best judgment, there’s no replacement for listening to yourself.  I have to trust my intuition and my own goodness.  So I guess the thing is to know I have to trust those things for me, and to admit when it comes to other people, I have no idea.

When I’m teaching, I’m critically aware that what I see must be monitored.  Meaning, I have to follow some instinct about what will be most helpful for a student to hear–I can’t shove my knowledge, training or education into anyone’s head in one block.  I have to be so aware that I can be wrong, I have to be willing to back up or step forward at a moment’s notice, I have to be present for what is.  In other words, the accuracy of my perceptions should be there–I mean, I get paid for something–but I have to live in humility in order to let the student’s need and readiness drive how I give information.

I have to be willing to be wrong all the time, or I can’t be right for anyone.

I guess it’s a convoluted mess.  And I don’t know much even about this topic.

How nice, to not have to be responsible for knowing.

If a blog about not knowing doesn’t know, can anyone read it?

This One’s for You, Katie

My very first blog request.  With a subject suggestion.  Well, I don’t know what more I have to say about my current acting class, Katie, but I guess I’ll find out.

They asked to continue last night.  I’m not a super-effusive person, so expressing gratitude seems, well, so understated coming from me.  But I am grateful for more time with all of them.  Their plan is for me to invent the classes from my knowledge of who they are and what they need to grow as actors, which is a bit of a dream for me as a teacher.  I’ve been feeling that after the last 7 years of teaching Meisner pretty much the way I learned it, I wanted to branch out and really create curricula from what I see that actors need.  And also, of course, from my own interests in the boundaries of craft.

Dream class.  I truly hope it works out.  I would love 10-12 more weeks with them.  And it’s funny, because often at the end of the Full Training both I and my students feel it’s time for them to move on.  With these actors, I think almost all of us want to continue.

Teaching is a thing.  I’m the oldest of 6, and my closest sibling is 13 months younger than I am.  I pretty much took charge of him, they tell me, so he didn’t talk until he was three.  I was always like, “Peter wants more birthday cake.  Peter wants to play with that toy.  You should get Peter X, Y & Z.”  Let it never be said that I lack in opinions.  Let it not be said that I did not need some kind of codependency recovery at a VERY early age.

But I kind of loved it.  I taught them to walk, to ride bikes, to tie their shoes.  I heated bottles and tested the temperature of milk on my wrist.  Later, I taught my sisters about birth control (in our very Catholic family, they weren’t going to learn it any other way).  I helped one sister to get into shape for field hockey tryouts.  Then I taught 3-5 year olds how to swim when I was 14.  I taught aerobics in my twenties, and then taught ESL in Japan, and finally opened my own business teaching writing in 1990.  I started teaching acting in 2001, and opened the Meisner business in 2004.

Teaching is like breathing for me.  I do it without excess effort.  Because I grew up teaching and because teaching was always equated with loving someone smaller and younger, with being my very best for my siblings, the first time I stood up in front of a classroom, I knew what to do.  I remember being in Japan, with 50 of the lowest level English speakers who were my homeroom and who really didn’t understand anything I said.  I had studied a very minimum of classroom management and a semester of ESL methodology.  It could have been a total disaster.  I was 26.  I had been given, by the administration, the choice to choose 3 class monitors or to have an election.  Are you kidding?  I chose.  I picked the young man I thought was likely to cause me the most trouble, a girl I thought might be picked on, and another girl who seemed very centered.  There’s a thing–if you win over the strongest personality in a group, all the rest will follow.  Sakuro reminded me of Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back Kotter, played by a young John Travolta.  And he was mine from the minute I asked him to be the monitor.  He used to leap out of his seat if other students were talking and tell them to shut up.

I don’t know exactly what I did with that class, but I did love them, and they took me in, they chose to trust me.  I did dialogue journals and I wrote back to each one of them every other week.  By the end of the first semester they understood every word I said. I made bad mistakes with them, but what I remember is that warmth–50 students and me, sitting at our class party, everyone laughing.  It was a deal, because these were the kids rejected by the major universities, the ones uncertain about having any future at all.  They needed someone to be on their side.

Teaching, to me, is really kind of holy.  Opening the door to a language, to an art form, to creative freedom, to self-expression…people have to trust you if they’re going to walk through that door.  I’ve taught 60 and 70 year old women who wanted to write their whole lives, but who were blocked by the fear of claiming a voice.  They came to me like children, saying, “Can I?  Will I be judged?”  They asked me how to trust that what they have to say was valuable.  I knew this.  The lexicon was writing craft, the lexicon was, “Write a shitty first draft.  Don’t censor.  Find out what’s there.  Be curious.”  But what I was really saying was, “Yes, you have words inside you that need to be said.  You have a story that counts.  Let it come out any way it can.”  My female students talked about what it was like to have a feminist teacher, but really, I taught all male classes with the same approach and saw the same vulnerability everywhere.  Craft, getting good at it, finding the limits on your own talent, comes second to the human act of sharing, telling, being heard.  My students went on to publish, win contests, get into grad school, but the first movement of creativity is believing what’s inside you is beautiful or interesting or both.  I have never understood how anyone can teach and not know that.

I also believe that education in general is the way to a better life.  When I bitch about therapy, it’s because it doesn’t teach enough, maybe.  It’s all about relationship, not necessarily about learning when it should be.  To move from one economic class to another, to find a way out of destructive early life experiences–nothing is more important than education.  We all need to learn that there are many worlds within one, and that we are not fully entrapped in whatever experience holds us in the moment.

Also, for whatever it’s worth, my teachers, throughout my entire life, adopted me, advocated for me, helped me.

It came so easily that for most of my life I took it for granted.  But I don’t feel that way now.  I feel blessed to be a teacher, to have the experiences of classrooms where people learn and grow.  I can’t imagine not having this as part of my life.

Dream class.  Dream profession.  (Along with writing and acting.)

In the middle of the craziest year in recent memory, there is this.

Noel Coward OR: Choose–Boring Love or Insane Love

The lover who pushes every button and totally gets you or the lover with whom you have calm but no chemistry so you’re always lonely.

Who wants these choices?

I say it’s on a continuum since I’ve had the absolute extreme of the lover who pushes every button (ages 19-22–off and on, of course), and I’ve had the sweet lover who I just didn’t dig into.  Or let her dig into me.

The extreme button-pusher I have a name for.  I call her my ex-girlfriend the train wreck.  If you’ve read my last blog, you’ll know that name indicates I am definitely still, after almost 30 years, living in my reptilian brain where she is concerned.  For the first 6 months we were together it was mind-blowing bliss, passion, melding, Juliet and Juliet, Cathy and Heathcliff.  There was a lot of sex.  A LOT.  Then the honeymoon ended.

We call these things addictive relationships.

As a cure for The Train Wreck, I took up with the Sweetheart, who I did love, but with whom I couldn’t seem to fall in love, probably because we weren’t really close and I didn’t want drama again, so I was a little guarded.  (Me, a little guarded.  HA!  Understatement.)

Therapists tell you to pick the Sweethearts over the Train Wrecks, and they are, no doubt, right.  But really, Sweethearts are just as much trouble, though they won’t tear your life apart.

In Private Lives, arguably Noel Coward’s most produced play, two Train Wrecks (at least with each other) meet up accidentally after they’ve both just married two Sweethearts.  They are, of course, miserable and bored with their Sweethearts, so they run off together for some hot bliss before quickly reverting to Train Wrecks again.  (I can testify that this is pretty much how it goes.)  The turning point of the play, though, is when the two Sweethearts find that they are insanely attracted to each other and turn into Train Wrecks themselves–with each other.

If you can follow all that, you will understand that Mr. Coward’s comedy actually uncovers some pretty violent and reptilian behavior–which is why we laugh.

My partner and I have been each other’s Train Wrecks (though never as bad as my first!), but we have been something else, too.  Not Sweethearts.  We have been each other’s Sun-in-the-Solar-Plexus.  Not fighting, not freakishly passionate, but that warmth at the center of things when you feel loved and accepted and it comes like a gift, being on the same side.

Then, of course, after a couple years, we go back to a milder version of Train Wrecks.  I don’t quite know why.  Some couples’ theories would say that we return to what needs to be healed.  It arises, through the contentment, to force us to grow, because human beings either grow together or destroy each other (dramatically, as Train Wrecks, or through atrophy, as Sweethearts).  It’s a nice theory if you’ve got the time to keep growing.

I have had students–not acting students, for some reason, but writing students–who have left their Train Wrecks (or who have stopped being reptile food) and have gone on to another kind of marriage, which they describe as Sun-in-the-Solar-Plexus.  I hardly ever meet people whose first marriage is a Sun-in-the-Solar-Plexus.  Anyway, I keep wondering if they ever slip toward Train Wrecks or not.  I mean, is that possible?  Have my partner and I missed the boat somewhere?

But what I really think is this…so many more people read my blogs about couples therapy than any other subject.  People my partner works with read it and some even confess they’re trying to figure out their own relationships and identifying with us.  OMG, please do not take me for a role model.  I am insane!  I know so little about anything!  (Except when I’m fighting with my partner.  Then my omniscience is astounding.)

I digress.  I think we’re all trying so hard to figure this out.  Because love is so powerful.  Because we need it so badly.  And how do we get it?  Beyond all the platitudes with their half-truths, how do we tolerate being close to each other when our reptilian brains keep flashing the danger sign?

I don’t know the answer to this.  I have learned only a very few things about intimacy:

1. Go slow in getting to know people so you don’t freak out.
2. Once you’re in, be honest as much as you can be.  Meaning, be honest, but don’t tell so much you want to kill.
3. Make fun of everything (especially yourself and your relationship) and laugh a lot, since that makes you less homicidal and reminds both of you that you’re reptiles because you’re human and for no other reason.
4. Know that vulnerability doesn’t really ever get easy, but it’s a necessary evil.
5. When you know your reptilian brain has completely taken over, go lock yourself in your room.
6. Let the adult gorgeous in you take the lead whenever possible.
7. Don’t loan money.  Give it away or say no.
8. Don’t expect your partner to make up for all the ways your parents hurt you.
9. Have a spiritual center of your own.  Cultivate it daily.  Like, meditate!
10. Stand up for yourself and hold onto you.  It’s the best way to hold onto her.

Wow!  That’s more than I thought!

But if you want to add to the list, please do so.  We’re all trying to figure this out.  Metta for us as we try and fail, try and get gorgeous, try and try.