I Hate This: Fifteen Years On

Don't you think I'm looking older?

As the new year began, I was struck by all the unique milestones, personal and public, that lay in our way in 2016. My daughter was to become a teenager. Shakespeare’s First Folio would be visiting Cleveland (and all those Republicans.) We would elect a new president.

I was also aware that our first child, stillborn in 2001, would turn fifteen. On the tenth anniversary of the events described in my solo performance, I Hate This, that play and a companion piece were produced at Cleveland Public Theatre. It was rewarding to expand upon the play in that way, and have the opportunity to widen the scope of what stories I could tell in a single evening.

For this birthday, however, I wanted to reconnect with I Hate This on its own. But how best to proceed? I considered intimate, private performances, maybe even hosted in my own house, or someone else’s house. Maybe a string of them, a series of appearances for an audience of ten at a time. Perhaps one day I will still attempt that.

I was actually about the abandon the idea. We were putting together The Secret Adversary tour, and soon I would need to begin rehearsals for a forty-minute abridgment of Twelfth Night we will be presenting as part of the First Folio proceedings. It just wasn’t the right time, you know? You can always tell yourself it isn’t the right time.

Then two things happened. First, my father died, and life itself took on a startling new dimension for me. Preparing a memorial service, physical contact with a deceased and beloved family member, making decisions you never imagined you would be called upon to make ... so much that had been buried into the past returned to the surface.

And shortly following that, I was accepted into the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, which I greatly wished to attend, but scarcely had the money to pay for. It made perfect sense to accomplish two goals at once, raise funds in exchange for which I would offer an entirely relevant premium -- my work. I would remount this play, with purposeful intent.

We have put together a production team, with Josh Brown adapting the multimedia he created for the CPT production (2011) and we will be including Dennis Yurich’s original score from 2003, which is now appropriately period.

Most significantly, I have asked Chennelle Bryant-Harris to re-stage the work. She has worked three seasons as an actor-teacher in the residency program, and we collaborated as co-directors for the Love In Pieces project two years ago. She is a talented, young director who will bring a fresh perspective to the work. Significantly, I suggest, for at least one important reason - unlike my previous collaborators, she wasn’t there. She did not know me then. Her experience is based entirely by what I set on the page, and so my words have to do much more work.

During the past two years I have watched with fascination as two other men have taken on the role, John Dayton and Brian Cook. Their interpretations gave me an opportunity to think of the text in new ways, have liberated me from thinking there was one way to perform this show. It’s my show, to be sure, but I was locked into a delivery, a certain cadence and choreography, which was established almost from the first reading in August, 2002.

When I polled friends on Facebook as to whether anyone would care to see either this play or And Then You Die (How I Ran a Marathon in 26.2 Years) again, Brian P. commented, “I'd be more interested to see how time and the vicissitudes of life has affected your approach to (I Hate This).”

So would I, Brian. So would I.

Click here to visit my GoFundMe page and make a donation and reserve your seat to see "I Hate This" on May 7!

Nineteen Eighty-Nine

Part two in an ongoing examination of the best year in musical history.

See Nineteen Eighty-Nine Part One.

Oranges & Lemons - XTC Some guy writing for Rolling Stone suggested that if Skylarking was XTC's Sergeant Pepper's, the Oranges and Lemons certainly follows as their White Album. Skylarking may have been the epitome of XTC's work, completing the transition from the somewhat clumsy after-punks of White Music (which features some great songs in which frontman Andy Partridge sounds unhappily uncomfortable) to the Beatles tribute band they had always desired to be.

The friends who had originally turned me on to XTC weren't thrilled with Oranges & Lemons, and it does have some unlistenable tracks, notably the heavy-handed President Kill Again and the not very clever Pink Thing which is, I shit you not, a poppy love song to a penis.

However, these are two false notes in an otherwise brilliant collection of tunes which landed just as spring was breaking for this young man about to turn twenty. And the thing actually had singles! Singles which charted, somewhat!

Speaking of spring break, I spent mine driving solo to Panama Beach and back, smoking cigarettes, chugging Diet Pepsi, driving well over the speed limit through the Deep South, and listening to this cassette over and over (which is what you did with cassettes) enjoying the metaphysically sexy punch of The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Mayor of Simpleton, the angry young manly introspection and doubt of One of the Millions and Miniature Sun, or the outright screamingly arrogant and cynical rage of Scarecrow People and Across This Antheap.

Oranges & Lemons is a fine thinking man's whine.

3 Feet High and Rising - De La Soul For white kids from the suburbs, we got into hip-hop pretty early. We had memorized Rapper's Delight before Blondie's Rapture had even been released, and not the other way around. Ditto, La Di Da Di. By the time the Beastie Boys emerged, we were keen enough to appreciate that License To Ill was meant as parody.

Rap had already been through many phases by the end of its first decade, from block party to the message to the frat party and on through my introduction to the biography of Malcolm X via the works of Chuck D, rap music had for the most part been an education, a look into a world in which I was entirely unschooled.

De La Soul was the, what, fifth wave of hip-hop? Sixth? Nerdy Tribal Retro Academic. Sampling as trippy modern art, lifting not merely funk and soul but 60s psychedelia and children's records. I was yet too callow to "get" it, but every track was an education. Every track still is.

Which reminds me, I need to go back and watch School Daze.

The gateway drug to Native Tongues, thank you Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, Q-Tip will never age. Phife Dawg, rest in peace. Also, lyrics. Also, too, comedy. I wish my cousin Nag was here, he knows these things, no, I'm sorry I don't.

Pretty Hate Machine - Nine Inch Nails No, I am not that cool. I did not purchase Trent Reznor's first album when it was released in fall of 1989. I cannot claim to have seen him perform at the Phantasy in Cleveland, I was at school. But this is another example of how the last year of that decade was the greatest in music history.

My introduction was in 1991 on KROQ in Los Angeles and picked up a copy at Tower Records. This first album (ticky ticky ticky thump) came at just the right moment, clearly articulating a sense of self-loathing and unhappiness with something edgy enough to feel dirty but in reality much like disco.

You should hear the Purest Feeling demos. Some of it sounds like Madonna.

To be continued.

Last Frontier Theatre Conference

Because in those days I had a yearning to go to Alaska.
- Willy Loman, "Death of a Salesman"

Founded in 1993, the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, presented in partnership with Prince William Sound College, is a weeklong event which features performances, staged readings and workshops, providing emerging playwrights the opportunity to receive valuable feedback from professional and often prestigious playwrights, directors, producers, academics and critics.

In Valdez, Alaska. The LFTC takes place in Valdez, Alaska, in June. And I’m going.

Notable playwrights who have been honored or have attended have included many whose last names alone are recognizable, like Miller, Albee, Kushner, and Wilson (both.)

Me, I wrote something I had been thinking about for years, it spilled out maybe two years ago, I have had a couple of readings and wanted to try it out. Among several of its offerings, LFTC has a “Play Lab” in which you will have one rehearsal and then a staged reading which will be attended by a trio of special guests who will comment on your work. I chose to submit my new play to LFTC in August 2015, and almost immediately received an email from director Dawson Moore. Not an acceptance email, but one he no doubt sends to every applicant who does not live in the great Northwest.

The gist was, “Really?” As in, so you've applied to our theater conference via email. Did you notice that we are in Alaska?

My response was not as ridiculous as it seems. “Hey man, I’ve been to Alaska.” I’ve even been to Valdez, though admittedly, it was part of a cruise the wife and I took for our Honeymoon in 1999. But I can fathom the vast distances, the miles, the expense. Yeah, if accepted, sure.

See? I been to Valdez.

Last month, shortly after my father died (I mean, just ten days after my father died) I got the message. “Congratulations, David.” It read. “Your play The Way I Danced With You has been accepted for inclusion in the Play Lab at the 24th Annual Last Frontier Theatre Conference.

“I hope you will be able to join us.”

Indeed. I hoped so, too.

It took a little time. Summer is busy, but work and family have been extremely supportive, and I am definitely going. The folks on the Facebook page have been very helpful and informative. I can expect a bit of roughing it - not exactly camping, but I may be lying on the floor of a college dorm in a sleeping bag in a room with at least two other people. Theater people.

I will also be attending others’ readings, produced productions, workshop and seminars, dinners with complete strangers, perhaps a glacier cruise (included!) and generally hobnobbing with a gang of writers and other theater people, none of whom I have ever met before in my life. It's thrilling, It's intimidating.

First things first, this will take some cash and I intend to do a bit of fundraising. However, to that end I am working to provide a very special premium - a performance of I Hate This.

It was my intention to perform the show again this year, as the events in question occurred fifteen years ago. I haven’t presented I Hate This in five years, but have been inspired by subsequent productions by others in Manchester and Oneonta. After father died, it suddenly seemed even more important. Then I got the call, and now it also seems practical.

Here’s the thing. Soon I will create crowdsourced fundraiser. There will be one premium; a ticket to the show, which will occur in early May. Details to come. I hope I see you there.

The Book of William (How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World)

Following a performance of The Secret Adversary at a local school, one of the students remarked that she, “enjoyed that it was easy to follow ... and was not Shakespeare related.”

Indeed. Working backwards through the previous three years we have presented original works about the Globe Theatre (The Great Globe Itself), inspired by a speech in As You Like It (Seven Ages) and a prequel to Much Ado About Nothing (Double Heart.)

My work as a theater artist has been inextricably tied up in the works of Shakespeare. Apparently this is not the case for American theater artists, generally. This is made painfully obvious to me every time we hold auditions. College graduates stick the landing with their contemporary monologues, their verse is often not even memorized.

How did I become one of those Shakespeare people? In eighth grade Mrs. Carson assigned Macbeth which I really enjoyed reading. We read it, we did not watch a video.

(Side note: My father had recommended at that time that I also read James Thurber’s "The Macbeth Murder Mystery." It’s a hilarious short story which is funny only if you’ve read the play, which made me feel once again too damn clever for middle school.)

My high school at that time was passing out of a golden age when they actually had quarter classes in specialized subjects. Now you might take a year long course called Honors English Lit or something. I had the opportunity to take Death Perspectives and Journalism, there was a course on The Bible as Literature, and both Shakespearean Comedy and Shakespearean Tragedy.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Great Lakes Theater, 1984

Chuck Millheim taught those last two my senior year. I took both. By that time I had already been introduced to Shakespeare on stage; my parents took me to see The Tempest in the new Bolton Theatre at Cleveland Play House, soon after the high school attended a student matinee of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Great Lakes Theater.

Those plays were covered in Millheim’s courses, and also The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear and Hamlet. For Hamlet we were treated to the audio version of Richard Burton’s portrayal. Picture if you will, a room of high school seniors listening to an audiobook version of Shakespeare. It’s awful, right? Heads on desks all over the room. Me, I loved it. Burton was my first Hamlet, and it is because of him I know the manner in which Hamlet is funny.

(Side note: We were required to memorize “To be or not to be.” This was no big deal for me, because I am an actor. I scheduled my time to meet with Millheim before classes, and rattled off the soliloquy in short order, and watched as he gave me an A for my recitation in his grade book. I also noticed he gave one of the football players an A+. When I pressed him for how that guy got extra credit, Millheim said bluntly, “He performed it. Very well.”)

When it was announced that Romeo and Juliet would be a mainstage production my junior year in college, we were suddenly learning Shakespeare. Verse and how to interpret and speak it. We had not received any such instruction until then, and suddenly it was all Shakespeare, all the time. Senior year came the Stratford trip, with master classes from RSC members and numerous performances (including a King Lear featuring then-unknown to American audiences Ralph Fiennes as Edmond and Alex Kingston as Cordelia) and “suddenly” I was one of those guys for whom everything comes back to William Shakespeare.

The elephant is in the room.

This summer something monumental is coming to Cleveland, and by that I am referring to a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and not that other thing that is happening, though they are not merely coincident, as I will explain.

To celebrate the Stratford Man’s 400th death anniversary (which is not that odd, we celebrate Elvis Presley’s death, too; also, Jesus) the Folger Library in Washington created First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare, a yearlong celebration in which they will loan a copy of the First Folio to every state in the Union in 2016. The Folger owns 82 copies, so it is possible for numerous sites to display them at once.

Great Lakes Theater in partnership with the Cleveland Public Library won the privilege of hosting the Ohio stop on this tour, and so it will be on display in Cleveland from June 20 - July 30 at the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library. It was the Folger Library who chose when we would receive the book, and they felt it was important for it to be here during the Republican National Convention.

(Side note: If there were ever a political convention in which those in attendance might set fire to a library, this would be it, but the Folger didn’t know that when choosing the date.)

We haven’t yet announced Great Lakes Theater’s contributions to these events, but we do have several exciting projects in the works and you will want to participate in them.

So, long story short (too late.) For the time being I will be selecting books to read from my father’s library. It’s not some new thing, I have been doing that for years. We both like history and nonfiction. I daresay he is the reason I like history and nonfiction.

Last week I spied his copy of The Book of William (How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World) by Paul Collins in his office and took it with me. In brief (it’s not a long book, either) Collins describes the origins of Shakespeare’s First Folio (also the Second, Third and Fourth) which is to say not only how it came to be printed but how it was printed, how the First managed to survive its first hundred years (for example, the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed almost every copy that hadn’t been bought and taken out of central London) and its estimable journey from yesterday’s news to the most expensive book on earth.

G.B. Shaw coined the term Bardolatry to mock those who attempt to deify Shakespeare. Shaw felt his work equal to Shakespeare’s and he is certainly entitled to that opinion. I agree that far too much emphasis can be put on Shakespeare the man when attempting to understand the work. What I cannot abide is the invention of biography for Shakespeare of Stratford in attempt to expand upon his legacy. Most of what people think they know of Shakespeare is apocryphal, the fact is we do not know.

But that’s okay. We have the most important part of him: this big, fat book, which, if it had not been printed in 1623 we would not have any text for Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest and fifteen other of his plays. They would for, all intents and purposes, not exist.

When Great Lakes' slate of events are announced, I hope you make time to join us for a workshop or a performance. There are a lot of folks who would just as soon not venture downtown during the Baby Elephant Walk this summer, and I understand that, too.

It’s not worth losing your head over.

The Secret Adversary: In Review

Cleveland Sight Center

Yes, it has been over a month since my last entry. These things happen. However, for years I have posted updates about the outreach tour and how it is progressing. Unfortunately, I attended only two performances of this year’s play, my adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, before the sudden death of my father.

Family business and my own sense of disorientation and mourning kept me from the show for a week. Lisa and I were going to host and moderate the performances equally, and thankfully she was able to take all of them instead, in my absence.

Lakewood Public Library

As it happened, the afternoon performance at the Cleveland Sight Center occurred just when each of my brothers were in town, and the day before my father’s memorial service. We all attended together. My brothers have never before been in the audience together, and with me, for something I have written.

Not surprisingly, The Secret Adversary has been very well attended. The name “Agatha Christie” remains popular. Christie’s works are the third best-selling in the world after the Bible and Shakespeare.

We had to turn numerous people away at Clague Playhouse when all seats were taken, though a dozen or so stayed to watch the large video screen in the lobby that showed the performance. It was standing room only in Lakewood, but no one was required to leave.

Those turned away are no doubt disappointed, and post-show evaluations give certain audience members the opportunity to complain about crowded conditions or having to sit in the back. (Did I mention it’s free?) However, the overwhelming reaction to the production is very high.

"Your actors are amazing! Possibly better than what I've seen on touring Broadway casts."
- Student, Elyria Catholic High School

"The script was outstanding - this was a great adaptation!"
- Kendal at Oberlin audience member

“I really, really, really loved this play. I very much enjoyed the actors and actresses, the theme, the dialogue, and the ending scene was just beautiful.”
- Student, Hudson Middle School

Friday afternoon we performed in the new Cleveland School of the Arts building, in their “Black Box” space. Over 150 students in attendance, and they were wonderful, leaning forward, hanging on every word, getting every jokes, gasping at each revelation. After the show, their questions were all processed-based, about character, accents, physicality, even about the writing, adapting a novel into a play.

There will be a performance this afternoon in Cleveland Heights, which is home base for me. There are only three more public performances before we close, in Oberlin, Akron and Lorain.

The Secret Adversary opened on February 16, my mother's birthday. She and my father were in attendance, he was always a great reader and very fond of mystery novels and he provided and suggested numerous books that I used for research. And basically made me a person who would want to adapt a novel by Agatha Christie into a play. He enjoyed the show.

The Secret Adversary: Dialect & Slang

Ray with dialect coach Chuck Richie

This evening's rehearsal was for dialect. The Secret Adversary is an international thriller, so there are numerous dialects. Not only Standard British, but various working class English accents, Scottish and Irish. There are Russians and Germans, and one very modern young American.

Of course, when I say modern, I mean modern in the 1920s. The story takes place before the Jazz Age really got swinging (and it did swing on both sides of the pond) in that moment referred to once as the "Great Silence." However, we will be taking some liberties there, too.

Agatha Christie was keen to introduce some exciting, fun characters into her second novel. She felt that her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was peopled with a number of unpleasant individuals - not least of whom  was Hercule Poirot, one she personally always despised.

Adapting the work into this script I had great fun including many of the colorful turns of phrase she put into the mouths of her young adventurers. She went even further with the American, Mr. Julius Hersheimmer. Almost every line of his includes some bit of period slang.

However, over the course of the novel she did use many terms more than once, and while idiom doesn't become established without repetition, and that repetition can often be humorous in itself (see: the rule of three) I found a couple words and phrases were overdone and took great joy in finding authentic replacements.

Here are just a few examples of 1920s slang we will be including:

Bully for you! - good for you!
Put me wise - tell me the whole story
Put me on the trolley - see: put me wise
Jake - all right (e.g., "everything's jake!")
Turned up your toes - died
Kale - money
Swell - n. fellow with a lot of kale
Chunk of lead - an unattractive woman of a certain age
Brick - a reliable man (see also: duck)
Gold-digger - a woman who does not choose to associate with any broke fellows
We take a lot of killing. - we are unstoppable

The Secret Adversary opens February 16 at Talespnner Children's Theatre.

"Incendiaries" at Cleveland Public Theatre

Google Maps

This holiday season, WVIZ ideastream broadcast a program called The Way We Shopped. Because I had time on my hands and had a nostalgic impulse, I decided to watch it. I have an interest in Cleveland history, don’t you know, and as I watch my children grow I am reminded of those moments I experienced when I was their ages.

Cosmic Comics in the Colonial Arcade. Visiting Mr. Jingeling at Halle's, when he was portrayed by Earl Keyes. Staying up late to watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman because you knew you were in the middle of a blizzard and there was going to be no school the next day and that guy was going to read that day’s edition of the comic strip version of Howard the Duck out loud from the Plain Dealer when the show was over.

However, something struck me as I watched The Way We Shopped, and that was that it was not recently made. The way each of these individuals described their experiences downtown, dressing up to go with their parents to experience the capitalistic glories of Euclid Avenue … these people were not the right age to have been children in the 1940s and 50s.

Most striking was the account of H.W. Beattie and Sons. People of a certain age can recall the window displays at Beattie’s, which included mosaics of loose gems. According this program (which was actually produced in 2000) this legendary store is still in business at 1117 Euclid Avenue, one of the enduring legacies of old downtown.

Of course, it’s not. I walk past that empty storefront every time I walk from my office towards Public Square, be it to shop at the new Heinen’s or meet a friend for lunch on East Fourth. In fact, not only is Beattie’s closed, but the engraved stone facade which bears it’s name - prominently featured in the TV program - has begun to deteriorate.

It was at that moment, this past December, that I finally realized something very important. That city is gone. Not as in the Pretenders song. My city isn’t gone, because that was never my city, or if it part of it had been, it has been gone so long it is as though it never was. Cleveland may be on the rise, but what it is now has little or nothing to do with what it was then.

Ageing Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation lament the loss of the May Company, Halle’s and Higbee’s. But why? They were department stores. Who shops like that anymore? Who has the time or the money? I can’t be bothered to miss a fucking store. I believe I am done with this kind of nostalgia.

Last night I was standing in the lobby of the Gordon Square Theatre, having a (free) beer following a Cleveland Public Theatre performance, engaging in small-to-big talk with two guys in their late 20s I had just met. One was raised in Lyndhurst but now lives in Ohio City, the other from Connecticut but had recently moved to town and lives just up Detroit from the theater. I am of course from Bay Village, but have lived my entire adult life in Cleveland Heights.

The space in which we were standing was, some twenty years ago, an appliance warehouse. Cleveland Public Theatre was still only renting the single black box space which is now named the James Levin Theatre. The Gordon Square District was called the Detroit Shoreway and I recall there being not much there there. It was a neighborhood, a depressed Cleveland neighborhood with a two-lane highway running through it. You can debate whether gentrification has been a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is that there were two theater spaces playing to near-capacity in that complex last night, and the bars and restaurants were filled with people.

And the movie theater. And the pinball emporium. And the bookstore, the ice cream parlor, and all of the additional bars and restaurants.

Incendiaries (Photo: Steve Wagner)

The play we were talking about was Incendiaries, created by Pandora Robertson and produced in collaboration between CPT and Ohio City Theatre Project. That was my kind of show, an emotional, hour-long, research-based, ensemble performance piece about a significant moment in Cleveland history.

The subject is Hough. Call it a riot, call it a disturbance, call it an uprising. Fifty years ago this summer the Hough neighborhood burned. In this blog I have written about 1936, 1954 and even for a brief moment 1976, neatly leap-frogging over the 1960s, that decade which culminated in the largely symbolic fire on the Cuyahoga.

What I knew about Hough was from the outside. Even Mark Winegarder in his historical fiction Crooked River Burning failed to adequately tell the story. Most of that book successfully tells the story of the Cleveland's decline from 1948 to 1969 from the inside, his fictional protagonists in the same room for important events and crossing paths with historical figures with great detail and realism.

When it comes to matters of race, however, the story takes a big step back, holding some of the most consequential events in Cleveland history at arms length. The Hough disturbance is told dispassionately, as an essay for a newspaper, perhaps. From the outside. Carl Stokes has a chapter which has no bearing on the main plot of the novel. It’s a subplot which any editor would have suggested be cut, except its absence would of course be historically conspicuous.

Incendiaries is chaotic, and it took me some time to catch up with the dialog it flew so fast. When it did I was entirely engaged and distressed. So many overlapping narratives, but clearly defined, never repetitious. Fascinating characters. It made me want to get back into the library and look up the articles listed in the program.

Also, too: I have been making plans to return to some of my unrealized historical work. There will be time for that. None of it has the fierce urgency of now, not like this piece. During the fifteen minute post-show discussion several, including some young men from Hough, who heard these stories from their parents and grandparents, were very open in their comments, their happiness that this story was being told in this kind of forum. They also lamented that little has changed.

Because they're right. While Halle's may be gone, systematic racism is not.

The Crucible (Photo: Roger Mastroianni)

The audience was majority white, because anywhere I go the audience usually will be. But only a slight majority. Because this is an American fact: we like to see ourselves on stage. This is why non-traditional casting of Shakespeare irritates some people. This is why I had an interesting exchange with a guy in a lobby downtown about the recent Cleveland Play House production of The Crucible, in which he took issue with the fact that John Proctor was played by a black man.

“I have looked it up,” he said, “and the historical John Proctor did not look like that.”

“The historical John Proctor,” I said, “was 70 years old in 1692, and Abigail Williams was 11, would you prefer to see that production of The Crucible? Because that's creepy.”

“The whole second act was about a black man arguing with a white man,” he said. “I am sure that is not what Arthur Miller intended.”

I cannot recall Arthur Miller ever writing any roles for people of color (except Tituba, of course) so I couldn’t argue that specific point. But this guy insisted the play was about religious persecution, and I said it was about persecution in general, and we agreed to disagree.

However, it is not enough to cast productions based on the content of a performer’s talent, rather than the color of their skin, though I entirely support doing that. Everyone wants and needs to hear their own stories told from the stage. Black stories matter.

As we see today, white people feel threatened by the increasing advancement of narrative from non-white peoples. And non-white, non-male peoples. We see it in backlash to the #OscarsSoWhite movement, I see it in Facebook groups for playwrights. White dudes hate being criticized for being white dudes.

Me, I am not troubled by this controversy. I will keep writing what I write and if it's good enough, I'll find a home for it. I am not threatened by a deeper talent pool. Meantime, I am engaged in absorbing as much of the conversation as possible, because that is where the future is and I for one would prefer to be part of it.