CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Unaccustomed As We Aren’t

Stan and Ollie’s last two silent films were filmed in February and March 1929, and released in the autumn and winter, with synchronized soundtracks of music and effects. Bacon Grabbers featured Edgar Kennedy as a grumpy householder and the boys as officers of the county sheriff’s office trying to repossess his radio. In Angora Love the boys are followed by an escaped goat and try to hide it in their boarding-house room. Edgar Kennedy is the suspicious landlord, and this is one of the first films in which Stan and Ollie share a bed. Poverty, not sex, is the guiding principle here, although the finale has three little goat kids coming out from under the bed, to Stan’s delight and Ollie’s dismay.

In one scene, with Stan and Ollie sitting on the bed, Ollie picks up what he believes to be his own foot and massages the toes, with growing delight, until he realizes it is actually Stan’s foot he is kneading, a nice example of the identity confusion Stan was so fond of exploring in all its facets. (He would repeat it in Beau Hunks, in 1931.) Just as W. C. Fields experienced great difficulty in having his own head in the right place when trying to put his hat on, so Ollie is so perfectly self-assured – and wrong — that he can mistake Stan’s limbs for his own. The first source of a clown’s delight, and confusion, like that of a baby, is his own body. Nothing, not even your corporal self, obeys your mind.

By the time Angora Love was released, in December 1929, sound had fully conquered Hollywood. The movies, having achieved an unprecedented fluidity of style and creative maturity in telling pictorial tales, were suddenly thrust back into the womb: the camera encased in its sound-proofed glass booths, the microphones struggling to pick up only the sounds they were supposed to, and actors with squeaky voices contemplating unemployment and ruin. The movie industry was lucky this clumsy transition, requiring the re-equipping of both studios and theatres, came just before the bubble of American prosperity burst in the Great Wall Street Crash of 25 October that defenestrated instantly bankrupt investors and ushered in the era of the Depression.

The last year of the boom, 1929, was in fact a good year for Hollywood, which saw its profits jump courtesy of the hundred million people who went to the movies every week. Profits of the major studios did not begin to nosedive until 1930 and 1931, while Roach himself declared net profits of $86,052.93 over the last thirty-four weeks to July 1930 on current assets of just under one million dollars. His early leap into talking comedies was a sound move. Stan Laurel, on the other hand, lost about $30,000 in the stock-exchange crash, a serious blow, given his total salary of $44,025 in 1929.

On 4 May 1929, Hal Roach Studios released the first talking Laurel and Hardy picture, Unaccustomed As We Are. It had started life as ‘Their Last Word’, which would have been confusing, as it was their first. The opening salvo goes to Ollie, who speaks the first words of Laurel and Hardy on screen, as the two are seen walking down the corridor of an apartment building towards Oliver’s home:

OLLIE

First we’re going to eat – we’re going to have a great big juicy steak with mushroom sauce, strawberries with a whipped cream mixed down in the bottom of it, a cup of coffee, with a big black cigar.

To which Stan ripostes, in his first on-screen words, ‘Any nuts?’

They are then interrupted by Thelma Todd, making her Laurel and Hardy début, as neighbour Edgar Kennedy’s wife, slinking from the doorway:

THELMA

Oh, good evening, Mr Hardy.

 

OLLIE

Good evening, Mrs Kennedy. (Nodding towards Stan) This is my friend, Mrs Kennedy.

 

THELMA

Good evening.

 

OLLIE

(Poking Stan to take his hat off) I brought him home for dinner, Mrs Kennedy.

 

THELMA

Oh, how lovely of you, Mr Hardy.

 

OLLIE

How is Mr Kennedy?

 

THELMA

Oh, he’s very well, Mr Hardy.

 

OLLIE

Is Mr Kennedy home, Mrs Kennedy?

 

THELMA

No, he isn’t, Mr Hardy. I must be going. Good night, Mr Hardy.

 

OLLIE

Good night, Mrs Kennedy.

She exits into her apartment.

(To Stan) That was Mrs Kennedy.

Stan looks stumped.

Why, what’s the matter?

 

STAN

(Pause, then) I was wondering who it was.

This exchange, with its ponderous, idiot-proof diction, may be only the boys’ ‘unaccustomed’ status as deliverers of dialogue, but it also suggests their realization, and that of their screenwriter, ‘Beanie’ Walker, promoted from titling, that the very slow, self-conscious speech of early talkie actors was itself ripe for spoofing. Hardy’s wife, who is expected to deliver on the ‘great big juicy steak’, is none other than Mae Busch, introduced by her strident off-screen voice yelling out, ‘Whadaya-mean, “yoo-hoo”?’ when Ollie coos into the kitchen. Of course, she has no intention of being cook-washer-up for Ollie and the ‘bums’ he brings home for dinner any longer, and launches into a full-blown tirade.

Stan, Ollie, ‘Beanie’ Walker or director Lewis R. Foster, whatever the creative combination, display an early grasp of the comic possibilities of the new-fangled medium. When Ollie puts on a record to drown Mae’s speech, her rant takes on the staccato rhythm before she realizes she is dancing to a tune and breaks the disc over Ollie’s head, storming out. Ollie promises Stan he’ll prepare dinner himself — ‘I’ll cook you a meal like you’ve never eaten!’ — but after tripping over Stan’s feet comes out with the first utterance of the recurring ‘Why don’t you do something to help me?’, followed by ‘Set the table, that’s easy, you don’t need to use any brains to do that.’ An invitation to inevitable folly. Lighting the stove, the two manage between them to cause an explosion that sets Thelma’s dress on fire. Mae’s approaching return prompts the boys to hide the undressed Thelma in a bedroom trunk. The scene is now set for Mae’s attempted reconciliation, Ollie’s speech about setting off for South America with the trunk, the intervention of neighbour Edgar Kennedy — of course, a cop —and subsequent shenanigans. The beating up of Edgar by his wife, then of Ollie, by Edgar, occurs largely off screen, with blood-curdling noises, and, in the finale, Stan waves Ollie goodbye and falls off screen down the stairs, crashing noisily floor by floor.

Even in their first talkie, Stan and Ollie realize that it is funnier to anticipate than to arrive at the joke itself, which is, more often than not, slight or banal. Nevertheless, Unaccustomed As We Are is an aberration, in its reliance on extended dialogue scenes. By their second sound movie, Berth Marks, the boys have returned to pantomime as the driving force of their craft. The story is slighter than slight: Stan and Ollie, two parts of a musical vaudeville act, are supposed to meet at the Santa Fe station to take a train to Pottsville, their next venue. This is the same location Stan used in one of his earliest Rolin solos, Hustling for Health, in 1919. An attendant’s garbled announcement of train destinations provides an early sound gag, anticipating — or perhaps inspiring — the gobbledegook train announcement in Jacques Tati’s Mr Hulot’s Holiday twenty-three years later. Of course, Stan and Ollie manage to nearly miss their train, leaving their music sheets strewn along the track.

A full five minutes of the eighteen-minute film is taken up with Stan and Ollie trying to take their clothes off, having managed to climb together into their upper Pullman bunk. Some critics have found fault with this sequence, which carries on beyond reasonable bounds, with much repetition of Ollie’s phrase, ‘Can you quit crowding me?’, and a long series of gasps, thumps, grunts, shushing, slapping and counter-slapping. Who in the end is undressing whom? Nightmares of entanglement in clothing seem to be a common feature of the human species since the perfect naked apes, Adam and Eve, got tangled in their fig leaves. The entire sequence can be perceived as a sweaty homosexual Kama Sutra gone terribly wrong, although it also conjures, once again, the frustrated conflicts of sibling children. At the end, having to de-train just as they have finally settled down to sleep, the boys are left in dishevelled underwear at their destination, Stan having left their sole remaining possession, the double-bass, in their bunk.

These early sound films were edited in silent as well as sound versions, with intertitles unseen, of course, in today’s versions. Randy Skretvedt reports that the long Pullman sequence may have become unwieldy because of the length of time it took to shoot, a full three days, due to the ‘giggle factor’, the as yet unsolved problem of crew and cast collapsing into laughter in mid-shot. Cameraman Len Powers succumbed too:

 

Sometimes I can’t do a thing for laughing as they start to ad lib … in Berth Marks, most of the funniest stuff was absolutely devised on the spur of the moment by Stan and Oliver. They got started and we couldn’t stop them.

 

Sound kept setting the crew, who were used to being able to talk over the action, new challenges. Roach himself said, about the sound pictures he would occasionally still direct himself, ‘just to keep my hand in’,

 

When we ran the dailies, the projection room was packed. The first scene came on, and it was fine. At the end of the scene, somebody from off screen said, ‘That’s good.’ And the next scene came on. At the end of the scene, somebody said, ‘That’s good’ again. The third scene came on. The guy said, ‘That’s good’ again. I jumped up and said, ‘Stop the projection machine! I’m directing this picture, I’ll decide what’s good and what’s bad. Now who the hell is it in this organization that decided they’re gonna say whether it’s bad or good?’ And there was a lull. Finally … a script girl very quietly said, ‘Mr Roach, that’s you.’

 

The third Stan and Ollie sound short, Men o’ War, returned the boys to full working order, in a sound variant of their characters in Two Tars. Once again, the boys are on shore leave and chatting up a couple of girls, played by Anne Cornwall and Gloria Greer. Jimmy Finlayson returns in his first sound role, mostly still silent but with a few measured lines, as a soda jerker, in a remake of a minor scene from Should Married Men Go Home. Stan and Ollie want to treat the two girls to drinks, but have only 15 cents, enough — they think — for three sodas, though the real cost of each soda is a dime. Spoken dialogue has now enabled one of Stan and Ollie’s most iconic scenes, as Ollie tries to figure a way out of their dilemma:

‘Soda, soda, soda. And what will you have, Stan?’

OLLIE

(To Stan) I have an idea. When I ask you to have a drink, you refuse.

Crescendo of Stan looks and glances as he tries to figure this out. Ollie returns to the two girls at the counter, ticking off their orders —

Soda, soda, soda. And what will you have, Stan?

 

STAN

(Beaming) Soda.

 

OLLIE

(Outraged) Pardon me. (Pulls Stan aside.) Don’t you understand, we’ve only got fifteen cents! Now when I ask you to have a drink, you refuse! Do you understand?

Stan nods. Ollie returns to girls —

Soda, soda, soda. And what will you have, Stan?

 

STAN

Soda.

 

OLLIE

(Desperate) Just a moment please …

Ollie pulls Stan aside, salvo of slaps, tugs; Stan pulls out one of Ollie’s chest hairs.

Can’t you grasp the situation? You must refuse!

 

STAN

But you keep askin’ me!

 

OLLIE

(Spelling it out patiently) I’m only putting it on for the girls.

 

STAN

(After long pause for dawning wisdom) Oh!

 

OLLIE

And we’ve only got fifteen cents! (Gestures thrice with five fingers.)

They return to girls, as Fin triple takes, watching.

Now let’s see: Soda, soda, soda, and, my dear Stan, what will you have?

 

STAN

I don’t want any.

 

GIRL

Oh, general, don’t be a piker!

 

STAN

All right, I’ll have a banana split.

Kick, poke, push, finger in the eye, as Ollie tries to get his point across, finally striding back to order the three sodas, having promised to share his with Stan. ‘And what flavour please?’ asks Fin, the first instance on film of that distinctive Scottish burr. ‘Cherry, chocolate,’ say the girls. Ollie twiddles his fingers and simpers terribly, before coming out with, ‘Sassafras!’ Only to be taken aside by Stan: ‘I don’t like frassassas …’ Nevertheless, when the drink arrives, he bolts it all down behind Ollie’s back and hands him an empty glass —

OLLIE

(With look of cosmic pain) Do you know what you’ve done?

Stan, with look of dire guilt, nods and cries.

(shaking his head) What made you do it?

 

STAN

(Crying) I couldn’t help it.

 

OLLIE

Why?

 

STAN

My half was on the bottom! (Sobs uncontrollably on Ollie’s shoulder.)

Ollie, receiving the 30-cent bill, comes over all forgiving, allowing Stan to settle the bill. Then, deus ex machina, the slot machine beside the counter comes to Stan’s aid. Amid a crescendo of frenziedly worried looks by Fin, Stan spends one of his precious coins, and is rewarded after a suitable pause and a dismayed Fin by a shower of coins. Double take and gulp by Finlayson, triumphant wave of the hands by Stan.

All human drama is here: desire, insolvency, distress, despair, hope against hope, faith against the odds, delusion, friendship invoked and betrayed, the unbridled power of the libido driving one to consummate delights even if one doesn’t like frassassas. And in the end, despite it all — triumph, the fragile and always temporary inheritance of the meek.

 

At this cusp of the curve between the dying world of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the new harsh awakening of the Depression years, Laurel and Hardy reigned supreme. The Marx Brothers released their first film, The Cocoanuts, in May 1929, but this barely qualified as a motion picture, being little more than a celluloid version of their Broadway hit revue of 1925. Mack Sennett, struggling to survive throughout the late 1920s, adapted with difficulty to the new medium, and retreated further and further from the limelight, enjoying a brief success in 1932 with his four shorts starring W. C. Fields. Fields himself did not unveil that groggy voice until 1930, with The Golf Specialist, a one-off released by RKO. Mae West was yet to hit first Paramount and then the world, in 1932. But throughout the early years of sound, Roach survived as the undisputed king of comedy. Both Our Gang and Charley Chase followed Stan and Ollie into the talkie age. In Charley’s first sound film, The Big Squawk, released in May 1929, he played a saxophonist in a jazz band. A later film, Great Gobs!, featured four songs, two of them apparently sung by Edgar Kennedy, no less, though the soundtrack of the film has not been found.

Stan and Ollie continued to turn out classics throughout the years 1929 to 1932. Seven sound shorts in 1929 (plus a guest appearance in a portmanteau feature, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, along with Buster Keaton and a very young Jack Benny); seven shorts in 1930; seven in 1931; eight in 1932. Beside these there were other projects: the first Laurel and Hardy feature films, and the boys’ first trip abroad as a team — a first sojourn across the ocean for Babe, and a belated and unusual homecoming for Stan.

Perfect Day, They Go Boom, The Hoosegow and Night Owls, all directed by Jimmy Parrott, rounded out the shorts of 1929. During the autumn, Stan and Babe were signed on to a feature-film fantasy, The Rogue Song, based on Franz Lehar’s opera Gypsy Love, a vehicle for warbler Lawrence Tibbett. This was a typical MGM stew stirred by wunderkind Irving Thalberg. Randy Skretvedt summarizes it thus:

 

Yegor, ‘the singing bandit of Agrakhan’ (Tibbett) is an insurgent against the powerful Cossack soldiers. Ali-Bek (Laurel) and Murza-Bek (Hardy) are his sidekicks. Despite Yegor’s hatred of the Cossacks, he falls in love with young Princess Vera, whose brother commands a Cossack region. Yegor and Vera alternately romance and berate each other, while the sidekicks provide comic relief.

 

This concoction is, alas, a lost film, another ‘holy grail’ for Laurel and Hardy enthusiasts, of which some two-strip colour segments featuring the boys have turned up in recent years. Given Roach’s distribution deal with MGM, he was obliged to lend his stars to the mother ship, but there is no sign that this enhanced their careers, despite the decent box office that the producers enjoyed. Lawrence Tibbett returned to the grand-opera stage.

The boys returned to Night Owls, an odd concoction loosely resembling Stan Laurel’s all-purpose ‘Nutty Burglar’ vaudeville routine. Cop Edgar Kennedy has been reprimanded by his chief about the epidemic of unsolved robberies on his beat. Coming across vagrants Stan and Ollie sleeping on a park bench, he rousts ’em up and makes them an offer they can’t refuse: to rob the chief’s house themselves and afford Edgar a chance to square himself by catching them red-handed – it’s either that or the rock pile. Jimmy Finlayson is the chief’s suspicious valet and the boys make every conceivable kind of noise with knocked-over garbage cans, crashing windows, thrown bricks and shoes, and an inadvertently switched-on player piano.

This was the first Laurel and Hardy film to be shot in alternative foreign language versions — Spanish and Italian. Later films would add French and German versions. As our earlier clipping described, this involved Stan and Ollie learning lines in all these languages phonetically, with the aid of a voice coach, laboriously taking each shot in each language before proceeding to the next. The studio then added scenes, with appropriate actors either replacing the original supporting cast or in separate, additional scenes. In Night Owls, grumpy police chief Anders Randolph was replaced for the español by one E. Acosta, a Mexican customs official. Fin and Edgar Kennedy, on the other hand, had to sweat their way through the multilingual labyrinth. This procedure was very slow and costly, but Roach got rich returns from European and Latin American audiences. If the bugbear of comedians was the loss of their universal status with the death of the silent cinema, Stan and Ollie saw their popularity soar with audiences who accepted them as local heroes. Hal Roach told Randy Skretvedt some piquant tales about these foreign versions:

 

I get [to Argentina] and they [the foreign bookers] said, ‘You’ve got to go to a theater and see this Laurel and Hardy picture.’ Well, in every country, like in the United States, you have slang. So I go to the theater, and Laurel said something in Spanish, I don’t know what the hell it was, and the audience roared with laughter! He had mispronounced a Spanish word, and the word he used meant ‘to pee’ … We had the same experience in Germany in a picture … where Laurel is in a Ford and Hardy is a cop. Laurel goes around and catches Hardy’s suspenders and breaks them. Hardy’s trying to wave the traffic through, and when he does this his pants go down … Right in the middle of this, they put in a German title which said, ‘He looks like a washerwoman.’ I said, ‘What the hell, there’s nothing funny in looking like a washerwoman.’ Then they took me to the theater and the audience laughed like hell at this title. Then I found out there’s a dirty saying in Germany about a washerwoman leaning over and somebody attacking her from the back.

 

So much for cultural confusion. Roach, in fact, is misremembering, as this is a scene from the silent short Leave ’Em Laughing, and the cop is Edgar Kennedy, not Babe. This serves as a warning about reliance on oral history as related by senior citizens in their twilight years, but the point still stands. When jokes travel, they sometimes arrive at strange destinations.

At the end of 1929 another interesting marker was set with the arrival at the Hal Roach Studios of Stan’s old ‘Guv’nor’, Fred Karno, in person. In October, presumably just before the Wall Street Crash, Roach signed Karno on as a producer and writer at the studio. Roach recalled, ‘I hired him after working with Chaplin and Laurel and always hearing them talk about Karno, Karno, Karno. I thought, hell, this guy must know a lot of gags. His business had gone to pot over in England, so I told him how much I’d pay him a week in salary, and paid his way over.’

Karno had indeed gone bankrupt in England in 1926, after a long run of self-imposed setbacks. Since 1912, not content with music-hall prowess, he had become obsessed with the building of a great luxury centre on Tagg’s Island in the River Thames, to be named the ‘Karsino’. Karno dredged the whole island and built a £70,000 hotel, gardens and greenhouses, as well as a £20,000 personal houseboat. The building proceeded despite the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, which transformed the centre into a kind of trysting place for army officers and their girls. Even the plum contracts Karno was still getting from the theatre circuits for his ongoing plays and revues could not save him from this financial folly. Litigation over purloined titles, and revelations about his overly lecherous private life and casting-couch prowess ground him down until his humiliating crash.

Nevertheless, Karno was still ‘The Guv’nor’, and people such as Paramount’s Jesse Lasky wooed him with invitations to the US. Karno’s biographer, J. P. Gallagher, claims that Karno was chased by a New York agent to write material for the Marx Brothers, an unlikely story if ever there was one. However, he did arrive in New York, only to find that Mr Lasky had ‘gone to the Coast’. Hieing to Los Angeles and booking into the Roosevelt Hotel, Karno made directly for Charles Chaplin’s studios and was fêted by his old employee, who put his publicity machine to work and alerted all the other American ‘ex-Karnies’ that their mentor was in town.

Doing the rounds of his old disciples, Karno gravitated soon enough to Roach and Stan Laurel. A number of publicity stills were taken of Karno with Stan and Babe, together with director Jimmy Parrott, on the set of Night Owls. Babe and Stan lie beside a garbage can, between the old master and the new. Stan looks delighted, Babe nonplussed, and Jimmy Parrott simmers in the right-hand corner. Karno, on the left, holds out his arms expansively.

But, as Roach related later, ‘I never knew that he was just the businessman. He wasn’t a writer. He just hired guys that were funny, and he hired other guys to write for them. He was only interested in management. I finally let him go. I wanted him to be a gag man.’

Part of the problem was that the United States and Britain were still two countries divided not only by an ocean but by a common language. Karno required an interpreter to explain to him such terms in Roach Studios scripts as ‘They take it big’; ‘He horns in on them’; ‘He does a Brodie’, or even ‘They neck.’ Karno’s imperious nature and old-world hauteur did not go down well with the wisecracking, somewhat ‘low-class’ Roach team. In February 1930, Roach and Karno parted company, and Karno returned to England soon after. Attempts to try his luck in British films with the Gaumont and Ealing companies fared no better, though about six short films, which remain obscure, were produced by him for the Hutton company. In 1936 he returned to the theatre with a show called Real Life, which revived his fortunes for a while. Still dogged, however, by financial troubles, he faded away, and the Music Hall Benevolent Society bought him a share in an off-licence situated in the aptly named Dorset village of Lilliput, where he died In 1941.

 

Laurel and Hardy’s second film after the Wall Street Crash was Blotto, a strange addition to the soon-to-be-superseded genre of the ‘Prohibition’ movie. This, too, was rendered into other languages, the French version entitled Une nuit extravagante and the Spanish, La vida nocturna. One wonders what these foreign audiences made of the bizarre subterfuge that seems necessary to get a bottle of booze into a night-club. The film also presents one of the bleakest on-screen marriages in the entire Laurel and Hardy œuvre, that of Stan and Anita Garvin, as a positively lethal spouse. ‘You’ve been pacing up and down here for the last hour,’ she grates at Stan, as he waddles about the parlour with his curved pipe. ‘What’s on your mind?’ ‘Can I go out?’ he asks in frustration. ‘And what for may I ask?’ ‘I need fresh air!’ claims Stan in desperation. But Anita is having none of this. ‘Now sit down, and stop annoying me!’ Stan settles down, unfolding the pages of the Hebrew-printed newspaper, the Yiddishe-Velt. (The headline, the new sharp video release of the film enables me to reveal for the first time, for all pedants, is of Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris. But Stan soon crumples this up and tosses it aside.)

Stan, of course, is awaiting a telephone call from Ollie, who wishes to entice him out to the newly opening Rainbow Club. But first, a whole flurry of mis-calls, with Ollie constantly forgetting the number he is trying to call: ‘Oxford 0614!’ (Stan’s real-life phone number at the time.) The extant Spanish version allows us to see Stan and Ollie in foreign action, with Oliver pretty proficient at his Spanish twang and Stan having a harder time wrapping his Lancashire tonsils around it. As replacement Spanish wife Linda Loredo purrs at Ollie, ‘Como está, señor Hardy?’ ‘Estoy bien, señora Laurel,’ oozes Hardy.

Ollie persuades Stan to escape the bonds of matrimony by sending himself a telegram calling him out on ‘important business’, so he can swipe the wife’s hidden liquor. But wifey is listening on the other line upstairs and replaces the drink with tea spiked with mustard, pepper and tabasco. This leads to one of Stan and Ollie’s most sustained scenes of making something out of nothing, as they settle at their night-club table and surreptitiously pour themselves their doses under the table. The result contorts Ollie into a complete spasm: ‘Es un licor excelente!’

Multiple wife trouble for the innocent spouse

Blotto was the first of Stan and Ollie’s sporadic three-reelers, a kind of halfway house towards the features. The Spanish version is fully fifty minutes long, padded out to feature length — for financial reasons — with extended night-club numbers. Jimmy Parrott, as director, shares the laurels with Stan in this most minimalist of Laurel and Hardy premises: just the two of them at a table breaking into an extended laughing jag as the imagined effect of the booze takes hold. Even spotting the wife glowering at a nearby table with her newly bought shotgun fails to sober them, until she responds to Stan’s gasping chortle of ‘We drank your liquor!’ with the chilling statement: ‘That wasn’t liquor. That was cold tea.’

The despair behind the laughter is seldom so close to the surface as in this movie, when the night-club singer Frank Holliday renders a kind of homily to all husbands drowning their marital betrayals in speakeasies, Stan sobbing inconsolably while Ollie pats him round the shoulder:

You made me what I am today,
I hope you’re satisfied,
You dragged and dragged me down until
The soul within me died.

 

You shattered each and every dream,
You fooled me from the start,
And though you’re not through — may God bless you,
That’s the curse of an aching heart!

Anita chases Stan and Ollie out of the club, taking aim at the taxi whose driver they have hailed to drive them off to safety, and bringing the whole vehicle down with one shot, blowing it into a pile of scrap metal.

Estoy bien, señora Laurel, indeed!