ADDRESS TO THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF ASSOCIATIONS CONVENTION, MINNEAPOLIS, JUNE 12, 1993

MADAME CHAIR, MEMBERS OF THE CLERGY AND JUDICIARY, DISTINGUISHED GUESTS, MEMBERS OF THE LEGISLATURE, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SKILLED TRADES, MY FRIENDS IN THE PRESS, FELLOW ARTISTS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, CHILDREN OF ALL AGES:

few years ago in a poker game I won a membership in a club called The Sons of Bernie and last January, late one night, I drove my truck deep into the woods near River Falls to attend the annual Bernie campfire and drunken orgy of song and self-pity, standing arm in arm with other S.O.B.s around a bonfire under the birches, in a raw wind at twenty below zero, the snowbanks up to our waists, and there, under the Milky Way and a nearly full moon, we ate chili out of cans and drank bourbon whiskey and sang mournful songs like “Long Black Veil” and “Old Man River,” and complained about women until six o’clock in the morning, when we retired to our homes to recuperate.

There were about thirty of us, and when I arrived and saw them, I said to myself, “Let’s get out of here. You were had in that poker game. This membership isn’t worth half the five hundred dollars you gave him for it, the big cheater.” It was not my crowd. They were the sort of desperate low-lifes who will tell you a long story for a five-dollar loan, guys who everything unfortunate has happened to, cruel fathers, treacherous friends, abject poverty, rejection by women, dust storms, prison, tuberculosis, car wrecks, the boll weevil, and poor career choices, all the disasters familiar to fans of the great Johnny Cash. Men peak at age nineteen and go downhill, we know that, but, I tell you, they looked so much older and sadder than you want people your own age to look. One glance at those beat-up faces and you could not imagine women loving them at all and I was by far the soberest and handsomest one in the bunch. “Well, perhaps I will stay for a while,” I thought, “and gather impressions of them so that I can someday write about these poor guys so that they will not be completely forgot.” As the night wore on, however, I came to feel more brotherly.

You had to stand close to this fire to get any warmth from it. The smoke got in our eyes, hot coals flew into our hair, but we didn’t mind. We stood, left arm over the shoulder of the man to our left, right arm free to pass the bottle, and we sang and sang.

We sang “Hard Times Come Again No More,” “Abilene,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Take This Hammer,” “Streets of Laredo,” and recited poems, such as “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone be-weep my outcast state,” and then someone recited, “There was an old sailor named Tex who avoided women and sex by thinking of Jesus and terrible diseases and spending the night below decks.”

It was not a tasteful or reverent occasion, and yet it was satisfying in some respects. A person can drink quite a snootful of whiskey in subzero temperatures and still keep floating, and while it isn’t an experience that you want to base a lifetime on, nevertheless you would hate to come to the end of your life and think, “I never ever once got drunk in the woods on a winter night with a bunch of guys who all knew the words to ‘I Ride an Old Paint.’”

We sang about Old Paint and Frankie and Johnny and somebody recited:

Whenever Richard Cory went dawn town,

The women on the streetcar looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean shaven, and he used expensive aftershave.

And he looked very elegant in a suit.

And he was always friendly when he talked;

He certainly made the heads turn en route

To his office at the First National Bank.

And he was rich, a man of style and grace,

And married to a beautiful woman named June.

And yet none of us wished that we were in his place.

We knew June and she was a bitch.

And one calm summer night, under a beautiful moon,

Richard Cory put a bullet through his head.

No big surprise, not if you knew June.

We got to feeling awfully close, hooked together, the fire blazing away, the whiskey doing its work. After the poem, a guy said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I’m glad there aren’t any damn women here.” (LAUGHTER) Sorry, but that’s what he said.

Another guy stepped forward and said: “I have worshipped women all my life, especially pregnant women, and then the other day, a woman I know, she looked like she had a basketball under her dress, she told me that she felt great when she was pregnant, that she enjoyed it, had more energy, felt sort of high, and it just makes me wonder if maybe women have gotten more mileage out of motherhood than they should’ve and if maybe we could stop bowing whenever one comes in the room.”

A ripple of excitement passed through the circle: Guys were Speaking Out! Us! Saying things we wouldn’t dare say in polite society (i.e. women).

A guy with snow-white hair stepped into the circle. “Listen, you pineapples. Damn women writers write absolute drivel and dreck and people fawn over them. Women win blue ribbons even though they didn’t come in tenth. They get hired for jobs they’re barely mediocre at. Affirmative action sounds good in theory, boys, but any time you promote incompetence, you are dragging society down, I don’t care what your motives are.”

A guy said, “I ain’t no misogynist or chauvinist but I got to say, women are getting awfully impossible to please these days. I’ve been busting my butt for years trying to keep women happy, and they’re madder at me now than they were before I started trying so hard. I quit playing softball and deer hunting and took up painting delicate watercolors, still lifes mostly, and tossing salads, and learned how to discuss issues and feelings and concerns and not make jokes about them, and they’re still angry at me. A guy can’t win. Boys, let me tell you this for your own good and it’ll save you a lot of time later in life: most women down deep believe that everything wrong is men’s fault and nothing you can ever do will change that. So don’t worry about it. Live your life.” Oya! we all yelled.

A great big bearded guy stepped into the circle. “I sort of miss communism. When the Soviet Union fell apart—I don’t know—it seemed like everything went slack. There was no point anymore. Guys lost interest in baseball, guns—guys quit messing with cars. My son never gets under a hood. Instead he tries to get in touch with his feelings, tries to understand his girlfriend and keep a nice close peaceful relationship. Something doesn’t add up here. We’re selling out our manhood, bit by bit, trying to buy a little peace and quiet, and you know something? it won’t work. Self-betrayal never works! I say, nuts to sensitivity. Go ahead and fart. Go ahead.” So we did. All at once. The fire flamed up blazing bright. It felt good.

I realized right then, standing in that circle, that I know many more women than men. Women are easier to talk to. So I go have lunch with a woman at, say, Le Domicile de Daphne restaurant, and we talk and talk about various things that intrigue us, and suddenly I lean forward across the plate of ziti and sun-dried tomatoes and whisper, “Bozo alert,” and nod toward a guy in a dumb T-shirt (HELP ME. I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T REACH MY BEER) and a blue satin team jacket, his cap turned backwards, who has lumbered into the restaurant searching for a toilet.

For more than thirty years, I have been nudging women and pointing out dopey men to them so that women would know that I am no bozo. And here I was arm in arm with the very sort of guys I had always made fun of. I felt ashamed.

I stepped forward and sang them a song:

There was once a shy young man who left his country home

And moved to the city to be more free,

For in the city no one cared if you stayed out half the night

And people didn’t notice every time you bought a new pair of pants.

So he enjoyed a carefree life amongst the Broadway crowd

And attended shows they did not have in Minnesota,

And the only thing that worried him was what if he got sick

And fell down in the street, would anybody notice?

He decided to find out, so he laid down in the gutter,

And right away a woman came and knelt down by his side,

And it was Gladys, his old neighbor, who was in the city visiting her niece Denise,

And she said to him, “Jim, I always knew that you were no good.”

“That’s right,” they said. Oya.

A large guy (I would say about a size 62) stepped into the circle. He was blinking back the tears. He had a hank of hair falling down in his eyes that he tossed back with his head. He blew his nose and said, in a soft voice, “I have never been in a group of men before, and it’s hard for me to say what I have to say.” We shouted our support and manly encouragement. “Thank you,” he said. “I had a chance to become a girl when I was in the fourth grade. We all did. You could check a box marked F on the Iowa Basic Gender Questionnaire, but they never explained it to me very well, like most things about sex, so I checked M instead, but some of the girls in my class checked M, and they got changed a few weeks later—in those days, it was referred to as ‘having your tonsils out’—and a tiny penis was implanted and two testes the size of hailstones—and those girls grew up and became extremely successful, happy, and well-adjusted men, the sort of guys who are easy with their masculinity and get along just fine. And sometimes—” and here his voice shook—“sometimes I wish I had become a girl.”

Several guys gave him big hugs. He flinched and tried to squirm out but they had him like a chicken in a vise. (LAUGHTER)

And then the head man of the S.O.B., the Big Burner himself, stepped into the circle, to talk about Bernie. He had been Bernie’s best friend.

Bernie was a good guy who married a great girl, Jackie, who then became a feminist, but that was okay by Bernie, and he supported her in all that she did as she flew around to women’s conferences and seminars, gave speeches at dinners, was on the boards of NOW and NARAL and the ACLU and ACT and WARM and WARN and YES, and seldom was at home there in Minneapolis, but that was okay, she was happy and if she was happy then he was happy. They had four daughters, Susan B., Elizabeth Cady, Willa, and Betty. Bernie was a good dad and good husband, and the rest of the time he was a cement contractor. He had fourteen trucks pouring concrete. One winter when the concrete business slacked off, Bernie thought he’d maybe go ice fishing for a week with his buddies, play poker and tell some stories, have some laughs—though Jackie thought it was dumb beyond belief and gave him a hard time about him wanting to go off with those rednecks and said, “I thought you got it, but obviously you don’t”—and then, the day before he was to leave, he ran into the Big Burner on the street and told him how wonderful it would be to see the guys again. “I haven’t gone ice fishing in fifteen years, but finally I got Jackie to let me go,” he said, “and boy, am I looking forward to it. Well,” he said, “I gotta cash a check before the bank closes.” And he turned and two seconds later he was rubbed off the face of the earth by a runaway gravel truck.

“Bernie was wearing a red-plaid flannel shirt, an orange down vest, rubber boots, overalls, and long johns, and he had a Vicks eucalyptus cough drop in his mouth and Old Spice aftershave on his face. I can still smell him and I’ll always remember how much he looked forward to being with us. He was one of us, a hard worker, not a loafer, a northerner, a trucker, a faithful husband, a good buddy, and here is to him.”

We drank a solemn toast.

“She got the house, the concrete business, everything, all that he’d worked so hard to build up, and you know? she didn’t share much of it with those daughters either. She sold the company for six million dollars to some jerks who then ran it into the ground and she built herself a big house on Barbados and bought an apartment in New York where she entertains liberals and artists and feminists by the truckload. That’s what happened to the life and hard work of Bernie, boys. It went to feminism and he never got to go fishing.”

We all leaned forward and spat on the ground.

“He was a loser, boys, and the world loves winners. People used to love their losing teams, but no more. The owners are in it for the money and the fans are in it for the victories. If you lose, you’re shit. Well, boys, we are all losers like Bernie—you, me, we’re drunk, confused, sad, and we smell like dead trout—but I loved him and I love all of you.

“Here’s to that trip he never took and the fun he never had. He wanted to get out of line for a few days, hoist a few, tell some jokes, be with the boys. So let’s do it. Here’s to Bernie. Let ’er rip.”

And we drank a long toast and gave six long whoops, Eeeeeeee-ha!

By four a.m. there was little left to say and nobody in condition to say it. So about six, I went home. (APPLAUSE)

* * *

It is hard to put your finger on, but guys are in trouble. Guys are gloomy. We try to cheer ourselves up, we go down to the Lost Hombre Saloon and hoist a margarita with some sad guys from the Sanitation Dept. and we tell them, “Hey, tomorrow’s a new day.” So we put on our pants in the morning and think A Hum babe c’mon babe hum babe, attaboy, let’s go, babe, play from within yourself babe, good as ya wannabe babe, let’s go, babe, hum babe, a hum it in there babe, focus babe, center yourself babe, c’mon babe, hum babe, hum babe, feel good about yourself babe. Or we say the prayer of St. Geoff: “Breathe deeply, relax, let go of all stress and anger, and be here within yourself in the universe where you are truly welcome—really.” Or we go to a steam room and cook, or we go to a ballgame, or we go to a Unitarian monastery in New Hampshire. The rule there is complete silence but if you think of something really good you can go ahead and say it. So one day, eating our silent lo-cal lunch, we turn to the abbot, a former psychiatrist, and say, “I keep racing and racing, I live life fifteen minutes at a time, I’m stretched thin, and inside I am empty.” And then we see the hollowness in his eyes, poor man. In America, you don’t have to know what you’re doing in order to do what you’re doing. You become a holy man by learning to act holy. The furrowed brow, the shambling gait, the vacuous modesty, the blissful dumbness, the maundering, the weird verbless speech, and Abbot Bob has mastered the act beautifully, but one look in his eyes tells you that nobody is home, he is a vacant shrine.

Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome. Plato, St. Francis, Michelangelo, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi, Van Gogh—you don’t find guys of that caliber today, and if there are any, they are not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or composing Don Giovanni. They are trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, go play basketball, come home, make melon balls and whip up a great soufflé, converse easily about intimate matters, participate in recreational weeping, laugh, hug, be vulnerable, be passionate in a skillful way, and the next day go off and lift them bales into that barge and tote it. A guy who women consider Acceptable.

Being all-rite is a dismal way to spend your life, and guys are not equipped for it anyway. We are lovers and artists and adventurers, meant to be noble, free-ranging, and foolish, like dogs, not competing for a stamp of approval, Friend of Womanhood.

Back when our gender was running on all eight cylinders, women died for the love of us (e.g. Carmen stabbed to death, Butterfly self-stabbed, Tosca self-hurled from parapet, Brunnhilde self-burned, Aïda self-buried, Ophelia swam after mealtime)—those days are over. Now women watch us and monitor our conversation for signs of bad attitude, they grade us daily, and, boys, we are in the wrong class. Men can never be feminists. Millions have tried and nobody did better than C+.

Here’s what they won’t tell you in class—

• Girls had it better from the beginning, don’t kid yourself. They were allowed to play in the house, where the books were and the adults, and boys were sent outdoors like livestock. Boys were noisy and rough, and girls were nice, so they got to stay and we had to go. Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning to solve problems through negotiation and role-playing. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess? (APPLAUSE, SHOUTS) IS there any doubt about this? Is it even close?

• Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet, a bad hormone experience. You are crazed with madness. Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

• Women know about life and social life and how to get along with others, and they are sensitive to beauty, and at the same time they can yell louder. They know all about guys, having been exposed to guy life and guy b.s. since forever, and guys know nothing about girls except that they want one desperately. Which gender is better equipped to manipulate the other?

The father of a daughter, for example, is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, “Daddy, I need to ask you something,” he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan. The butter thinks to itself, “This time I really am going to remain rectangular,” and then it feels very relaxed, and then it smells smoke.

• Men adore women. Our mothers taught us to. Women do not adore men; women are amused by men, we are a source of chuckles. That’s because women are the makers of life, and we aren’t. We will never be able to carry life within our bodies, never breast-feed. We get more than our share of loot and we are, for some reason, incredibly brave and funny and inventive, and yet our role in procreation basically is to get crazy and howl and spray our seed in all directions.

• So we carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives. We get through the Car Crash Age alive and cruise through our early twenties as cool dudes, wily, dashing, winsome, wearing white socks and black loafers, saying incredibly witty things, shooting baskets, the breeze, the moon, and then we try to become caring men, good husbands, great fathers, good citizens, despite the fact that guys are fundamentally unfaithful. (AUDIENCE REACTION) A monogamous man is like a bear riding a bicycle: he can be trained to do it but he would rather be in the woods, doing what bears do. Nevertheless, we learn to ride that bicycle for the sake of women, and we ride it darned well, considering, and we live a pleasant, if sometimes cloying, life shopping at the Food Shoppe and Wine ’N Stuff and taking the kids to the Wienery-Beanery, attending planning meetings, writing thoughtful letters to the editor, eating bran flakes, supporting the right things, and we accept restrictions and limits, no smoking, jackets required, No Left Turn 4–6, and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

Spectacular dumbness is a guy type of gift. (APPLAUSE) We are good at great schemes and failed brilliance, and some eras seem to encourage this. The seventies was a time when people could do dumb things and nobody gave them a hard time about it. You’d go to see improvisational theater and the actors were climbing naked through piles of tires waving flashlights and reciting numbers at random, and afterward you thought, “Well, life is like that sometimes, I guess,” and then a few years later there were strict new rules: everything had to Add Up, as if life were a term paper. People kept turning around and explaining themselves, even people for whom there was no explanation—everyone was seeking plausibility.

I once was interviewed on a daytime radio show whose host wore a tiny pink bathing suit, although she was in fact a normal-sized woman. We sat together in a studio the size of a walk-in closet, and I avoided mentioning her bikini on the air, but she didn’t leave out anything when it came to me.

“You seem like a nice guy with a lot of dirty underwear,” she said. “Let’s talk about it. I’ve heard it said that you drifted into manhood with the charm of a claims adjuster and a withering sense of guilt due to a good upbringing. That in high school you tried to escape your unworthiness by affecting a sort of wispy bohemianism, writing your name in lower-case letters and composing dippy poems with titles like ‘Soliloquies for Stringless Guitars,’ and eventually you ran away from home when you were twenty-four. People who know you well have described you as moody and inarticulate, a guy with cold green eyes and a ratlike smile who suffers good fortune with ill humor, which has left you virtually friendless, isolated, adrift, out of touch, and that you have lost approximately thirty-two points of IQ in the past twenty years and were only average to start with. But that’s not my question. My question to you is: does loss of brain function justify persistence in the face of, shall we say, a certain pointlessness to one’s life? A lot of people are asking this question about you. What do you think, Gar?”

I will be honest—through most of her rather long question I was concentrating on her breasts, which were prominently displayed, particularly the left one, which was nearer to me. (AUDIENCE REACTION)

“I don’t think that’s true about my IQ,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve dropped that far.” I smiled.

She said, “And yet my question remains: is reduced mental capacity the clue to your career or should we look for other explanations?”

I had to admit that I have made some boners in my day. I wasn’t about to confess them all but I did tell a few stories on myself, about situations involving cars, in which I had attempted to solve problems through brute force. She seemed genuinely amused by these anecdotes.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s all the time we have.” And the show was over. “I hope you don’t feel I was too hard on you,” she said. She put on a brown wool skirt and white blouse and a green blazer, picked up her briefcase, and left.

Her honesty drove me to take a closer look at myself and I made a list of my abilities and inabilities.

A. Useful Things I Can Do

Fix decent meals and serve them.

Be nice.

Make a bed.

Dig a hole.

Write books.

Sing alto or bass.

Read a map.

Drive a car.

Talk on the radio.

Wash and iron clothing.

Clean.

B. Useful Things I Can’t Do

Chop down big trees and cut them into lumber or firewood.

Plant a field of corn or any other crop.

Handle a horse, train a dog, or tend a herd of animals.

Handle a boat without panicking the others.

Build a frame structure larger than a birdhouse.

Do simple algebra or mathematical computations of any kind.

Fix an internal combustion engine. Or an external one.

Remember the laws of physics.

Make an intelligent bet on a horse.

Invest money wisely.

Teach electricity, grammar, the Reformation.

Play guitar.

Throw a fastball, curve, or slider.

Load, shoot, and clean a gun. Or bow and arrow. Or use either of them, or a spear, net, snare, boomerang, or blowgun, to obtain meat.

Defend myself with my bare hands.

Keep my mouth shut.

Maybe it’s an okay report card for a person but I don’t know any persons, don’t know what they can do and can’t do. For a guy, it’s not good. A woman would go down the second list and say, “What does it matter if a guy can handle a boat? Throw a curveball? Bag a deer? Throw a left hook? This is 1993.” But that’s a womanly view of manhood. (LAUGHTER)

Miss Woofenberg, our second-grade teacher, worked hard to instill a womanly view of manhood in us boys. She taught us that it was manly to be quiet and be nice, to be neat, to share and yet give a slight advantage to girls, to be studious and listen and do as she said. These traits, which she believed that girls innately possess, Miss Woofenberg urged us boys to learn, and she made us repress our urge to push ahead, to grab, to fight, to struggle, to press forward in man’s relentless quest for superiority and world domination.

A man achieves world domination every time he does something awfully well. A guy who has a good fastball, or knows physics like his own backyard, or can pick up a .22 and pick off a pine cone at a hundred yards knows this.

Guys need this feeling if they’re going to survive. Guys know that we are going to lose some, maybe lose a whole long string, maybe get our butts kicked for years, but we have to be No. 1—sometime, somewhere, if only for ten minutes—or else we sag inside and become sad and careful, a guy who when he stands up you hear the tinkle of broken dreams.

Miss Woofenberg created a problem for us when she catechized us in the theology of submergence in the group.

“We want what is best for everybody,” she said, which sounds good until you strive for it for a while and realize that, like the horizon, the common good recedes as one draws near. The only way to approach it is to live in a deep canyon.

A fastball travels ninety miles an hour or so, and if it isn’t thrown by guys, it isn’t going to be thrown, babes.

We go around with a sense that our gender peaked in the eighteenth century. The King, the Court, the Church, Knighthood, Guilds—all of that worked for guys: in paintings by the Old Masters, guys looked good, whether boy or burgher, hearty and flush, good-humored, bold, prosperous, Guys at Their Best. After that, guys vanished from art, except for troubled self-portraits. Now our gender supplies all the major criminals and all the major candidates for high office; the female gender supplies the goddesses of light and mercy. What went wrong?

I haven’t seen the S.O.B.s since that campfire and I don’t expect to, and if I did see them, I don’t know what we would say. Because guys don’t talk to each other. We paw up dirt, we bang antlers, sometimes we graze side by side, but we seldom talk.

You can fly off to the rain forests of Rawalpindi and attend the Tribal Gathering of World Men and dance around pounding your tom-toms, chanting ancient guy chants, grunting guy grunts, painting your body with guy markings, squatting around the fire and telling ancient guy myths, but the biggest myth of all is that men can open up to each other and share their secrets. Oya.

You go to the Guy Pride lunch and hear a talk about All for Oneness and afterward you confide in a fellow guy that you are going through a hard stretch right now, and he says, “I can sure sympathize, Jim. Listen, let’s get together soon and do some bonding. Really.” And he checks his watch, glances around for someone else to talk to, he can’t get away from you fast enough. He goes off and talks to other people and he says, “Look out for Jim. He strikes me as unstable. A liability to the team. How can we ease him out of here?” Men are capable of this. You should hesitate to tell a guy you feel bad. It may embarrass him and he won’t talk to you for months. Or it may excite him and he will think of ways to get your house or at least some of your savings.

Men need women to talk to and tell the truth to. This is a main feature of sexual life, where guys are concerned.

Guys know that we should free ourselves from women, stake out our own turf, and stop trying to be so wonderful to them. Let women deal with their own lives and solve their own problems. Stop feeling guilty, as if we could make it up to them. (AUDIENCE REACTION)

Guys know that we ought to get together with other guys and drink whiskey with our arms draped around each other and sing “Old Paint,” and tell our ripe rich jokes.

But we keep coming back to women.

They can’t take over the world fast enough for me. (APPLAUSE) I mean that. Let them run everything. (APPLAUSE) They should take over business and government and manage society and finance and let guys be artists and hoboes.

We are delicate as roses in winter and need to be wrapped in warmth or else we die. (LAUGHTER) I don’t know why I said that, except that it’s written down here and also it’s true. (LAUGHTER)

Women can rule the world, fine, but we need them to love us again, or else it’s no good.

“Why is it so important to you to be as wonderful as you are?” a woman asked me one night as I lay sobbing into a pillow, having made a cherry pie that tasted like some old sparrows had been baked into it. “Why can’t you just be yourself?”

I am trying to do that, my darling. I am going to go be myself right now. Thank you very much. (APPLAUSE AND AUDIENCE REACTION)