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A Tale of Two Christmas Trees or Letting the Magic Out

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Yesterday I encountered two Christmas trees at the mall. Now, I realize Christmas trees before T-day is fraught with controversy. There have been a number of posts on Facebook this week denouncing the presence of Christmas trees before turkeys. I certainly respect those sentiments. I used to feel that way – until I realized I was in love with Christmas trees because they are works of magic in my small, solid earthbound world. For me, if someone wants to turn on the lights and hang the tiny glass balls and stars early, I’m the girl who’s ready to sign on for the fantasy! I want as much magic as I can get for as long as I can get it. And Christmas trees are magic!
My fascination covers the ornaments too. I like to walk through the displays and admire the miniature sleighs and Santas, the adorable Rudolphs, the fairy princesses, and the baby pandas and polar bears. I particularly love the glass ornaments: the silver and gold stars, the moons, and the icy snowflakes. One of my favorite haunts is Anthropologie where I scope out the tiny dolls and woodland creatures I intend to scoop up at the after-Christmas sales. (Since everything at Anthro goes ON SALE eventually, it is against my sacred pocket book principles to pay full price. Especially Anthro’s full
price.) Over the years, I have acquired some gems this way. For example, I have the knitting-doll ornament. (I knit.) I have the “shop local” doll ornament. (I shop, locally and otherwise.) I have the wooly lion. (Ok, I’m a person not a lion, but I’m a Leo person.)
So yesterday, as I bopped along on a mundane errand, on an otherwise mundane Monday, I came , unexpectedly, to this:

Christmas Tree!!

The Christmas Tree!


This gigantic tree soared into the California deep blue November sky, shining with copper, gold, and silver ornaments. The sheer size of it took my breath away. Dwarfed by its grandeur, I stopped to bask in its Christmasy magic – silently apologizing to the turkeys and pilgrims who are waiting to assume the spotlight next Thursday. But I just couldn’t resist flying into the blue sky on that trail of glorious Christmas.
Inspired, I went in search of more fantasy and found these ornaments waiting at Anthro. I will definitely be back when they are ON SALE.
The Ornaments at Anthro

The Ornaments at Antrho


Anthro Cool Bunny

Antrho Cool Bunny


The Other Anthro Cool Bunny

The Other Antrho Cool Bunny


But then, as I hurried along, I came to this little tiny little frosted tree, trapped in a glass jar at Sears. Oh, it wants OUT, I realized at once. It wants out, so its magic can let it grow to be as big as the magic of the tree outside.
Help, let me out!

Help, let me out!


As I stood looking at the little tree, I imagined screwing off the jar’s lid and setting it down in the center of the Sears’s store. What if freeing it and all its Christmas magic would let it grow and grow until it broke through the roof and became as big as its counterpart outside? It reminded me of those tiny little sponge capsules you can drop into the bath. In the warm water, they slowly break through their plastic prisons to become sponge dinosaurs and circus animals and racing cars. What if my little tree had magic inside that would let it reach its full potential as soon as someone freed it from its glass? What if it could emerge, fantastic, shiny, and free, to soar above the mundane? In short, what if I let it’s magic out?
My errand done, and work waiting, I headed off to my beloved chili-red Mini Cooper with black bonnet stripes and the world’s greatest vanity plate. (Another blog to be). But as I went, I realized, we are that little tree. We are all trying to break free of the glass jar and to grow into our magical selves so we can shine our unique magic into the world.
Merry Early Christmas! And Here’s to the Escape of Everyone’s Magical Self!
The Magic!

The Magic!

So You Want to Be A Fiction Writer, But Are You Any Good? Part II

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CHAPTER ONE
Mid-November, 2010, New York
Conference rooms are all the same. As are airports. On a cold, wet, mid-November afternoon, His Grace, the Eighteenth Duke of Burnham, decided that those who thought running the Burnham Trust was a glamorous job should go from London to Paris to Brussels to New York seeing only conference rooms and airports. He was now trapped in one of the beastly things on the twenty-eighth floor of the Manhattan offices of Craig, Lewis, and Weller, studying the deepening early twilight through the sheets of glass that formed the walls. His mood was as black as the coming night. This was the last leg of his autumn trip to ascertain the status of Trust assets in several countries. And two weeks of nonstop polished mahogany tables, crystal water decanters, dense financial statements delivered by earnest twenty-somethings, and masses of sandwiches on large silver trays had been a mind-numbing combination. He longed to go back to his suite at the Plaza, draw a hot bath, and order a bottle of Balvenie Cask 191.
But a quiet evening in was highly unlikely with Ami Hendria in town. Twenty-eight-year old blonde bombshell actresses were not fans of a low key evening by the fire. Still, he would be the first to admit that one reason he kept Ami around was to avoid having the world find out who Nicholas Carey truly was: a middle-aged homebody, longing for some solitude and a nightcap. On the other hand, the female segment of the populace would have refused to believe his real persona if he had posted it on a billboard in Times Square because, as a widowed duke, every woman he encountered believed he was swinging Prince Charming. And he was anything but that.
Oh, he was bored if his mind wandered to scotch and the possibility of eluding Ami’s grasp that evening. To bring himself back to the present, he looked down the nine-foot glossy mahogany conference table and counted the populace. Three lawyers from Beville, Platt, and Fisher on one side, all local counsel for the Burnham Trust. And two on the other side from Craig, Lewis, and Weller for Miss Reilly’s Female Finishing Academy. Why did it take five lawyers to sell a house to a girl’s school? And why weren’t any of them the one he wanted to see? His operative had named Taylor Collins, a partner in the Craig, Lewis real estate section, as was the one likely to know where Diana’s tape was. He’d told Hollis Craig he wouldn’t sell the Abbey to his daughter Tracy’s school unless Taylor was on the deal. Yet, he’d been trapped in this conference room for more than an hour, with no sign of her.
The tape was so sensitive, Nicholas knew he couldn’t approach Taylor Collins directly about it. But he was more than happy to offer Burnham Abbey, the ancestral home of the Careys, on the sacrificial altar of subterfuge. The place had long been an albatross around his neck that he was determined to remove. He smiled happily at his picture of his father, the Seventeenth Duke, turning in his grave in the chapel about now as the lawyers blathered on blissfully and incomprehensibly about the terms of the deal.
For as many of his forty-nine years as he could remember, he had detested lawyers of every ilk. The American big firm types were particularly irksome because they all looked, sounded, and dressed exactly alike. Dark suits, starched white shirts with monograms on the cuff, and subdued silk ties. And the women lawyers. Oh, he didn’t even want to think about their sexless, baggy black outfits. Was being neutered worth all that money they reportedly made? He knew Taylor was thirty-nine, but he bet she looked at least forty-five and was twenty pounds overweight. And probably chain smoked and had a face like a bulldog. He didn’t look forward to dealing with her.
Well, here was his chance to find out. The massive, dark mahogany door to the conference room opened, and another female suit stepped inside. Except this one was so, so different from the others. And not at all the woman he had expected to see.
“Sorry to be late. I had a call from the Cuniff trustee that I had to take.” She was speaking to Hollis Craig, but a pair of eyes the color of spring violets were fixed on him. Very like Diana’s eyes, but deeper.
“My partner, Taylor Collins, Your Grace. She’s going to be in charge of the file for Miss Reilly’s as we agreed.”
His heart was racing so fast, he had difficulty speaking, so he merely nodded in response. At thirty-nine, she looked ten years younger. He guessed the form-hugging black wool suit on her tiny five foot two frame was Chanel. She barely weighed a hundred pounds. Her jacket allowed a demure ruffle to spill over its dark edge, highlighting the single strand of perfect pearls circling her creamy throat. Her dark hair was pulled back into the usual professional woman’s knot, revealing more perfect pearl drops in her exquisite little ears. He wondered what she looked like when her hair was wild and free. Her face was impassively professional, yet he sensed much more lay beneath the surface. Physically he was drawn to her so strongly that he wondered what color La Perla’s she was wearing, but he longed for more than sex. He desperately craved the impossible: time alone and the chance to know who she was beneath the lawyer facade.
The conference room doors opened once more and another black-suited woman with hair also tightly wound roused Nicholas from his fantasies. She wasn’t as expensively dressed, and he recognized her immediately as the telephone receptionist who sat at the throne-like desk opposite the elevators. Her task was to greet everyone who arrived at the twenty-eighth floor.
“Your Grace?”
Why did all professional woman have to slick their hair into those ridiculous knots? Did it make them seem more serious? More competent?
“Your Grace, ” she repeated. She was young, early twenties. There was that look in her eyes that said, maybe I will be his Cinderella. Even a woman in a business suit longs to be a princess. Or at least a duchess. Although he doubted Taylor Collins would be interested.
“Yes, Miss –?”
” La Breaux. Marie La Breaux.”
“Well, yes, Miss La Breaux? What is it?”
“A call for you.”
” I’ll take it later. After we’ve wrapped up in here.”
“I’m afraid it’s the headmistress from your ward’s school.”
“Oh, God. Very well.” Nicholas got up and went into the adjoining conference room, this one dominated by a long glass table, sterile enough for surgery, surrounded by empty high-backed chairs. It looked like a board meeting of ghosts, and for a moment Nicholas saw the empty room as a metaphor for his own life. The people he had loved the most were all ghosts: his mother, Deborah, Diana, Annabel.
“Hello?”
“Helen Myrtin, Your Grace, from Miss Whitcomb’s School.” Her thin, nasal vowels sliced through the silence and reminded Nicholas that in person she appeared as intimidating as she sounded. Thirty-five. Always dressed in suits so crisp they looked like military uniforms. “I’m afraid there’s been a bit of difficulty with Lucy. Again.”
Nicholas had hoped she wouldn’t refer to the past, but in fairness, she had a right to sound exasperated. It had taken a hefty chunk of Trust cash, tastefully donated to the school’s general fund, to keep Lucy there the last time. “Tell me about the problem, Mrs. Myrtin.”
A very human sigh surprised him. “I’m so sorry, Your Grace. I hate giving bad news.”
“If she’s drinking again–”
“I wish that were the only problem. Unfortunately, Lucy has begun to experiment with drugs. She had too much to drink, threw up in the loo, and passed out. One of the other girls found her and called Matron who called Dr. Briggs. When he looked her over he found signs of cocaine use. And later we located some of the drug among her things.”
Nicholas gripped the phone and willed her to stop speaking. The alcohol had started last year. It had been tough to deal with a fifteen-year-old with a taste for scotch. Maybe he should have seen the other coming. But he had put his head in the sand. “Are you very sure that she was actually using the stuff–not just trying to sell it?” Both were bad, but using was worse. It would be much harder to stop that.
“Perfectly sure.” The headmistress’ voice tightened in response to his denial. Give me any window, any hole to escape this he prayed. Don’t make me deal with another failure where Lucy is concerned. I know it’s my fault. But it hurts too much. Far too much. Still, fate had already done its work. There was no going back. “Dr. Briggs says the drug caused bleeding around her nose. The girl who found her in the loo thought she was dying.”
“I see. And where is Lucy now?”
“In the infirmary. We have to send her down. At least until the New Year. You realize that, of course.”
“Of course.” But she wasn’t saying out for good. There was still hope. “But after Christmas?”
“You’ll have to show us that she was treated. And that she’s–uh, how do they say- clean. Perhaps one of those drug management programs in Harley Street. Although I will warn you the source is her boyfriend. He’ll find her if she’s in London. He’s very persistent.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Well, man-friend, actually. Didn’t you know about David Lowenby? She said you approved.”
“David Lowenby is Lord Gaynor’s heir and twenty-five years old. He’s almost ten years older than Lucy. She couldn’t have been seeing him.”
“I’m afraid she has. She told us she had your permission,” Ms. Myrtin repeated.
“And you believed that?” Nicholas didn’t even attempt to control his outrage.
“Well,” her tone of detached poise seemed to slip momentarily, “I did think of ringing you up. But she was so emphatic. Good family. All that.”
He sighed. “Well, the harm’s done. But if I put her in Harley Street, Lowenby will find her with more cocaine. You are right. I’ll have to think about what to do.”
“There are home programs, I think. Nurses you can hire. Maybe one of the Harley Street clinics can give you some information. But we do have to send her away today. And you appear to be out of the country.”
“New York is not the ends of the earth, Mrs. Myrtin. I can telephone my staff. I’ll send an estate car for her as soon as you ring off. I would imagine my driver can be there within the hour.”
“That would be greatly appreciated, Your Grace.”
After Nicholas hung up, he sat for a long minute watching the New York sky line; he felt empty and sad and defeated. She had promised no more drinking. She would study to get into Oxford. She would find some meaning and purpose for her life. Not just parties and shopping. But all her promises had meant nothing. He glanced at his watch: 4:30 here, so 9:30 in London. He could have Lucy at Burnham Square before midnight.
He picked up the phone once more, this time punching the intercom button.
“Marie La Breaux, here, Your Grace.” She sounded so eager. For what, he wondered.
“Please get my butler on the phone and tell him to send a car to fetch my ward from school. At once.”
“Yes, Your Grace. I’m sorry the news was bad.”
But he wasn’t inclined to tell her anything, so he ignored her condolences. First rule of survival in the tabloid fishbowl of aristocratic life. Never give anyone information about yourself. “And get my London solicitor on the line. Lord Thomas. My personal assistant will give you the numbers.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” She sounded more distant now. She had understood he was not going to let his guard down with her.
Kerry Thomas, his chief friend from Eaton, would know what to do. Restraining orders–whatever it took to keep the press out of Lucy’s screw-up. Maybe he could recommend a treatment program. A scholarship boy from a poor London family, Kerry was resourceful. And now rich.
As he sat waiting for Kerry’s call, he wondered if he should fly back to London that night or follow his original plan to return in the morning. His pilot was used to turning around on a dime if Nicholas demanded it, but sticking to his original itinerary looked very attractive. He didn’t feel ready to face Lucy and her problems any sooner than tomorrow night. If then. He could stay at the Ritz for a couple of days and avoid his townhouse at Burnham Square for at least forty-eight hours. Cowardly, but tempting.
Then, too, it was Ami’s last night in New York before she flew to Paris to begin a new movie. She expected him to take her to dinner at Per Se, with dancing afterwards at Provacateur. The thought of all that throbbing music punctuated by green strobes gave him a headache in advance. In addition to being very egocentric, American twenty-something actresses loved night life. And were completely convinced that dukes did, too, despite his sincere explanations to the contrary.
Well, even if blonde American actresses had dukes pegged correctly, and they all liked to boogie until dawn, he didn’t. Maybe it was because he had never felt much like a duke to begin with. Maybe it was because he hadn’t been intended to be one, either. Arthur had been real duke material. He could picture his older half-brother at Provacateur until the wee hours. He didn’t deserve a lifetime subbing for Arthur.
Hours under strobe lights, sandwiched between gyrating, sweating bodies was just the sort of thing Deborah would have loved and would have insisted that he do with her. But even the most boring things had been worth doing – just to be close to her. All at once, he could see another pair of blue eyes. Not deep violet like Taylor’s, but pale as spring rain, cool, and appraising. Deborah’s eyes. Deborah’s voice. “I can’t live locked away in that decaying old house in Kent. Don’t be ridiculous. There’s everything to do in London and nothing at the Abbey except watching it crumble to bits stone by stone. You can’t seriously be thinking of living there.” He could hear her voice as clearly as if more than a decade had not gone by since the last time she had spoken. And he could picture her graceful body and the way she would shake her golden, shoulder-length hair to make a point.
The memory was too sharp and too clear, and it hurt too much. He brought himself back to the dilemma of Lucy. He would leave New York in the morning as planned. But he’d lie to Ami and cancel the evening. She’d be furious, but she’d get over it. And if she didn’t, there were a zillion more just like her waiting to attach themselves to him. He badly wanted his evening alone at the Plaza with his bottle of scotch. No, that wasn’t what he wanted at all. He wanted to take Taylor Collins to dinner at Per Se, drown in her violet eyes, and learn everything about her, including which places on her tiny exquisite body she liked to be touched. But that was out of the question. He hadn’t expected her to be beautiful and sexy, but he had to force himself to stay on track. He had made a promise to Deborah and to Diana. He couldn’t be so distracted that he gave up his quest for the truth.
He would telephone Steve Riddely now and arrange for him to come round early in the morning to look at Lucy and advise him about treatment programs when he returned. Steve’s father had been his own father’s doctor, and he knew he could trust him not to tell anyone why Lucy had been sent down.
As for himself, he was a coward. Tomorrow or even the next day would be time enough to deal with Lucy.
* * *
The next morning, his Lear Jet was scheduled to depart at 8:30 a.m. As he sat on the tarmac, waiting in the queue of airplanes for clearance to taxi and takeoff, Nicholas Carey reflected upon his success the prior evening. Ami had been easily put off with a promise to fly her to London the following week. Apparently she was willing to risk the ire of her director to be with him. Not a good development. But the bottle of Balvenie Cask 191 had been superb. He had almost obliterated the shock of meeting Taylor Collins with its joys.
But he was sober now, and she was very much on his mind. He had to find a way to see her again. Not only to find Diana’s tape, but to learn more about her. How to do it without being obvious? Ah, the sale of the house. She was the lead lawyer on the file for the buyer. This would be easy. Way too easy. He picked up his cell and dialed his personal assistant.
“Myles?”
“Your Grace.”
“I want you to call Suzanne Kelly, the woman at Miss Reilly’s who is overseeing their purchase of the Abbey. Tell her there may be a problem with conveying a clear title to the school; and their attorney, Taylor Collins, must come to England and personally examine the documents to determine whether the Trust can actually sell the house.”
“Will do, Your Grace.”
“And another thing. The land conveyance records are at the Abbey library in the family papers section. Keep them in the library but hide them where they’ll be very difficult to find.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Anything else?”
“Only one. Book a suite for me at the Ritz for the next three days. I need some time and space away from Lucy while I think about what to do with her.”
“Done, Your Grace.”
The jet gathered speed for take off. Nicholas watched New York begin to drop away behind him. If Taylor knew about Diana’s tape, her life was in danger.

Dangers of the Princess Gig or Why I Always Leave my Tiara in the Vault

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The “it girls” all arrived as princesses this Halloween. They made the trick or treat scene at our front door in ankle-length pastel blue and pink satin skirts, frothed with sheer tulle ruffles at the waist and hem. Bodices sported sequins and glitter. I doubt there was a Versace, Chanel, or Marc Jacobs in the lot, but each one was thrilled with her red carpet look for the evening. (It was Halloween. I should say orange carpet.)
Observing them as I handed out Halloween candy reminded me that I had had a secret desire to be a princess when I was their age. Just as small boys announced their intent to be firemen or policemen, small girls are prone to favor the princess line of work. The only trouble was, I couldn’t quite figure out what princesses did. Sitting on a throne all day waiting for a prince to show up sounded like the height of boredom. So did swirling around a ballroom at all hours in an evening dress and diamonds. And I wasn’t particularly thrilled about eating a poisoned apple or pricking my finger and sleeping for a hundred years. Just regular sleeping overnight was pretty boring, in my view. So even though I was taken with the princess uniform – evening dress, glass slipper, and tiara – the job that went with it didn’t sound as attractive as I’d first thought.
Then I went to school and began to read history. The princess gig began to look less and less attractive. For example, Henry VIII had no trouble dispatching unwanted princesses to nunneries and scaffolds. A little later, in France, the guillotine did the job of eliminating the surplus princess population. Moving into modern times, a Russian firing squad did away with a whole family of princesses in Ekaterinburg in July 1918, along with an Emperor, an Empress, and a Tsarevich. And then, to prove it still isn’t safe to be a princess, Diana, Princess of Wales was smashed up in a car “accident” in 1997.
Conclusion: “pretend princessing” has its upside: a swirly satin skirt for the evening and all the chocolate you can stuff into a plastic pumpkin on Halloween. But the real thing isn’t safe. You don’t want to wind up as another princess statistic. Just say NO to Prince Charming when he hacks through the hedge after a hundred years.

Regulation Princess Gear

Ok, So You Want to Be a Fiction Writer, But Are You Any Good?

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PROLOGUE
Mid-April 2010, Paris
In the gray spring rain, he stood in the Place d’Alma staring down at the tunnel where she had vanished from his life on the last night of August 1997. He came here whenever he was in Paris. He counted the pillars until he reached number thirteen, the one that had taken her life. Tears formed behind his eyes, as they always did in this place. But he refused to let them overflow. Instead, he took a long breath of fresh rain mixed with the exhaust of cars speeding through the tunnel.
When the big black Mercedes had entered its skid that horrible night, his last living link to Deborah had been taken from him. Diana and Deborah, West Heath girls, friends forever. Deborah had been dead since 1994, but he had lost her long before she had become his wife just two years after Diana had married the Prince of Wales in 1981. How many nights had he spent talking to Diana about his marriage, about her marriage, about his guilt over Deborah, and about the impossibility of being in love? Too many to count. He ached to tell her now how empty his life had become without either of them.
He stared down the long, gray tunnel, wondering as always, what she had felt as she had slipped away from everyone who loved her. Had she struggled against it, as Deborah had? Or had her torn and broken heart quietly accepted its fate? No, he doubted that. She’d have fought to stay with her boys. Diana hadn’t gone into death quietly. That January, she’d had a warning of what was coming. She’d recorded a video tape naming her assassins and had given it to someone in America for safekeeping. But she would never tell him who it was. Too dangerous, she always insisted. If you had it, they’d come after you, too. Leave it alone, Nicholas. The tape is safer out of England.
His phone abruptly interrupted with a text message from his assistant. He was late for a meeting of the Burnham Trust at the Trust’s Paris headquarters, and everyone was waiting. Well, they could wait. All day and all night if he wanted. He was the Eighteenth Duke of Burnham and the second richest man in England after the Duke of Westminster, and he’d be late if he decided to be. He hadn’t wanted to be a duke, but having been forced into the job, he was going to enjoy every possible perk.
As soon as the news of Diana’s death had reached him, he’d vowed to find her tape and make it public. No luck for the last thirteen years, but his latest operative had just come up with a stellar lead at last. It was so stellar that not only was he pretty sure he was going to find the tape, he was also going to have the opportunity to unload the decaying family seat in Kent and exact his well-deserved revenge upon his father, the Seventeenth Duke.

Hever Castle as the Model for fictional Burnham Abbey


Tunnel, Place d”Alma, Paris


Diana’s Funeral


West Heath School for Girls

Diana, Princess of Wales, and Me or How I Nearly Wound Up in A Russian Gulag as A Political Prisoner

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Life as a stay-at-home mother of three children, five and under, was an endlessly demanding job. I had always been a hard worker and an over achiever, but child/care 24/7 was the most exhausting challenge yet. There were days when, as much as I loved my three little ones, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get up at sun rise and keep going. I had never been so tired in my life. And I had a sinus infection that lasted for three and a half years. One unhelpful and terrifying male doc said I needed to be tested for HIV. The woman doc whom I went to for testing and whose children were the same ages as mine couldn’t stop laughing when I told her why I was there. Honestly, it wasn’t very funny.
I became fascinated with Princess Diana in that period. I’m not sure why. There were probably a lot of reasons for my fixation. First, I loved her clothes. Whether in her early Laura Ashley mode or in her shoulder-padded Power Suit mode in the 1980’s, she was gorgeous. She was the IT Girl of Style.
Second, she delighted in mothering just the way that I did. In the pictures of her with William and Harry, who were only a few years older than my children, her love shines off the page. Granted when she played games with them in their nursery, she’d had a full night’s sleep because her nanny was on call, but even my sleep-deprived brain could connect with another mother who loved her children the way I loved mine.
Third, she and I had entered into similar marriages. My husband’s job was to our marriage what Camilla Parker Bowles was to Diana’s. The third party to my marriage was a corporation whereas for Diana it was the Other Woman; but the result was the same. And Diana had married a man who wanted a wife and children from Central Casting to be available only for photo ops. And so had I.
Fourth, Diana went through a very public divorce with a man determined to wound and humiliate. One of my few consolations on those terrifying days when I left the Family Law Courthouse threatened with the loss of my children and so emotionally upset that I was afraid to drive, was that at least the venom that had just been spit in my face wasn’t going to be heard around the world. For Diana, it was a very different story.
I didn’t lose my children. I would have if I hadn’t been a lawyer. Oddly enough, the role that sat most uncomfortably on my heart was the one that saved the people I loved most from being lost to me. But that victory came at a heavy price. During that marriage, I had done the thing I had wanted to do all my life: I had written a novel. After a lot of tries, I even got an agent in New York. In those early dark days of my divorce, my little book traveled from editor to editor at major publishing houses. Some did not like it. Some liked it but would not buy it. It was called Summers’ Child, a title that another writer would use for her own very successful novel some years later. (I had copyrighted my manuscript, and I knew she hadn’t done her homework before using my title.)
But when my husband found out that I had written a novel that was not succeeding with New York publishers, he dragged me down to the Family Law Courthouse and accused me in public of being a no-account deadbeat who was trying to live off child and temporary spousal support. He argued that I was trained as a lawyer, and so I had to go back to work as a lawyer. Even though I hadn’t done any work as a lawyer for eight years and hadn’t the foggiest idea, anymore, how to even sigh on to a legal research service.
Family Law Court, at least in those days, was a terrifying hell of illegality. I had graduated second in my class from law school, and I knew how unconstitutional the various rulings from that court were. The family law court operated at that time as if the Right to Privacy did not exist. At one point, I actually thought they were going to send me to involuntary psycho therapy to force me to withdraw my accurate and true statements that my husband had abused me and the children. I felt as if I’d wound up in a Russian Gulag as a political prisoner for not Speaking the Party Line.
I knew how to challenge these outrageous family law court rulings in higher courts. But the problem was I had to play the Family Law Court game or lose those dearest to me. It would do me no good to take my case to the United States Supreme Court only to be reunited with my children by my victory there when they were adults. So even though the Thirteenth Amendment abolished involuntary servitude, the state of California said I had to go back to work as a lawyer. And I did. In my living room, where I wrote appellate briefs and remained close to my children. But who I really was born to be was quietly dying, day by day.


Southern Mother At Large in California or You have a WHAT in that Suitcase?

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In the end, I drifted up the road from Richmond to another, smaller firm in Washington, D.C. where my creative bent found a home. Not long after I arrived at New Firm, the Most Important Partner came into my office one day to congratulate me on a memo I had written for him that the Florida Legislature had then adopted at a statute for the benefit of one of the firm’s clients. He was a very happy Most Important Partner. The client was a Very Happy Important Big Bucks Client. And the firm sure could bill for that one! Redeemed at last.
But finding a home as a lawyer wasn’t as fulfilling as I had thought it would be. It was all still paper and stale conference rooms and working trips on air planes. And business suits, starched shirts, and floppy bows. So I struck out for California (on an airplane, not in a covered wagon) and motherhood.
By 1991, I had three children, ages five, three, and newborn. I had hired a college girl as afternoon help three days a week because I just could not keep up with the demands of the mother job, which was a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week affair. I had no family to give me a break. Babysitters didn’t want three kids or a newborn. And the kids’ dad had parked us in a ritzy part of town where moms had Hispanic nannies. (And went back to Work. To avoid the tough job of Mother, I was convinced.) So no one needed a Mothers’ Day Out Program. (Except me, apparently.)
Mothering, I soon discovered, was an endlessly creative job. My artistic self smocked tiny dresses for my daughter, rompers for the boys. I marched clowns and balloons, cupcakes, and teddy bears across their tummies. I looped ribbon into “frou frous” and sewed them onto my daughter’s dresses and hats. I made tiny linen and velvet suits and vests for the boys. I made doll wardrobes and Halloween costumes. (Think my daughter as Pooh and my first son as Piglet when I was pregnant with Number Three.) I made matching velveteen mother-daughter-son outfits for Christmas. And I used a gallon milk jug and fake fur to create a dead wringer for a Coldstream Guards hat. (For my daughter, not the two boys.)
Of course, this activity was not a California Mother Thing at all. California Mothers (the ones without nannies) wore yoga pants and stuffed their children into knit rompers from Mervyns and Gymboree. My activities were so unusual that I had to smuggle a “pleater,” the device consisting of rows of tiny needles that prepares fabric for smocking, back from Tennessee in my suitcase. I ordered smocking patterns and laces and tiny French hand sewing needles from Georgia and Florida and Virginia and Texas.
And naturally I didn’t send my California children to school in these artworks that only a Southern Mother could love. No, as soon as my daughter could pull the OshKoshs off the hangers and put them on, one leg at a time, the dresses hung in the closet quietly waiting for Sunday, like the Good Girls they were.
But, of course, Sunday came. And again, I behaved as a Southern Mother would. CHURCH. Being Episcopalian, we had no duty (Thank, God) to proselytize the California Mothers and their offspring. I could quietly dress my little ones in their smocked and French handsewn best and shuffle us all off to Sunday School (which, true to Southern Mother Form I taught) and CHURCH. (Where I provided stickers and crayons and paper and tiny coloring books to keep the small troops quiet through the boring (to them and sometimes to me, true confessions) service. One interesting Sunday, my small daughter pointed out we were almost the only people there under fifty. Everyone else was at BRUNCH in their yoga pants and knit rompers, California Style.
But I was a Southern Mother. I didn’t know any better.
Being creative as a mother wasn’t just about their clothes. No, it was far deeper and more fun and more substantive than that. Southerners love stories and are born storytellers. I told stories about the South and about their grandfather the FBI agent and their great-great-grandfather the Civil War solider (for the Union!). I read and read and read and read. We loved Thomas the Tank Engine (we called him “Thomas Tanken”), Madeline, Good Night Moon, the Runaway Bunny, Winnie the Pooh, any alphabet book ever written, and all forms of Nursery Rhymes. We watched Sesame Street, talked about “Bee Bo,” “Oscar the Grouch,” “Cookie Monster” and “Count One Count.” (My daughter’s name for him which I thought much better than the original.)
We went to Disney moves, although my daughter wisely decided she did not want to be a Disney princess like her California counterparts, who would ditch their knit rompers for princess gowns, tiaras, and scepters to wear to the park. My daughter, on the other hand, put on her Coldstream Guards costume for outings and marched beside her little brothers’ stroller.
We ate fish sticks and tater tots for supper with plenty of ketchup. We had pillow fights and said prayers at bedtime. (Always the Lord’s Prayer because Now I Lay Me had terrified me as a child because it talked about dying.) We waded in the Pacific on days that never seemed to end because of the stifling heat. (The kids’ dad, who worked in air conditioned comfort, said we didn’t need to be cool.) And we promised every time that we wouldn’t go in the water in our clothes. But we always did. In short, the four of us laughed and created and played and had fun, Southern Mother style, in the foreign country of California. We made few friends, although we tried. But we had each other.

Somewhat skimpy ribbon frou frou on dress


Bee Bo!

Thomas Tanken!

A Smocked dress


Her costume looked like this!


 

A pleater.


 

On Being A Creative Refugee on the Underground Railroad or Would You Like a Side of Fries with That Baby Lawyer for Breakfast?

/in /by

The seasons change in Southern California, but subtly. For the first two autumns I spent here, I was always waiting for the cold, wet, windy day that would announce winter had landed. That day always came in the South, a day when it became apparent that winter coats were now inevitable until late March or early April.
But to me autumn in Southern California has always consisted of the uneasy feeling that real winter is just around the corner. Except there is no corner, and real winter never arrives.
In my second autumn-waiting-for-winter here, my September baby began to settle into life. By late January, she slept more and cried less. From her infant seat, she began to look around at the world she found herself in, appraising its potential to entertain.
Less sleep deprived, I started to recover from months of living in survival mode. At last I began to feel separate from the child who had not allowed me to put her down since birth. And as I did, I began to reconnect the dots of the picture that was me. It was as if coming to California had severed my life into two halves. In half number one, I had been first a teacher and then a lawyer, married to a gentle man who wanted me to assume the responsibility of breadwinner. In half number two, I had married a man who ignored me, I had had a child, and I had lost myself. Why had I chosen this path? What had I been running from?
At least part of the answer could be traced to a deep winter day in February in Virginia. One morning I was sitting in my tiny cubicle of an office (it was exactly the same size as a secretary’s cubicle, but it had a door), watching the icy James River slide by my window and wondering if there would be black ice on the commute home. To say I was bored would be an understatement. I had never dreamed life in a big law firm could come to a crashing halt, day after day. But the litigation partner I worked for was busy on matters that didn’t require my help; and likewise the senior associate, who would be a partner within a year, hadn’t produced any interrogatories for me to draft or answer for more than a week.
Enter a Newly Minted Partner in the labor practice, looking for an associate to do a research project. I was “loaned” to the labor section and ushered into a conference room whose floor was white with paper. Every legal job begins with a story. And this was the story.
Newly Minted Partner, who was the rarity of all rarities at The Firm, a Female Newly Minted Partner, had just lost a Motion For Summary Judgment with her Mentor Male Senior Partner (to become partner at that firm, it was an advantage to have one of these). Now Summary Judgment is the worst legal insult possible. It means your lawsuit did not even get to first base. You filed something that didn’t state a claim a court could consider. Bad news. You’ve wasted everyone’s time. And money. And the client doesn’t think you are very smart.
Now The Firm, being one of the smartest and best anywhere, rarely fell victim to Summary Judgment. But, then, again, no one is perfect. Although The Firm did not see things that way.
At any rate, the paper on the floor was nearly every sex discrimination case ever decided by an appellate court. My job was to find the rest of the slippery little dears – if any more existed – and turn them into a memorandum that would be The Firm’s Secret Weapon to be used by Newly Minted Partner and Mentor Male Senior Partner when they went back to show the judge just how wrong he had been to dismiss their Age Discrimination Case. Or, in the alternative, my memo would be the basis for writing a new lawsuit that no one could throw out. Either way, The Firm had been embarrassed in front of one of its Highly Important Clients. And I was now thrown into the breach to repair the damage.
That project seized my imagination as few projects had done since becoming a Big Firm baby lawyer. Maybe it was the sight of a woman who had survived to join the Inner Sanctum that grabbed me. More likely it was just the intellectual challenge of making sense of all that paper. One of my professors in graduate school, when I’d been dreaming of being a professor myself one day, had explained we are biologically driven to create order out of chaos. So perhaps my creative juices were happy to be alive and well again.
I was given two weeks to produce The Firm’s Secret Weapon, otherwise known as my memorandum. I threw myself into it, spending twelve hour days reading and researching, sometimes working while lying flat on my back on the floor because I was in the grip of a nasty inner ear infection that gave me vertigo. (Someday I will tell you how I discovered baby lawyers were not allowed to be sick. But that is a story for another day.)
My then-husband was quite supportive. An extraordinarily bright man, he listened as I talked endlessly about the project and my findings. He made helpful comments here and there even though he was not a lawyer himself. And I’m sure in the back of his mind was his devout hope I would survive to become a Newly MintedPartner one day for our Mutual Economic Benefit.
Trouble was, about three days into the project, I saw why The Firm had lost. The existing law was against what they were trying to do. The judge, whom Newly Minted Partner had not had nice things to say about (use your imagination, but remember to keep it professional), had actually gotten the law quite right. Oh, dear. What was a baby lawyer to do?
Now, despite what happened next to me in this story, the truth is the best lawyers are creative. Think Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of Education. He saw the possibilities in the law where none yet existed and pushed forward to change the lives of every non-white, non-male American forever. (Yes, Virginia, the African American civil rights movement made the Women’s Movement Possible. And now the push for Gay Rights. We owe it all to Thurgood.)
Anyway, I wrote my memo, explaining the existing state of the law and then explaining how Newly Minted Partner and Mentor Male Senior Partner could draft a new pleading, using the Sex Discrimination Law creatively for an Age Discrimination client. If it had been a law school exam, I would have had an A plus plus. I finished, after a nearly all nighter, handed over the thirty page extravaganza, and went home to sleep the sleep of the Righteous. My then husband, Ph.D. in English in hand, had read my magnum opus and congratulated me on my writing and my presentation. Even he, a non-lawyer, got it.
TWO WEEKS LATER:
I know it was the end of February. I like to think maybe it was leap year and the 29th, so it is a day not often to be repeated. But I am not sure. I was summoned to the Ninth Floor to the office of Newly Minted Partner where I expected to receive congratulations on my work. For not every one of us spiffy little J.D.’s can see how the law can be pushed and molded and prodded to the next level of social change. And no one had ever said I couldn’t research and write with the best of them. Until that day.
She was one of those enviably thin women whose suit skirts never had to be fastened with a safety pin. (True confessions. All that sitting at a desk and Firm Luncheons had taken its toll on me.) She had the short, professional haircut we all thought was required in the eighties, and she had the most highly polished French manicure I had ever seen. She was certainly a woman in charge of her life and highly successful in a world and time where women did not succeed. She’d sacrificed marriage and children to her success, but I assumed it was a choice she happily made.
I admired her as a sort of Legal Rock Star. And I had put my everything into her work. And she spent the next forty-five minutes telling me what a Worthless piece of Human Trash I was. About three minutes into the diatribe, delivered in the low professional tones you would associate with someone of her standing, I realized that she hated me, my work, and the creative solution I’d given her. Rather than seeing the beauty of my striving, she pronounced me an ignoramus for not coming to her on Day Three of the project and telling her the law was not on their side. (Something I had assumed was obvious from the beginning since they were the victims of Summary Judgment.)
Newly Minted Partner wore hats. Even now, it is rare to see a professional woman in a hat. Especially a red hat. As the diatribe continued, I fixed my eyes on the stryofoam head behind her desk that held her hat and pictured my head there in the morning, eyes glassy in what she would have considered my well-deserved death. The whole idea was so ludicrous, I wanted to laugh out loud. But I’m sure Newly Minted Partner would not have taken it well.
Her parting shot, as she released me from the hell of her office, was “We couldn’t bill the client for your work!” The ultimate disgrace for a Big Firm baby lawyer.
I went home and cried all night. My then-husband tried to comfort me, reminding me over and over how unreasonable she had been. But she looked so wise and knowing behind that Big Firm desk under the guise of Big Firm Partnership, I forgot who I was. And I let her bully and humiliate me. And then I eventually fled to the other side of the world, away from everything familiar, cutting a swath through the center of my life, in an effort to escape my own incompetence. Except, I wasn’t incompetent. And I had nothing to escape. But I was a long way from discovering that fact in the first autumn of my daughter’s life.
So, as I began to come back to myself in the mild California January, I blamed myself for being creative – the very thing I was born to be.
Below:  Richmond in Winter.

Don’t Change the Words or the Spell Will Be Broken or When is a Lawyer Like a Wizard?

/in /by

After my first terrifying experience as a “trial lawyer,” in October 1981, I devoutly prayed each night I wouldn’t be sent back to court any time soon to sit behind a counsel table. Of course, if you stop and think about it, sending a one-day old lawyer with no trial experience into the lion’s den of superior court to oppose an injunction was an especially rotten and unreasonable thing to do. I had, after all, taken a job with A BIG FIRM to learn from highly talented and experienced attorneys. Imagine what I would have learned that October afternoon by watching the Firm’s Tallest Partner in action, instead of being fed to the wolves myself.
But even in 1986, hiding out in San Diego, holding my crying infant night and day, a world away from the east coast and that first job, and with the vague feeling I was running away from something I could not name, I was still looking back on those baby lawyer days and blaming myself. Shouldn’t have.
After the year rolled over into 1982, (did I mention they made me and me alone, work on Thanksgiving Day?) my old nemesis Legal Aid reared its head. THE FIRM expected baby lawyers to take on Legal Aid clients pro bono, and I was happy to sign up for mine. I actually thought lawyers could change the world by helping poor people back then. Wrong again.
My client was a twenty-year-old highly attractive African American woman who wanted a divorce. She’d been married a year, no kids, no money. In theory a slam-dunk legal proceeding. Her major drawback was she liked to sit in my office for hours spinning obvious yarns about abuse at the hands of her soon-to-be ex. I wondered if the lawyer-client privilege allowed me to tell her I didn’t believe a word she said.
Legal Aid helpfully sent along THE FORMS that I was supposed to file to ask for her divorce. Now, by this time, I had begun to suspect that law was not about language so much as about filling in blanks. I spent a lot of my time drafting “Interrogatories” which are questions one side in litigation poses to the other to figure out what their evidence is going to be at trial. The art of drafting Interrogatories basically consisted of copying the forms from the book, inserting the correct gendered pronouns, and sending these linguistic wonders to the typing pool. (And yes, we had an overnight typing pool that took over when the secretaries went home.)
But as I worked on the Legal Aid forms, asking for my client’s divorce, I saw better ways to say what needed to be said. I had, after all, a Masters in English and had worked on my Ph.D. I had been a technical editor. I had taught writing. Wouldn’t I be the one to know if there was a better way to say it? Apparently not.
I crafted the divorce documents and had them filed with the court where they would percolate for six months until the State of Virginia decided to free my client of her improvident marriage decision. I never expected to get anything back other than a piece of paper saying my client was a free woman. So imagine my dismay and horror, when after three months, I was personally summoned to the judge’s chambers one afternoon.
His Honor, sans robes, sat at his desk, the court file for my client’s case in front of him. I sat on the other side, in my man-tailored lawyer suit, starched blouse, floppy bow, and one-inch heeled pumps. I could see red marks that looked like blood trails all over the top paper in the file on His Honor’s desk. It was the pleading I had filed.
After ten seconds, I surmised a couple of things. One, His Honor hated me. No clue why. But he did. Two, he hadn’t called me in to thank me for volunteering for Legal Aid.
For the next hour, His Honor spat out a monologue about how THE FORMS were sacrosanct and NOT A WORD COULD BE CHANGED. According to His Honor, the words I had substituted in place of the SACRED TEXT made my pleadings totally inadequate, and my client could not get a divorce. He made it clear he had nothing but contempt for BIG FIRM ASSOCIATES who were trying to be Legal Aid volunteers. In his view, we should stick to representing only BIG BUCK CLIENTS because that was all we were good for. I didn’t have to read His Honor’s bio to figure out he’d never darkened the door of a BIG FIRM before going on the bench.
My punishment was to have my pleadings declared null and void, and I was sentenced to the ignominy of slinking back to my office and drafting new ones, this time inserting only my client’s name, her gender pronoun, and the correct dates into the text. After having these prepared in overnight secretarial, a winged-foot firm messenger deposited these linguistic gems in the courthouse. And my client would now have to wait another six months for singlehood because of my incompetence.  The first three percolating months with the WRONG WORDS didn’t count.
So what had I learned so far about being a lawyer? A couple of things. First, being sent to court to oppose injunctions was like being Daniel cast into the Fiery Furnace. Except no angel came down to get between me and the judge who said my client was lying. Major slip up in heaven that day.
Two, lawyers, whom I had thought practiced law, were actually practioners of black magic, wearing black man-tailored suits instead of wizard robes, but pretty much doing the same thing that wizards do: casting spells for dissolution of marriage using spells set out WORD FOR WORD AND NOT TO BE CHANGED in THE SACRED BOOK OF FORMS. Yep, being a lawyer was not what I’d expected. And creative? Well, law school said lawyers were creative, but so far I wasn’t seeing it.
Next time: My Head on a Pike or THE MEMO WE CAN’T BILL THE CLIENT FOR!!!! 

More Baby Lawyer Adventures or Death by Courtroom

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I began law school at the University of Tennessee in the summer of 1978. I had no idea what lawyers actually did, but liberal arts grads all around me were turning into them, so I figured I could, too. My then husband, like me an English major with a graduate degree and no teaching job, was happy to see me darken the legal doors of learning.
I came out in 1981, number two in my class, and still without much of an idea of what lawyers did. For three years I had done what I excelled at – read, memorize, and regurgitate facts – but I had never been inside a courtroom or taken a deposition or even seen a real live client. I had done one mock oral argument in moot court my first year with sweaty hands, a dry mouth, and a heart slamming in my chest. That was the entire extent of my “practical training” in law school. (Think medical school where you memorize the symptoms of every disease on earth but never see a body, dead or alive.)
At first being a lawyer wasn’t so bad. I’d accepted a job with a Big Firm in Virginia where I had family, and they paid me to study for the bar all summer, sitting in the apartment they rented for me and my husband. I watched the ducks swim on the pond out back and re-memorized all the law I’d learned in three years of law school. This time, Virginia style.
On the day before Princess Diana married Prince Charles, I drove to Roanoke where I stayed in the hotel room The Firm paid for. Next morning, I put on my lawyer suit, went to the Civic Center, and sat at a long table where I took the Virginia Bar under the watchful eye of the Bar Examiners IN PERSON. They sat on a dias above us and watched us spill our brains into blue books for two, very long days. (Weren’t they bored to death?) At night, I ate room service and watched the royal wedding.
Perhaps the fate of that marriage was a metaphor for the fate of my Big Firm career.
On my thirty-first birthday in August, I put on my lawyer suit again – this time supposedly for good – and took my place in my tiny office at The Firm in the litigation section. Until the Bar Examiners certified me as “passed,” I could not sign pleadings or take depositions or appear in court as anything except a clerk. And that was just fine with me. I wrote research memoranda that, as one senior lawyer observed, he could actually follow and understand. What a concept!
But my luck ran out in October. The day after I passed the bar, I was sent to court with the Firm’s Tallest Partner (I am five feet two), to oppose an injunction that Legal Aid was seeking against one of Our Most Powerful Clients. The Firm’s Tallest Partner was only there to watch me; I was the performing bear that afternoon. Of course, it was not a major matter (or they wouldn’t have sent newly-minted lawyer me); but, as far as I was concerned, it was The End of The World.
I didn’t even know which table to stand behind in the courtroom. And what questions to ask my witness? OMG. No CLUE. I used up at least three of my nine lives that afternoon, standing mute behind the defendant’s table, listening to the judge tell me he didn’t believe my witness. (While I wondered what the witness had actually said and what to say to a judge who says your witness is lying.)
A couple of miserable hours later, the Firm’s Tallest Partner, who had watched me demonstrate total incompetence in that courtroom, walked me back to The Firm in a steady downpour, with no umbrellas. My client had been enjoined, big time. Or small time, really; but it didn’t feel that way to me. It was my own personal Trail of Tears. The Firm’s Tallest Partner had nothing to say to me on the way back. I wondered if I’d offered to throw myself in the James River, if he would have given me a push.
Never mind that I had been a successful English graduate student, teaching three sections of freshman composition per semester. Never mind that I could take kids from writing C themes to A themes and have them laughing all the way. (Beware the flying commas!) Never mind that I could recite the Rules of Evidence backward and forward, and I actually understood Constitutional Law, including the dreaded Commerce Clause. Law on the hoof was a very different animal than in the classroom, my home turf. Teaching colleagues had always said they could stand in the hallway and know which class was mine because that was the room that the laughter was coming out of. Judges don’t laugh. Killer creative comedic timing is a useless skill before THEIR HONORS.
So for the next two years, I struggled to figure out the alien world I had landed in by mistake. Next time: More Baby Lawyer Adventures or The Judge who Taught Me Why You Never Change the Words and Still to Come: the Female Partner Who wore HATS and Ate Associates for Breakfast and High Tea
Below:  the James River

Hiding in Plain Sight or Who is that Woman in the Lawyer Suit?

/in /by

So in the fall of 1986, alone in a tiny rented cottage on an island in San Diego Bay, I set off on the journey of motherhood. My lawyer suits, one gray, one beige, one black, one navy, one brown, hung listlessly in the closet of the bedroom I shared with the husband I never saw. My black, tan, and navy four-inched heeled pumps remained in their shoe boxes. For the first three months of the journey, I rarely got out of my bathrobe. After that, it was elastic waist pants and frantic dieting until, finally at my daughter’s first birthday, I could sigh with relief and zip my jeans.
The task of dealing with a constantly crying infant wiped my memory clean of what it had been like to be a lawyer, pulling twelve and fourteen-hour days in major law firms back east. I truly wanted children when I finally decided to have them, but I also think I was on the run from a profession I hated and that I had never intended to join.
When I was eleven years old, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I read constantly even before I went to school, and I began to write stories in third grade. I had no doubt in my child mind that I was born to be a creative artist until the night I announced my intended destiny at the family dinner table. My rational, linear father went crazy, outlining the impossibility and stupidity of trying to reach that goal. I slunk back to my bedroom, full of shame for aspiring to be something so outrageous and totally WRONG.
The trouble was, the dream of writing stories would not go away. I realized it was safer to hide my identity underground, as I went on writing. By age thirteen, I had finished a three-hundred page novel.
I thought by going to graduate school and getting a Ph.D. in English, I would move forward with my dream of being a writer. But by the time I had my Masters in English, I could see the reality of every graduate student’s situation: THERE WERE NO JOBS IN UNIVERSITIES TEACHING ENGLISH. And graduate school, like all the other forms of school I had encountered, did not foster creativity.
In the 1970’s, disappointed liberal arts majors of all kinds were going to law school, including, for the first time a significant number of women. I went to talk to the Assistant Dean at the University of Tennessee College of Law about enrolling. She said, “The law is only words. You’re good at words, right?”
Good at words, yes. Good at nit picking trivialities, no. I graduated second in my class; I was admitted to the Order of the Coif, the Phi Beta Kappa for lawyers. I was wooed by major law firms in New York, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Richmond, Virginia. I studied for and passed the Virginia bar in 1981.
But as soon as I sat down at my new associate desk in Richmond, the overwhelming lack of creativity that is THE LAW began to choke me. I had never been so bored in my life.
Next: Driving the wrong way down a one-way street (my perilous adventures as a baby lawyer) and how I was nearly gobbled alive by a female partner with a penchant for hats
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