I started my directing textbook with the simple words: "I am a play director." So I was for twenty-five years, in college, in graduate school, and as a theatre professor. In the early years, when I was young, I directed three productions a year; later, when teaching at larger universities with larger theatre departments, I directed two or even only one. In the end, when I had determined to leave academic life to become an attorney, I ceased directing altogether. But still, if asked, I would have responded, "I am a play director." It is what you
are; it is not what you do.
Until very recently, then, the last play I directed was at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I served as Department Chair and Producer of the semi-professional McLeod Summer Playhouse. During the summer of 1988 I was set to direct
The Sound of Music, an audience favorite. But I had just stepped down as Chair, and another faculty member took pity on me and stepped in to direct the musical. That freed me to direct a play that spoke to me in a way
The Sound of Music did not:
Children of a Lesser God. It was an unusual choice for a summer playhouse that usually did musicals, Neil Simon-type comedies, and mysteries, but I was still the producer and we made that choice.
I had a history of success with modern serious drama, although if I told the truth my favorite type of play to direct was period comedy. I had particularly enjoyed the experiences of directing
Twelfth Night,
A Midsummer Night's Dream, and
The Miser, but the list of my most successful productions included
The Glass Menagerie,
Equus,
Old Times,
The Zoo Story,
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,
The Member of the Wedding, and
Amadeus. So
Children of a Lesser God was right in my wheelhouse. I was able to cast it successfully, using one of our own students who, while hearing herself, had been raised by deaf parents and was thus a native "speaker" of American Sign Language. Additionally, I was able to hire a consultant in ASL to teach the rest of the cast. We rehearsed for two weeks, while the actors simultaneously rehearsed
The Sound of Music, and opened the season most successfully. I received notice that the local deaf community was going to picket our performances because I had not cast a deaf woman in the major female role, but I invited the leadership to a dress rehearsal and when they met with the actress they got on board. The production sold out. Until the past two months I counted this production as my most successful product and the process that I enjoyed more than any other. I felt that it was a great way to end my directing career. Although I continued to teach full time at SIUC for another five years, I knew that simultaneously I would be going to law school part time and that there would be no time for directing. And so it proved.
Twenty years later I had retired from SIUC, become an attorney, and was looking forward to permanent retirement. Carol retired in 2008 and I followed six months later. While still working I had begun acting again, taking one small role and one large role at the Charleston Community Theatre. They invited me to serve on the Board of Directors and I agreed, although I only served one year because of conflicts with the then President. I broadened my local acting experience, taking medium-to-large roles with Charleston's other community theatre and small-to-medium roles with the Eastern Illinois University theatre group. The director I worked with twice at EIU had received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University, the same place I did my undergraduate work. As it happens we were trained in directing by the same people, so naturally enough her directing style was very similar to mine. The other director I worked with at EIU was a guest artist who had been my student at SIUC while earning his M.F.A. in directing, and who had later been on the faculty there. Later still he had become a faculty member and head of the acting and directing program at Western Illinois University. Needless to say I was as comfortable with him as my director as I had been with the previous EIU director. I was not, however, comfortable with any of the directors in either of the community theatres I had worked in, and in one of them the situation was so bad that I resolved never to work there again. Since I felt I had "aged out" of working as an actor alongside college kids, that limited my options somewhat. I acted in a couple of historical dramas written and directed by a professional who had trained at EIU some years ago and had returned to the area after a lengthy sojourn to Florida, but it looked like my primary option going forward would be the Charleston Community Theatre. So I continued to take small-to medium roles with the group.
Along the way I had organized my notes from various directing classes I had taught (and taken) over the years, and I put together a series of blogs on another platform entitled, "Notes Toward a Textbook in Play Directing". If interested you can find them in my book,
A Retirement Blog (https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Blog-February-2012-August-ebook/dp/B00QQRJI9K/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8). These were collected and edited into my directing textbook,
The Art and Craft of Play Directing (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Play-Directing/dp/1300888482/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8), which has been adopted as a primary or supplemental textbook for the beginning directing course at several colleges and universities. In an Introduction and five main chapters (Theatre and Art; The Interpretation of the Script; Composition and Movement; Working With Actors; and Matters of Style) I laid out what I considered to be an effective way to teach play directing. I assumed that the teacher of the course and I would collaborate, with me providing a theory and him or her providing practical examples and exercises. The first course would culminate with each student directing a one-act play.
The book has been a steady earner, funding trips to New York and Chicago to see plays and musicals, most recently
Hamilton. But more than bringing in money the book awakened dormant memories and yearning: I wanted to direct again! By that time it had been 28 years since I had last directed, but I was convinced it was like riding a bike: once you learn how you never forget. So I went to the Board of Directors of the Charleston Community Theatre and told them I wanted to direct. I think they were at least somewhat skeptical, but they agreed. Then I told them the title I wanted to do: Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman. As I had worked with them several times before I had a good idea which actors might be available, and I was convinced that I could cast the production successfully. I didn't tell them this, but like most directors I would not take on a project like
Salesman unless I knew I had an actor who could play the main role. In this case I had two, one of whom was on the Board and the other of whom was the professional actor, director, and playwright with whom I had worked as an actor on historical dramas earlier. Either one of them could have played the role, although they would have given vastly different performances despite my vision of the play and direction. A director cannot bend actors to his or her will, or even vision of the production; a director must collaborate with actors, working within their physical, vocal, and emotional limits to create a production within the range of possible productions that serves the play and engages the audience. The Board was skeptical again, but in the end they acquiesced. I was to direct
Death of a Salesman as the first production in the Charleston Community Theatre's new space, the basement of the local Elks' Club.
CCT had been mounting its productions at the University's small art center on campus, but that facility had an ambitious new director who was installing a new exhibit in the space that would remain in place for eighteen months. So CCT had to find a new home for the final production of the 2016-17 season (
Salesman) and all three productions of the 2017-2018 season. Of the possible locations, the basement of the Elks' Club was the best option, and
Salesman would initiate CCT's use of the space.
Essentially the basement was a large empty space, with a small raised platform (laughingly called a stage) at one end and with steel and concrete posts scattered throughout. The ceiling was about 10 feet high, but with steel beams spanning the area between the walls and steel joists between beams. At least the ceiling was open so there would be hanging positions for lighting instruments, but there were not enough electrical circuits to power the number of instruments we would need. I had designed a thrust stage for the production, but the steel and concrete posts made that impossible. My remaining options were an arena stage configuration or an alley stage configuration, and I quickly decided on the alley option.
A brief word about design. I am not a scene designer, although at one time I was an accomplished lighting designer and technician. Like all directors, though, I was trained in scene design, and in a pinch I can design a simple set if I have to. Over the years I have designed scenery for productions I have directed when necessary. That was mostly when I taught at small colleges or universities where I didn't have a skilled designer. My favorite productions that I designed include
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Old Times,
Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,
The Threepenny Opera, and
The Miser. So while preparing to direct
Salesman I assumed I would not have a scene designer and prepared to do the job myself.
The basic design I decided on looked like this:
I'm rather old-fashioned, coming from the school of design that believes a scene design should be a visual metaphor for the play, and my metaphor was "two houses". Willy and Linda's bedroom was on one side, raised 24", and Biff and Happy's bedroom was on the other side, also raised 24". In between were three spaces that could be anywhere, raised 16", 8", and 16". I included audience seating in the design because I was obligated to provide at least 50 seats for patrons (CCT has a very small audience base in a very small college town located in the middle of a cornfield). The design as executed was actually somewhat larger and with more seats because the space we were working with was larger than I expected. That made the blocking somewhat less restrictive when I began working with the actors, always a good thing. The existing stage area I ignored completely, ultimately using it as a backstage area.
The floor plan being established left the question of stage properties. The usual and easy way to go would have been to use realistic set props: real beds, real tables and chairs, a real refrigerator, a real hot water heater, a real desk, and so on. Many of these would have had to have been carried on and off stage by the actors.
Salesman, though, is not a realistic play; it was first performed in 1949, a time of great experimentation in the American theatre, and the play is a combination of the realistic and the non-realistic (to be precise, the expressionistic, but why quibble?). So I determined to use realistic hand props combined with non-realistic set props. To create all of the set props I ordered about 45 black plastic milk crates in 12" and 18" sizes which, in various combinations, formed the beds, the tables, the chairs, the refrigerator, the hot water heater, and the desk. The actors could carry them in and out as needed easily, and they had the extra virtue of being perforated so the audience could see through them. The set thus not only represented a visual metaphor for the play but also expressed its style.
In addition to the set, I also needed designers (or at least coordinators) for costumes and lights. I immediately contacted an 81-year-old friend of mine who used to work for the university theatre program in Charleston to take care of the lighting. This would amount to building an entire lighting system from scratch, which I could do but would require more time than I would have. As LD/TD (lighting designer/technical director) of a summer stock theatre in the mountains of Colorado in 1968 I had done exactly that. But my friend had both the time and the contacts which would enable him to borrow the equipment that we would need. He was also a very pleasant guy to work with, and I foresaw a future in which we would work together on this show a great deal. Costumes were a different problem. What we would need was not time so much as money; I decided that the best way to get the results I wanted (realistic 1949 and 1932 costumes) would be to rent them, and rentals, although effective, are not cheap.
So I inquired as to the budget and found that it was lacking. The usual budget for the technical elements for a CCT show was $3300. I had budgeted $1500 for the set, $1500 for costumes, $1000 for lighting, and $300 for props, assuming I would have to rent platforms, costumes, and lighting equipment. That came to more than I was allotted, so I made a donation to CCT to make up the rest. CCT is an IRS 501(c)(3) charitable organization, so donations to it are tax-deductible. That meant that every dollar I donated only cost me seventy-five cents or so; it was a pretty good deal. I also waived the usual stipend that went to the director; they couldn't afford my usual fee and I didn't need the money anyway. CCT was happy and I was happy; I was prepared to move forward. In the end we spent significantly less than my budget because we were able to borrow all the platforms we needed and all of the lighting equipment, and the woman who served as costume coordinator found lots of costume items at local thrift stores. We also brought in more money at the box office that CCT had planned for, so the show was a double success financially.
That brought me to the subject of incidental music. I am a firm believer in music as underscoring, to help set the mood and to mark changes for the audience. Fortunately I didn't have to worry about that this time because the music from the original New York production, by composer Jay North, was available for a modest fee. CCT paid the fee and we had the original haunting flute score for the entire show. Ironically I cut Uncle Ben's speech about his and Willy's father, an itinerant flute maker in the 1880s.
Nor was that the only speech I cut. The original production lasted about three hours, and in my opinion that is about an hour too long for a Charleston audience. So I diligently searched the text for about an hour's worth of dialogue to cut. In the end I was able to find about forty minutes' worth, but the first act still ran an hour and the second act, an hour and twenty minutes. I could find nothing else to eliminate that would not harm the play. So my only hope was that the actors would make it so interesting that the audience wouldn't mind the time they spent in those hard metal folding chairs.
That depended, of course, on finding actors who could play the roles. Fortunately I had two actors who could play Willy (not to mention, I suppose, several others who thought they could have); three women who could have played Linda, two men who could play Biff and Happy, two who could play Uncle Ben, two who could play Charley, two or three who could play Howard, and two or three women who could play The Woman. The rest just needed young, attractive people of both genders. It is my policy to cast where possible without regard to race (except for plays like
Othello and
A Raisin in the Sun), and where possible without regard to gender (as when I cast two women in
Waiting for Godot). In a period piece like this one, where gender roles are foregrounded, I didn't feel that I had much room for cross-gender casting, but race played little part. It turned out almost to be a good thing, since one of the men I had thought about for Uncle Ben did not audition and my only option turned out to be a black actor of mature years who would have been just about perfect. If anybody in the audience had questioned why a European-American Willy would have had an African-American brother, I would have just smiled. In the end, though, after I cast him he had to decline the role because of health reasons, and I was forced into finding another actor or playing the role myself. Fortunately, a quick phone call found an actor of the appropriate age who had an announcer's voice. Problem solved.
Not that playing the role myself would have been all that taxing. I had been in a production of
Salesman in a professional summer stock company in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 1967, and I knew the role and remembered all the lines. Interestingly, I had also played Bernard in the same production, with the help of some really quick costume changes and a bald wig, but I was far too old fifty years later to play Bernard again.
After two nights of auditions in February I had a cast I was immensely pleased with. The professional actor-director-playwright would play Willy, and the other possibility would play Charley. One of the three women I had thought about would play Linda; one of the others would play The Woman, and the third I cast as Jenny, a small role, but she declined the role and I cast another woman with whom I had worked previously in several shows. The actor I cast as Biff walked in the door unannounced, but with a professional-looking resume and lots of experience. He blew me away at auditions and ultimately in performance as well. One of the other two men I had envisioned in the role of Biff I cast as Happy, and the other as Howard. It would have been a difficult choice, but the actor I cast as Howard had some rehearsal conflicts and I didn't think it would have been fair to the other actors to put him in a major role.
And speaking of rehearsal conflicts! The inexperienced actor I cast as Bernard was an EIU student who had classes and labs on Tuesday and Thursday nights, making him unavailable for rehearsals. Plus, he would be in Japan for about 10 days over EIU's spring break. It turned out everyone (including me; we used the tickets for
Hamilton in Chicago I had purchased months before setting the rehearsal schedule) had rehearsal conflicts of one kind or another. Two actors were in Las Vegas at different times on vacation; one was an EIU faculty member who was in Chicago for a few days for a conference and some recruiting; two were ministers with scheduled services; a couple got sick; and on and on. I had never had to deal with such things before, but such is one of the problems with directing in a community theatre; people have lives. So we coped.
When I established the tentative rehearsal schedule I tried to accommodate all of these conflicts, and for the most part I succeeded. As I always did when I directed regularly I tried to avoid wasting people's time as much as possible. So I divided the play into about 25 French scenes (scenes of any length in which the characters on stage do not change) and sorted those scenes into five groups according to characters involved, each group of approximately the same number of pages. That way certain actors were only called for rehearsal once a week; others were called two or three times; and only what I came to call The Family (Willy, Linda, Biff, Happy) were called five times. Every couple of weeks I scheduled a run through, for which everyone was called. During the first five weeks of rehearsal, then, we rehearsed the play out of order, scene by scene, with each scene rehearsed the same number of times per week.
Each week there were different types of rehearsal. There were reading rehearsals, at which the cast read the play; blocking rehearsals, at which I gave them their positions on stage at any given time and the movement to get them from one position to another; working rehearsals, at which we fixed any problems that developed during blocking rehearsals; and characterization rehearsals, at which I worked with the actors to find reasons for their movements ("motivation") and to discover a workable subtext for the text they were speaking. As I explained to the actors, the audience does not come to the theatre for the text; they can read the text at home. They come for what the actors provide: the subtext, or what the characters mean emotionally and intellectually as they speak the text. Each rehearsal lasted between two and two and a half hours, and my goal was to have thirty hours of rehearsal time before the beginning of technical rehearsals for each hour of stage time in performance. For a show lasting two hours and twenty minutes, then, I wanted some seventy hours of rehearsal prior to tech. Why prior to tech? It is my firm belief, based on eight years of intensive training as a director and twenty-five years of practical experience, that the acting in a production must be as good as it is ever going to be at the final run through before tech. The reason is that my focus as a director will be on things besides the actors: light cues, sound cues, music cues (music and sound are not the same things), props, costumes, costume changes, etc. Things tend to fall apart at tech rehearsals and must be carefully rebuilt to achieve the level the actors reached before tech. With
Salesman I achieved the seventy hours of rehearsal that I wanted, but not all actors had as much as I wanted them to have, because of the unavoidable rehearsal conflicts.
After lines were learned in the fifth week I changed the types of rehearsals I conducted. During early rehearsals we stopped and started, making on-the-spot corrections as they were needed. This has obvious advantages, but it has one terrific disadvantage: it gets the actors used to stopping whenever anything goes wrong in order to fix it. At some point that mindset has to change, or else out of habit (in the worst case) an actor might stop in the middle of a performance and go back and try to fix something. So in my rehearsal schedules I set up "polishing" (that's polish, not Polish) rehearsals, in which the French scenes are still rehearsed, but without stopping to fix errors; and running rehearsals where, for the first time, entire acts are run without stopping. At these rehearsals I take detailed notes, which I give to the actors individually rather than waste time reading all of my notes to everyone. When there is time, I like to run a polishing or running rehearsal, give the actors notes, then run it again to fix any problems, then give them notes again. These rehearsals are followed by one or more run throughs before technical rehearsals start.
Not everyone runs rehearsals this way, but most actors are flexible enough to adapt to whatever rehearsal scheme is adopted by their director, and some are, frankly, so inexperienced they want help in whatever way it happens to come. Some actors, though, are so experienced, or so inflexible, or both, that they are uncomfortable with any rehearsal process that does not conform to their ideas of what rehearsals should be. When this discomfort is combined with the pressure or stress that comes from playing a huge and iconic role (such as Hamlet, for example, or Willy Loman), a certain amount of conflict is inevitable. So it was with
Salesman.
The fully professional actor playing Willy and I came into open, loud, and frightening (to me) conflict twice during the rehearsal period. The first time was over a single word in the text. He wanted to change it to the way he had seen it published elsewhere, and I wanted to keep it the way it was in our production script. I had reasons, and he had reasons, and we tried to explain ourselves to each other. My problem was that I did this at the end of a rehearsal in the presence of other cast members. Out of what seemed to me to he nowhere, he was yelling at me at the top of his voice, calling me repeatedly "a fucking jerk". Now I have been called a lot of things by a lot of people, but never that. Fortunately, I have been called enough other things often enough by enough other people that I recognized this for the stress-induced trauma it most certainly was. I was secretly very proud of myself for how I handled it. I gave him a few minutes to calm down, then asked in a calm voice if I could speak to him privately. We spoke for a few minutes, at the end of which he apologized (without me asking him to) to the cast members who were present. He explained that he was under a lot of pressure, and assured us all that it would not happen again. I must say I was relieved; had he walked out my choices would have been to play Willy myself (not a good solution) or have the actor playing Charley play Willy while I played Charley (also not a good solution). Fortunately I didn't have to choose the Lady or the Tiger.
And he was true to his word; the next time outright hostilities broke out between us, I was the one who yelled my head off. We were in the middle of a running rehearsal, the purpose of which was to create continuity. I had told the cast, repeatedly, that I wanted no stops, for any reason, except if they needed to ask for a line (we were not in technical rehearsals yet and prompting was still available). When, inevitably, something went wrong, he unilaterally stopped, broke the scene, and explained that he wanted to go back and fix it. I explained that I didn't want him to do that and asked him to please go on (and I'm sure I said please; I was inordinately proud of using that work when I really did not want to). He declined, and began to explain why it was better to go back and fix it then. I then rather shortly ordered him just to go on, raising my voice a little but retaining control. When he then openly refused to do so, continuing to argue with me, I lost it. I remained seated, but I screamed at him to go on, now. There was what seemed like half an hour's silence (although I imagine it was only a few seconds) while he stared at me, and then I calmly gave him his next line as if he had asked for it and things proceeded. Following the completion of the Act I apologized to the cast, citing the same pressure he had earlier, although pointedly not apologizing to him. During that silence I was once again weighing the likelihood of playing Willy myself, and I was very glad I did not have to. We had no further conflicts after that (at least in part because I treated him with kid gloves and gave in on virtually every minor point where we disagreed). Fortunately I felt his performance was brilliant, and the audience and the reviewers agreed. I also felt he might have been a somewhat idiosyncratic Willy (for example, incorporating spins on his feet and floaty hand gestures into his performance), but he clearly knew what he was doing and his performance was well within the range that was acceptable to me. So I gave him his head for the most part (which translates into him ignoring notes on line readings I gave him a dozen times until I just gave up [I wanted "There are a dozen men in the city of New York who would stake
him: and he insisted on "There are a dozen men in the city of New York who would
stake him"; he wouldn't even try it my way]). and he was a pleasure to watch perform. I noticed, by the way, that he later used that moment of silent staring very effectively in the performance, in the second act just prior to his line, "Mention my name to Bill Oliver; he may remember me." So in the end it was all good.
Brilliant though he may have been, though, the performance was very nearly stolen from him (the obvious star) by the actress playing Linda and the actor playing Biff. Of course the play is written that way, which makes it easier for actors who know what they are doing. Of those two, one did and the other may not have.
The actor playing Biff knew what he was doing and how he was going to do it from the first day. He had the intellectual tools to understand the role as well as the physical, vocal, and emotional tools to play it. It turns out that he got started at the community college in Champaign with our friend Tom Schnarre, and Tom's training is solid. In any case, the actor came to rehearsals, worked hard, learned his lines when asked, made corrections as requested, and turned in a gut-wrenching performance. While
Salesman is undoubtedly Willy's play, this Biff will be remembered by audience members for a long time. The two highlights of the production for most audience members were when Willy slapped Biff on the face (with the retort echoing through the theatre) and when the muscular and taller Biff shook Willy like a rag doll and then fell to his knees crying to his father.
On the other hand the actress playing Linda may have been a little young for the role, but she more than made up for any lack of age with compensating experience. The problem was that she has been doing important roles without the discipline that she needs. For one obvious example, her diction and vocal rate were both out of control when she started. Apparently no one had bothered to point that out to her, or perhaps none of her prior directors had the ear to tell the difference. She also had trouble differentiating between line readings. After a while she agreed to concentrate on diction and rate, even though it felt artificial, and as I predicted it soon became second nature. I felt this was particularly important playing opposite the consummate professional who played Willy, whose diction and vocal variety were an absolute joy to hear. As one simple example, in the requiem, at Willy's funeral, she has the line, "I never had the chance to say goodbye." A southern Illinois girl to the core, she kept saying, "I never had the chance to say g'bye." The difference is significant, but for the longest time she could not hear it. Similar things occurred throughout the play. But after a few weeks she could hear it, and once she could hear it she changed her vocal pattern like magic. And amazingly enough, when her diction improved so did her emotional intensity. I told her after one dress rehearsal that she was my hero; what she accomplished in a few short weeks was little short of miraculous. Nobody in the audience will ever forget the "Attention must be paid!" speech.
These were not the only wonderful performances. The actor who played Happy was energetic and inventive. The actor who played Charley was warm, friendly, thoughtful. The actress who played The Woman was sexy and grim, picking up hints from me and raising them to heights I had not imagined. The wonderful actor who played the small role of Howard (who came to the first rehearsal with all of his lines learned!) was fascinating to watch, highly inventive, and sympathetic and hateful at the same time. The reviewer in the town paper called his one scene "heart-wrenching". The actor who played Uncle Ben had a foghorn voice which he used to tremendous advantage, and when his timing was right appeared and disappeared from the stage like a ghost. He studiously ran his lines before the show every night to make sure he got them right. The inexperienced and underrehearsed actor who played Bernard finally got it all together and provided the needed foil to Biff and Happy.
Even the actors in the smallest roles played them to near perfection. The actor who played the first waiter got the laughs he was entitled to, plus one that was not in the script. Even the actor who played the lineless second waiter got a laugh. The actresses playing the two women in the restaurant hit all the right notes in their brief appearances. The fine comic actress playing Charley's secretary Jenny brought a lift to the somber proceedings.
In short the acting in this
Salesman was outstanding from top to bottom. There were no weak links. I could not have been more pleased and proud. Such a statement, of course, begs the question: Who gets the credit for that? The answer is obvious: the actors do. Whatever I may have done for and with them, they are the ones out there doing it. In my heart of hearts, though, I take a little of the credit. Happy's line, "He had a good dream; the only dream you can have: to come out number one man," was undoubtedly better when he changed the emphasis in response to my suggestion. Linda's great speech, "Attention must be paid!" became more heart-wrenching when I suggested she increase the intensity as far as she could and that if she went too far I would pull her back (I never did; it is almost impossible to take that speech too far). The basic blocking I gave the actors during the first three weeks of rehearsal freed them to worry about line interpretation and characterization rather than where they were on the stage. I could go on; there were literally hundreds of moments in the production that had my fingerprints all over them, including many of Willy's despite our conflicts. This is what the director does, but it is the actors who bring it all to life. As I said in my directing textbook, anything good that happens on stage is a credit to the actors, and anything bad that happens, including bad acting, is the director's fault.
Salesman is the first production I have directed in 29 years. It was among the best productions I have ever done, if not the best. It is likely to be the last production I direct for the next 29 years; I can't think of another play that it would be worth coming out of retirement for. I've think I've shown folks around here what a well-trained and experienced director can do, and I hope I've set a standard for CCT. I, at least, am satisfied with what I did.
