LIFE S MORE THAN A CABARET, OLD CHUM

Agnes Bernelle is probably best known for the one thing through which she would least like to define herself. Yeah, you guessed it, European cabaret even though that blood-soaked, black-hearted, giggling beast has lately been unleashed to maybe a greater degree than ever before in Ireland.
You don t believe me? Check out Marianne Faithfull, who recorded one of last year s most resonant albums, 20th Century Blues: An Evening In The Weimar Republic, featuring mostly the songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Or Jack L who bellowed his way through an album of tunes written largely by Brel and sells out the Olympia theatre whenever he s in town. Or the ridiculously under-rated Jeanette Byrne who conceived, created and delivered a stunningly beautiful mini-album of Brel and Michel Legrand songs, Une Femme (Avec Toi) , which someone out there really should help her develop as a full scale work as soon as possible. And as for Gavin Friday, well, everyone knows that the Shag Tobacco album is his take on an evening in the capital of the Irish Republic, before the still-missed demise of Mr. Pussy s Cafe-De-Luxe.
Not that any of this is new, or news, to Agnes. After all, she is one of the few remaining original interpreters of Brecht s material. And was the first person to base an entire evening s theatrical production on these songs more than 30 years ago, when she opened her show at London s Establishment night-spot.
But before we speak about why Agnes Bernelle doesn t want to die being remembered only for this innovation, or even for her new fragment of autobiography, The Picture Palace, let s get her response to why Ireland seems to be suddenly swallowing up European musical influences big-time. Does Agnes feel she gets enough credit for her influence in these areas, particularly her album Father s Lying Dead On the Ironing Board which she recorded in 1985 and which was produced by Philip Chevron and a certain Elvis Costello?
Do I feel I get enough credit? That is a difficult question to answer. We all have our little conceits and probably never feel as though we ve been given enough credit, she says, seated near a winter-lit window in Dublin s Central Hotel. Though, I must say that the Sunday Independent sent me Marianne s CD to review and I was reluctant at first, explaining that if I don t like it people will say it s sour grapes and if I like it I will go over-the-top to prove whatever . But then I listened to it and thought it absolutely wonderful, even though I didn t like the show itself, at the Abbey. Largely because her own songs, she did in very great stillness and they were very effective because of that. But when she took out the Weill songs she started wriggling her hips! You can t do that to a Brecht song! These songs must be done still, with maybe a single gesture to emphasise a point. You don t wiggle your hips!
Not even while interpreting Pirate Jenny , which is about a prostitute?
No. Sex is not just wiggling hips. It is quite a different thing. And Marianne has it in her voice. So it comes over wonderfully well on the CD, that s why I gave it a great review. But I am going to have a good talk with her. Though I did see her acknowledgement to Agnes B and said to her, in my notice, could this be me? If so, thank you, Marianne . But I don t know why she didn t put my proper name.
Yet I do think she was right to mix in the work of other composers with the songs of Brecht. I did that, too, though not at the very beginning. But in time I put in people who inspired him and people he inspired. Wedekind. Ringelnatz. Christopher Logue. Adrian Mitchell, a whole score of them. And then, after I got afraid people would start saying oh, there s Bernelle, with all those old songs again , people started bringing me up-to-date modern songs that were suitable. People like Marc Almond. Daniel Cainer. Then I found things by Maxwell Davis, though I changed a few words in his work, which Davis had no problem with.
Agnes, apparently, wasn t totally besotted by Frank McGuinness translations of Brecht for Marianne.
Not totally. Some were an improvement, but not all. I objected to his use of the word sweet , as in sweet shark in Mack the Knife. If that was meant to be sarcastic, it doesn t come across. But then I also don t think Marianne should have ended her show with those new words for that song, which is very similar to the way I ended my show. Yet I ve always loved Mack The Knife , even the pop versions by people like Bobby Darin. I love that. It certainly swings!
The last time she spoke to Hot Press, a decade ago, Agnes claimed she also had written to Leonard Cohen asking for suitable songs.
He never replied! she says, laughing. But Tom Waits did, and he promised to write me a song, though that never happened, because his career took off at that point, in films. But he did suggest I do one of his old songs and I have been doing that ever since, Broken Bicycles . And Tom Waits claims he was influenced by one of my records, which is very flattering. But the main difference between what I do and what a lot of these people do is that they take their material from cabaret, whereas 90% of the songs I do are by published poets. That s why I can still do them. Real cabaret is of the moment and fifty years later wouldn t mean a thing.
Comparing the work of these poets to most popular music, Agnes once referred to the stupefying mediocrity of pop.
I haven t changed my mind about that, since the last time we spoke, she asserts. Though I have a great God I love to listen to right now and that is Jack L. I think he is wonderful. He has a good voice but a tremendous feeling for what he does. He can get an audience in the palm of his hand. I ve seen him do that. He has this enormous energy, plus the stillness I talked about earlier. And I think it s very, very healthy that all this is happening in Dublin.
Maybe if pop music was going anywhere interesting people wouldn t be turning back to this stuff. These days it seems to me all you have to do is take a line and repeat it 50 times to the same two notes and that s supposed to be a pop song! Well, it isn t, as far as I m concerned. Though I do use some modern songs, one by Dillie Keane. I asked her for a funny song and she sent me this tearjerker that it took me three weeks to learn to sing, without crying! And audiences respond much the same way to it. It s called Look Mammy, No Hands . God, it works!
Agnes Bernelle has always claimed that for any song to work when she covers it she must relate to the lyric. In her book she talks about being a monster as a child. Brecht s work often demands that we recognise, if not accept, the monstrous side of human nature. So, is this a part of the human condition and herself with which Agnes can happily live?
Every child, if you spoil it, has the potential to be a monster, but most grow out of that, she reflects, a little tentatively. Can I be monstrous now? I can, in my imagination. If somebody really upsets me I can think up the most fiendish things I could do to them. And I get a lot of pleasure out of that!
But would Agnes draw back if she had to consider that she actually could be evil and harm someone?
I would, yes.
How, then, can she travel into the bowels of a great Brecht song, like Mack The Knife , which, in a sense, celebrates the magnificent virtuosity of a murderer? Or, again, Pirate Jenny in which that bittersweet-hearted prostitute dreams of burning down a hotel, hoping that everyone in that establishment will end us as a mass of ashes on a floor?
But that is just a fantasy Pirate Jenny has because she feels she has been so degraded by certain people. I haven t been degraded enough, I guess, Agnes responds, slowly. The only person who made me feel like that was my girlfriend, who ran off with my husband, Desmond Leslie, as he was known then. She did cause me to say, I ll shoot that bitch and someone told me she actually bought a bullet-proof vest. That s the only time I felt like that. On the other hand, when my husband locked me out of our house after he moved her in, what I wanted to do was not so much kill him as much as expose him. First of all, I wanted to divorce him which, at the time, of course, I couldn t do in this country. But I also wanted some judge to say to him, in public, you have behaved like an absolute pig . That was my dream. I didn t want to kill him. His image, that s what I wanted to kill.
Agnes Bernelle pauses, her voice rippling with what clearly still is suppressed anger.
Actually, my feelings have been greatly relieved by one sentence somebody spoke, she continues. My husband once rang me up and said, I am as happy and as free as a bird. I have divested myself of everything I own . But I have been told that I, as his legal wife, in this country, have rights to one third of everything he has. Well, what he did was put it all into a discretionary trust so he no longer owns it when he dies. So he didn t leave it to my children, who are his sons, he wanted to leave it to his eldest daughter, by this other lady. And he got hold of a lawyer and an accountant who knew the whole thing was illegal because I hadn t signed it. And they persuaded him that this was fine. But I rang him up and said, Desmond, you think you have settled your estate. You haven t. There is going to be the most appalling trouble when you die because I can blow this thing sky high . He said, don t be ridiculous, you have no rights. Then we had a great big, family meeting in the castle and the lawyer and accountant were there and after a while the accountant finally said, well, there really isn t any point with us carrying on with any of these plans, until we know what Aggie wants . Desmond said, what do you mean? And the accountant said, without her, this is not legal . And that was such a wonderful moment! So I told them what I wanted, and, in the end, Desmond signed it over to the five children, my three, and her two. So I m happy with that resolution. But that s hardly me acting like a monster, is it?
Hardly. But shifting focus to a star beside whom Agnes is photographed in her book Marlene Dietrich what is Agnes response to the recent documentary which revealed Dietrich to be quite monstrous at times, a Mommie Dearest-type mother, secretly having two lovers in her holiday home at the same time and, apparently treating many of her male and female, lovers like shit?
I didn t see that documentary, but I read the daughter s memoirs, on which that documentary was based, and thought the book was really trashy, Agnes responds, angrily. I mean, does she need to tell us that her mother had a leaky gall bladder? As for the other stuff, I don t care tuppence whether somebody is bisexual or has six lovers at the same time. Originally, I didn t know any of this about Marlene but, later, one would have learned a lot about her sex life, though she never came on to me!
But where Maria made her mother out to be a real monster, was by suggesting that Marlene made her father s mistress have abortions. We all knew that Marlene supported the father and his mistress but now Maria claims she forced that woman to have abortions because she didn t want people to know about this. Then the woman went insane, Maria claims. That is fairly monstrous. But I don t believe it, in the context of this book, which is not only mean-spirited but fairly unbelievable, at points. I mean, she quotes, verbatim, conversations her mother is supposed to have had when Maria herself was only four! Are we to believe that?
On the other hand, aren t some people bound to find relatively unbelievable certain claims made in Agnes book? Such as Agnes saying that, at one point, she happily helped to choose dresses for one of her husband s lovers? Even in an Ireland where countless husbands and wives now undoubtedly have secret lovers, doesn t this strike Agnes as fairly liberated, to say the least?
Yes. But a lot of this happened when I was in London, though, I admit that this kind of behaviour was far from the norm even there, at the time, Agnes suggests. Yet the point is that I went through analysis back then and my analyst once said, but, you re not jealous? and I said, No. But then I m not living in the jungle . And she said, You are living in the jungle and you re not facing it . She obviously thought there was a lack in me. But I didn t feel that threatened in terms of many of my husband s lovers because I knew they were no danger to our marriage. Until, as I said earlier, that other woman came along. Then I really went over the top, occasionally. I didn t want to kill her, even though I said I would.
Yet there also was that other woman who, in this book I call Suzy and I resented her because she vaguely broke up the marriage. She didn t know the marriage was still going because he told her it had been over for years. So I then asked her to lunch, thinking it would shame her, seeing this home and the children. And it was then I realised that she didn t even realise he was still living there.
That said, does Agnes agree that many women would find it exceedingly difficult to deal with not only the fact that their companion was having an affair but that he had made another woman pregnant, which is something she, at one point, had to contend with. Likewise, surely she can sympathise with a husband who might not feel too delighted to discover that his wife is pregnant by another man?
I certainly understand the rage a man would feel in those circumstances, and I don t know why I, as a woman, didn t feel that way, at the time, Agnes reflects. Nevertheless, I still have this open attitude to sexuality, in a sense. I have a daughter who recently got married. She had an affair with her husband for two years and she had other affairs and he had other mistresses. They d say none of that was serious, just flings . Then, suddenly, they decided they must get married and not look sideways ever again. And she said, if he ever . . . and I said, please, darling, don t have that rigid attitude. He s an attractive man. He may not always be faithful . And I would hate you to give up the whole marriage, because of that, especially when you might have children . So, you see, I m still a bit like that. And I worry about her being exactly the opposite, though she would be considered to be right and I would be considered to be wrong. I know that.
On the other hand, perhaps Agnes marriage was too open. As in those evenings when they both went to a particular London nightclub and Desmond would leave with another lover, leaving Agnes to be picked up by another man. Many post- 60s liberated lovers might see this as the ideal marriage; others would say it is little more than a recipe for disaster.
That s just the way we lived at that particular point, she says. But my friends would warn me, even then, to get away from Desmond. Not because of his women, but because they felt he was no good for me. Yet there is no doubt he was a charming rogue. He swept me off my feet, to begin with, as I describe in the book. And I did decide we were going to be lovers from the beginning and told my mother so. Indeed, I told her, on the night I was going out to lose my virginity to Desmond, at 22, that this is what I intended doing, because she wouldn t have let me go, otherwise. But she didn t mind that. She was more jealous of my girlfriends at the time because, I think she confused them with my father s girlfriends, of which there were a few. She was far more jealous of my girlfriends than my boyfriends.
Aggie s father also called the young Agnes Buddy and tended to treat her as though she were a boy. Did any of this lead to sexual confusion? If not Marlene Dietrich, then would Agnes ever have been sexually attracted to a woman, for example?
Just once, as far as I can remember, she muses. We had a party in London and John Osborne arrived without his wife Mary Ure, who was playing in Look Back In Anger that night. Then, as the party was going on, there was a ring at the door and I opened it and saw Mary Ure in this blue, velvet cape and I suddenly thought, if I was a lesbian, that would be for me. Apart from that nothing like that ever was part of my life.
But would Agnes Bernelle have been held back from this form of sexual exploration by those feelings of Jewish guilt she writes about in her book and which, she says, have bedevilled her all her life? Indeed, at one point her good old, clearly ill-informed daddy told her that, having felt pleasure she must feel guilt.
No. It wouldn t have been that. I just wasn t attracted to women, in that way, Agnes reflects. And, yes, because of what my father did say, at that point, there were times, following pleasure, when I would sit around waiting for the pain to arrive! But if, for example, I had met a man at that night-club I went to with my husband, I wouldn t feel guilty. I d wake up with him the next day, think, that was lovely but I m not about to pack my bags and leave Desmond because of this . That gave me reassurance. And, strangely enough, I could enjoy the sexual act without feeling guilt, though I did think this was some form of masculinity in me. My mother would say that a woman s role is in the kitchen, to serve, but I never, ever thought the same thing applied in the bedroom. Maybe because my father had always told me that I should remain free-spirited, not play the traditional role for women. So I had none of those inhibitions.
As such, the guilt I felt was because I never wanted to be the subservient woman in the house. I only felt guilty because I always wanted to work in the theatre and do creative things. I honestly, really did feel guilty for a long time because I was never satisfied with a handsome husband, nice home, healthy children. I always wanted more. And until I was into my thirties and met other women who felt the same about this, I used to think I was a freak. But sexual pleasure never really made me feel guilty. Why should it?
These other women Agnes Bernelle met in London in the late 1950s, when she began acting. Acting later led to directing which, she admits, probably gave her the greatest gratification in her life.
That means more to me than my daily life, she explains. As in the play s the thing , or whatever. That s why I can be such a bully in theatre, whereas, at home, I m a real softie and let people walk all over me. But in the theatre I don t take nonsense from anyone. And I didn t even from the beginning, as is patently obvious from that story in the book, about how I turned on director Basil Dean, in London. In fact, Maurice, the man I m with now, says I am a tyrant in this respect. But then he should know. He is a tyrant too! So people are right to say I m terribly patient in my private life, but not when it comes to work.
Yet isn t this art-is-all-that-matters-philosophy partly a consequence of the fact that Agnes Bernelle comes from a family where the respect for self expression, at that level, was of paramount importance? Particularly acting, given the fact that her father originally ran a number of theatres in Berlin, where she was born in 1923.
Yes, it is, she concedes. And there never was any doubt that I would go into acting. That, as I say in the book, is why they called me Agnes, after that other actress of the same name. And even during the Second World War when I played Vicki of the Three Kisses on that BBC radio programme, I always saw that as just a role I was playing, a way of getting across propagandist messages to help defeat the Nazis. For a long time I always said I did all the dirty tricks we had to do in the War because we had to get rid of the Nazis and that we had to bomb Dresden, and so on. But I don t feel that anymore. I feel that evil burns itself out and that we could have saved millions of lives and much suffering if we hadn t waged the War. I said that once on television and everyone was horrified. But I really do feel that now. And saying this is a reversal of my entire lifetime philosophy.
Agnes is not exaggerating. Her role, during the War Years, broadcasting propaganda from the BBC where she was employed as a form of Armed Forces sweetheart was very much rooted in her first-hand experience of the Nazis, back in her homeland of Germany. Whether that meant, at one point, standing in line and watching Hitler parade by and strangely, stupidly thinking he was quite handsome or simply remembering the time her mother was approached by the SS who wanted her to carry packages to Britain, a request which immediately prompted the mother, Frau Bernauer to follow her husband, Rudolf, to that country where he had already fled, to escape the Nazi scourge. And where Frau Bernauer finally collapsed under the pressure.
At that point I had many personal reasons for working to rid the world of the Nazis and that s why I believed in getting across those propagandistic messages through my broadcasts, Agnes remembers.
For most of my life I believed that. But now, as I say, I think that although the millions of Jews would have been, yes, persecuted, they would not have been incarcerated in concentration camps, and all that, if the Nazis had not been cut off from the rest of the world. But, as a child of six or seven all I remember is having to ask schoolmates why they were throwing mud at posters of Adolf Hitler. I really didn t become aware of the full scale of Nazi horrors until years later when I returned to Germany. And, as I describe in the book, we arrived at this place where they used to hang people on meat hooks and I found myself reading, on one of the walls, the story of the chap who had been executed for listening to our radio station. That brought it all into focus for me. I ve never really recovered from the realisation that struck me at that particular moment.
Agnes has told this story before, to, among others, Hot Press. But isn t it possible that this particular case may be a mis-application of her legendary Jewish guilt ? After all, how does she know that this man was listening to her show, in particular?
Well, he was listening to some of our broadcasts, that I do know, she says. The story was that here was this man listening to the black radio from abroad which was the BBC World Service, or wherever, for whom I worked at the time. And the real point is that even if he wasn t killed as a result of listening to our programme, many other chaps must have been. I do believe that. I m sorry, but I can t help that, Though I do see what you mean about my maybe mis-applying my Jewish guilt. Yet, on the positive side of all this, I m sure than many of the coded messages we sent out through my Vicki of the Three Kisses programme also helped save lives. As I say in one story in the book, we certainly saved that U-Boat commander s life, definitely. Someone once said to me, be careful, when you go back to Germany, because that U-Boat commander might put a knife in your back . I said, he won t. I saved his life. So, yes, I am aware of all this.
So, why has Agnes waited so long to write this, the first volume of her memoirs?
I didn t know I could write, although I have done little bits along the way, like that report I wrote on going back to Berlin in the 1950s, which is included in the book, she responds. I thought you could only call back memories if you had people around a table, for example, talking to you. I didn t realise you could actually start with a blank piece of paper and take it from there. At least, in not in the sense that it might become a book. Now I wish I d have done it earlier. But Maurice, the man I m now living with, was very helpful. He said you ve been going around pregnant with this bloody book for so many years, I will pay for you to go to Annamackerrig and you sit down for a week and get the thing started. And that s what I finally did. And the response has been wonderful, especially from critics.
Not that it was quite as easy as that, Agnes explains.
Well, sometimes in my life my parents come back too vividly in dreams and I wasn t sure if I could handle that. Even now, I don t know that I did. My father always comes back in those dreams and I find myself closing the door on him, saying no, this is not the place, you don t belong here . And even though he died years ago, I never dream of him dead. But with my mother it s more often me screaming with no sound coming out. Because I do blame her, basically, for what happened to my eldest son, Sean. Though I haven t addressed that in this book, will keep it for the next, if I write about it at all. In fact, I can t even say to you now what is wrong with my son because he lives in a state of total denial.
Yet what is in the book is that my mother used to say, don t touch that child, you ll kill it . And I do blame her for that. And the other day, he came into the kitchen and I said how did you sleep? and he said very, very well but then suddenly he said, did you kill me last night? . I said of course not, you re standing there . And he said you did, you bastard you! Then he stormed out of the kitchen and I went to the sink to wash up the breakfast things and suddenly felt somebody hitting me at the back. I turned round and it was my son and he said, you are trying to kill me . He practically broke my nose. Then I locked myself into the bedroom and he smashed through the door. And then he chased me into the garden, stopped and suddenly said, but I love you as my mother and it suddenly brought back all this thing of my mother saying, don t touch him, you ll kill him . That was a long time ago. But these things take time to come out.
So does this leave in a core sorrow in the life of Agnes Bernelle at the moment?
Yeah. Maurice doesn t like Sean and the only way he can survive in the house is by pretending Sean isn t there. That has a very bad effect on Sean, who invents all these people to talk to, because he doesn t get enough playback in the house itself. But yes, one day I will have to write about all that. People say, write about the second half of your life and don t mention this but how can I do that when it is half of my life? I don t know how I could do that. Maybe I can write about it without naming it. But I must say that such shadows don t dominate this book. It s more of a celebration of my life. And I wanted it to be that, which is why it stops at the point I arrive in Ireland. The next book will be much darker. At the end of his review Fergus Linehan, in The Irish Times, said what comes out of this book is a person who will always dust herself down, get up and carry on . And that is nice. And true, I hope.
Nevertheless, Agnes admits that if she were to die before writing the next volume of her life story she d die feeling she has been an abysmal failure. Why?
Because I never achieved the things I set out to achieve, she reflects. In fact, the book is the nearest thing to what I would like to be doing. It has made a tremendous difference to how I feel about myself. The cabaret means nothing to me, absolutely nothing, which, of course, does make quite ironical the fact that this is probably what I m best known for. But the fact is that I only got into cabaret because I was out of work and I needed to create some work for myself. And that s what I see it as, little more than an opportunity to earn a living.
So when people say I ve succeeded in, say, keeping Brecht s music alive, bringing all that material to a new audience, I go yes, maybe . And if I have done that, it is a success, in one way. But it is not what I set out to do. It s not the thing I would want to bear my name, not what I wanted to be doing. What I would like to have been is somebody like Dame Peggy Ashcroft. I d love to have been Peggy Ashcroft. She worked with all the famous actors when she was young and always did wonderful parts all her life. That would have been my idea of success.
So does Agnes regret never going to Hollywood, for example, when she had the chance?
Not really. As I say in the book not many women made it from London to Hollywood, she replies. Besides, when the Metro Goldwyn Meyer people didn t pick up the tickets I left for them I knew they weren t interested in me as an actress. They were interested in me as a girl with good legs and lovely hair. And why? Not to make me a famous acting star, but to have girls in Hollywood for the visiting firemen as it were. The businessmen, the visiting dignitaries. It was a sort of high-class prostitution that was going on at the time. It went on in London, too, but I didn t see myself in that role. Which doesn t mean there weren t suggestions made along these lines, to me, in London. There were. In fact, there was one chap who actually sold me! He invited me for a drink and then went off and I said I better go, too and these people said, you can t! We paid for you! So I just left.
Nevertheless, there were many points in her life when Agnes was broke and left abandoned in Grade A hotels across Europe. At times like that did she ever consider humouring any of the rich men who approached her and made similar propositions?
No, because I always found those rich men so boring, she says, laughing. Though I probably would have done much better, if I hadn t. And I think that s what the MGM people had in mind. So I m hardly going to regret not going for that.
But I do remember one incident, which I didn t put in the book. There was an actor called Harry Green, who befriended me. He was a fat, elderly man, but nice and I used to go out with him, occasionally. Then Charlie Chaplin came to London and Harry said, would you like to meet Chaplin and try to get into his film? and I said, I d love to. So we went to the studio and I told Chaplin about myself and he said, I think there is a part you could play. Nothing happened. I waited and waited and waited. But then I discovered that the particular part he told me about had already been shot. Yet Chaplin was going through the motions because he thought that Harry was doing this in order to get me into bed. So, in fact, he was keeping Harry happy.
That s how the whole film industry was in those days. Especially when I was 21, 22, 23. Though things changed later when the British Film Industry started to like women that were not Jane Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe. And I really resented being left out of the film industry when that change came about, with Woodfall films and all that.
I was left out for two reasons. Because I had married Desmond, who was deemed to be a social butterfly. And I was seen to be the same. The other reason I didn t realise until last year, when my daughter got married and her godmother, Rennie Goddard, came over to Ireland. I hadn t seen her for years. I showed her some of this book and she said, you know you are unfair, suggesting that because of Desmond you didn t really make it in the British theatre or film. I m a refugee, you re a refugee. We didn t have a chance. And I now think that may be true. But, even so, overall, I would have to say I do believe that I haven t achieved many of the goals I, or my parents, set for me, as an actress. The closest I came to it was here in Ireland, though when things got tough here the ranks did close against me, no matter how great my reviews had been. I had, in fact, to create my jobs. 60% of what I ve done here has been set up by myself. And at one point I did say, I m sick and tired of setting things up. I ve made enough young people stars, by giving them their first breaks, now I m going to sit back and wait for things to turn around . But things don t turn out that way, in the end.
The only people who have been good to me are young companies. The Abbey never wanted me. And the Gate Theatre gave me only one job, and it was the smallest part in the play. And the irony is that I did give Gate actors like Stephen Brennan his first break. Yet that s the kind of stuff I ll write about in the second book!
But as for what I ve done in cabaret, when people say that s wonderful it doesn t mean a damn thing to me. So I really do wish people would stop seeing me in just this context. Hopefully now they will, after this book. n