The Colorado Convention of Young People in AA

Hi, my name is Wes. I am an alcoholic.

It works.

Victoria told my story, so I guess I'm done.

Oh, some details. Yeah, it did all start in Texas.

He hangs his head in mock shame. It started in Texas.

Yeah, I started in Texas. I was born in Austin, Texas. I was actually, I got started on life a little ahead of when I was supposed to start on life. I was a couple of weeks premature and I just made, I just made up for no lost time. You know, back in those days, you know, I was born barely in the tail end of the 50s.

And back in those days, there were baby books for women who were pregnant that said,

you know, the occasional cocktail wasn't a bad idea.

During pregnancy, I think my mother took that occasionally as occasionally, how many times a day is occasionally.

And so I think I just came out of the shoot, you know, ready for alcohol, you know.

And, well, I was from Texas, shoot, you know.

I mean, it's a rodeo, right?

Anyway, I grew up in a family full of alcohol.

That's what we did.

We drank.

It was a very, our coping skills as a family consisted of say nothing.

The less you said, the better off you were, the less trouble you ended up in, the less times you got hit, the less times bad things happened to you.

And...

So I have developed a skill that was to serve me well in my alcoholic life, that mind reading skill, you know, or you just figure out in advance the lay of the land.

Who is it that I need to be for you?

Who is it that I need to be in this family?

Who is it that I need to be in the world?

What version of me do I need to sell so I don't get hit, hurt, or otherwise abused?

I learned that early on.

It set me up perfect for drinking.

I drank a couple of times before I was 18, but the consequences of stepping out of line were pretty severe.

I didn't want to get smacked.

So I stayed pretty much in line until I was 18 years old.

And in Texas, in those days, you could drink at 18.

And, man, when I turned 18, it was legit, and I was off and running.

And my family sent me a not-so-subtle hint.

Around my senior year in high school, they moved into a place that had, I have a brother and sister,

and it was my mother and father, my brother and sister and myself.

They moved into a two-bedroom apartment.

They gave a bedroom to my brother and sister.

They had a room for themselves, and they said, we're not sure where you're going to sleep here.

Okay.

So my bedroom, my last half of my senior year, was this little walk-in closet,

which worked great for somebody who liked to isolate, you know,

and could get dark in a hurry, you know, fit my mood on many an occasion.

And so I moved out, basically.

I got the hint, you know, you need to go get your own place.

So I moved out, and right after I graduated from high school,

and shortly after that, within a few months of moving out from high school,

I met Victoria. The year was 1977. The very year our speaker last night got sober.

It was just awesome and amazing to me. And by the way, the speakers here have been, I have laughed, I have cried, they have been great.

This committee has done a great job, and I've heard a lot of great sobriety here.

You guys have done awesome, and I know this is a lot of work.

So, and thank you for having me here.

So here I am.

I've moved up.

I've moved up from my walk-in closet to my little tiny apartment.

I have it properly furnished.

By properly furnished, I mean there is my guitar in the corner, an essential,

my bed, and then my furniture consisted of long-necked beer bottle cases

with, you know, cloth thrown over them because that's how I furnished my life.

No food in the refrigerator, but lots of long-neck beer.

And that was the deal, man, long-necked beer.

It was cheap.

It was the nectar of the gods.

It was what I was raised on.

Literally, water was for washing your car.

It wasn't for drinking the way I grew up.

We had this theory when I grew up.

My father had this theory.

When I was 18, he takes me out, and I get that rite of passage into manhood in Texas in those days.

And that right for him, anyway, and it was, we went to this restaurant that served alcohol.

I had turned 18.

And he goes, son, you're buying drinks for the whole family tonight.

The whole family.

It was kind of a group thing.

And so we go up, and I got to buy the drinks.

I just got ripped on my 18th birthday.

And...

My dad was proud of me for that, man.

That was the deal.

I was in the club.

I was a real man in Texas.

I was 18.

I spent the morning after my 18th birthday with one of those class A hangovers.

And it would not be my last.

So what happened to me was this.

I...

I grew up in this environment where the theory had always been when I was growing up.

If you wanted a beer, you didn't have to sneak off and get beer.

You could just go get one from the refrigerator.

I could have 14, 15, it didn't matter.

The theory being that, you know, if I didn't sneak around, I wouldn't become an alcoholic.

Granted, this was alcoholics that were having this theory and were proposing it, but...

A little bit of, the logic was a little twisted, but, you know, it was go get a beer anytime you want, but you better not drink on my beer.

Okay, so I stayed out of the beer refrigerator, mostly until I could buy my own.

And I met Victoria, and within a few months we were living together, and alcohol was the deal, and off I went.

And I want to tell you about kind of how the outside of my life looked.

This is how the outside of my life looked.

At 18, I move out.

I'm supporting myself on my own job.

I'm supporting Victoria.

I'm going to college, and I'm working a full-time job so I can pay for the rent and, of course, the furniture, the beer furniture.

And so I'm doing this, and by the time I'm 24 years old, I'm the vice president of a $10 million company.

Okay? So it's still working.

Okay, but this is how I'm having to deal with it, okay?

I'm really driven.

I'm go, go, go, go, go.

That's me.

I'm the energizer bunny, okay, especially in those days.

And, you know, I am one of those alcoholics who did a few other things than just alcohol.

Me and Dr. Bob would have got along well.

You know, we mixed other things with our alcohol.

He mixed other things with his alcohol.

I mixed other things like, you know, crystal meth and, you know, cocaine and a little recreational marijuana with my alcohol.

But as it so happened, I actually quit doing all of that stuff long before I got sober.

And so what happens is this. I'm 24. I'm the vice president of this company.

There's like 150 people that report to me. There's not like 150 people. There are 150 people.

They report to me and I am terrified.

Absolutely terrified.

I know I am in over my head.

I know I don't know what I'm doing.

This is what my head's telling me.

And so the only way I've got to deal with that,

that I know, my coping skill,

which has been my coping skill from, you know, certainly 18 on,

You know, having discovered early in life that I seem to have been born without this layer of skin that everybody else seemed to have,

and everything that came at me in the world just felt like pins and needles.

Just extremely sensitive, man.

The wind's blowing the wrong way.

It's going to screw up my psyche.

And alcohol took that away, you know?

In this respect, I just didn't notice it so much anymore.

It didn't matter to me which way the wind was blowing, you know?

Yeah.

Alcohol actually was a spiritual awakening for me.

It was the wrong kind of spirits.

It was distilled spirits, but it was a spiritual awakening.

It just came in the bottle.

So what happens is I'm 24.

I am getting plastered at lunch every day drinking three.

My standard lunch was three pictures of beer.

That was maintenance drinking.

I would go get drunk, and then I will come back and make it through the rest of the day

trying to manage this company.

And about this time I decided, boy, corporate life sucked.

My opinion hasn't changed a whole lot in the ensuing years.

And I left the corporate world and opened a recording studio in Austin, Texas,

which is perfect, because talk about drinking on the job.

It just kind of was like, well, doesn't everybody?

So I opened up this little recording studio in Austin, Texas by the University of Texas,

and proceeded to drink...

Drink, drink.

Like the sign it says in a lot of the meetings, think, think, think.

My motto was drink, drink, drink.

We did have some very innovative concepts to deal with public intoxication, though.

Mad was just getting started back in those days, and we were playing all the clubs,

and Mad is Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

We came up with Dad, which was Drunks Against Drunk Drivers.

The theory being that when you and your buddies were really getting drunk,

you just keep them drinking until they pass out and then take their keys,

and they weren't going to hurt anybody.

We were very proud of this, this dad thing.

Didn't catch on, but we thought we were clever.

So what happened is this.

I had a recording studio.

Everything's rolling along, you know, eking out of living, you know, putting bands on the radio.

doing this kind of stuff and I lost the lease on my recording studio

and couldn't find another one so now my way of making a living was gone

and I wasn't too thrilled with Austin anyway

and I decided you know the problem with Austin is they just don't appreciate

the genius that is me

They just don't get me, you know.

And so I'm going to take all this amazing talent,

and I'm going to move to a city of like 11 million people where surely I will stand out.

And so we packed up our little tent.

It was the grapes of wrath, man.

Everything I could not ship via UPS to a little apartment.

We found in an area called Korea Town of Los Angeles.

later to be the scene of people standing on rooftops with semi-automatic weapons

because the Rodney King riots broke out about, oh, about 10 months after I,

or about a year after we moved there.

So we picked a great neighborhood to move into.

So we, anyway, it's like everything we own, packed and strapped on top of a van.

Off we go to the promised land, Los Angeles, California, you know.

Get to Los Angeles, California.

I'm still drinking.

Los Angeles is a pretty good place to drink.

Started going to all the...

You know, got in with some people in the music business out there

and started hanging out at the music business parties.

Which...

It's just a parallel universe that doesn't really have much bearing to our own.

And it's a place where people do a lot of drugs, drink a lot,

tell a lot of interesting stories to each other that nobody remembers the next Monday

when you call to have that business conversation with your new best friend you'd made last Friday night.

Come to think of it, that's just like the bars I drink in in Texas, actually.

So maybe it's not so different.

So anyway, I go out there, I get involved in the music business.

sort of, meaning I go to music business parties. I'm not really doing anything. My wife in the meantime

goes out and gets a job. Now, she hadn't had a job in years. God bless this woman, she went out.

She held down a job, and that job was to prove incredibly important in me getting sober.

The magic of Alcoholics Anonymous was sneaking up on me, and I didn't know it.

Now, back in Texas, I had had a pretty, one important thing happened to me. I'd gone into a recording studio

with this guy, and by the way, you know,

Think about this for me. This is a measure of the insanity of someone like me.

I am so raw and terrified of the world. I just want everybody to love me, right?

And so what do I pick to do for a living? I'm going to go stand in front of people and try to entertain them.

Where in a business where the entertainment business is all about hearing the word no, usually accompanied by you suck.

Okay?

And so why I picked that to go heal me.

Now I know why I picked that.

I've done lots of inventory since then.

But, you know, I was going to make the whole world love me for what I thought I needed to be.

Remember that mind reading thing I was talking about earlier?

It's that thing inside of me that said, I've got to spin up some version of me to sell to you that you're going to find acceptable.

Okay.

And please give me just enough clues with the way you look at me or something you say to me

that I can stay one step ahead of you and figure it out.

Because I'm just a sentence away from falling apart here, man.

You've got to give me just enough feedback so that I can know who I'm supposed to be so you'll care about me.

Man, that is my alcoholism full-blown.

And no wonder I had to drink to deal with that, you know.

That's a miserable way to go through the world, you know.

Talk about living inside out.

That's what I was doing.

So I'm out there in LA. My wife's got this job. She's working as a dental assistant in Beverly Hills, where all the fancy people go get their teeth fixed.

And she's out there, and in the meantime, alcoholism had swallowed me whole.

I was living in this little apartment in this questionable area.

Let's just say none of the street signs were in English, so I couldn't read the local language.

I don't read Korean so well.

And so I discovered this store called Trader Joe's.

It's a store they have out in California.

Trader Joe's was perfect for an alcoholic.

At the time, they sold like 14 bottles of wine for $8.

I was home, you know, and I got my wine and my beer, and I just, I lived inside the bottle.

And I was still doing work, but nobody was hearing it because I became too frightened to go out in the world.

And, you know, if you're going to do any kind of creative art for a living, if nobody sees it or hears it,

you're going to have a hard time making a living.

Just a tip for anybody considering that.

And so I wasn't going very well because nobody was here and seeing what I was doing.

I was locked in this apartment.

So my wife is, she goes in and she's in the dental chair.

By the way, this is the what happened part of the story.

So she goes in, she's in this dental chair.

And this guy's laying down in the dental chair, and he's got an earring in his ear.

And it's a circle with a triangle inside of it.

And my wife and I being students of all things metaphysical, but especially my wife, goes, I know what that is.

And this guy goes, really, you know what that is?

And she goes, yes, I know what that is.

And he's like, and?

And she goes, that's the sacred Tejas.

And he's like, huh?

The what?

And he goes, yeah, it's the sacred Tejas, which in fact it is.

It's a...

You know, they say in the music business, amateurs borrow and professionals steal.

So AA is another in the long line of societies and people seeking spirituality

who have made use of that fine circle and triangle notion.

And the notion behind it, which actually fits the conference just great,

is that that triangle pointing up into that circle is man-seeking unity with God.

And this guy who happened to be this really, really famous songwriter,

was a famous songwriter that I'd grown up seen on TV,

and she was working on him, and he was the one with the earring.

His name was Paul, Paul W.

And so Paul says to her, well, you know, it's, it's, I may be the sacred Tejas,

but to me it's the symbol of this society that I belong to, this fellowship, that...

where we just help people stay sober and we don't drink one day at a time.

And then he asked a question.

And I was not in the room for this question.

Now, this is an important part of the story because all in our lives out there,

there are things going on that are changing our lives and we don't even know about it.

You know? And one of these days it's going to walk through the door and hit us.

And that's what I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I mean, Bill and Bob got together.

That changed my life before my life ever got started because it was waiting for me when I got here.

And so she was sitting there and this guy asked her a question and I was not in the room and that question changed my life.

And that question was directed at her.

And by the way, she was like Karen Allen in the original Indiana Jones, you know,

where in the beginning of the movie, Karen Allen drinks the bad guys under the table,

she could go shot for shot with me or anybody.

And so this guy says to her, do you have a drinking problem?

And God bless her, she answered, no, but my husband does.

She wasn't lying.

Yeah.

And then she did something else.

She played him a little cassette tape of this song demo I had worked up.

And that proved to be very important about three hours later.

Because he asked for her, for my home phone number.

And so he leaves.

He leaves.

and she calls me and says,

hey, I met this guy, Paul, you know, Paul W., you know.

And, God, you know, he's such a nice guy

and he listened to your music and he really liked it

and he's like, and he wants to talk to you about something.

About something.

You guys know what's coming, right?

So the phone rings, and so I know this has occurred, right?

I know this meeting has taken place.

So the phone rings in my little apartment, oh, about three hours later, and I pick it up, and I hear this voice.

Hi, this is Paul, Paul W.

And he says, and my first reaction was to be a smart ass.

You know, I'm going like, yeah, right, I'm Johnny Carson.

You know, why is this guy calling me?

But then he, I think it's a hoax.

I think it's a joke, frankly, that somebody's pulling my chain.

And this guy sings me a couple of lines from that song that I'd written.

And I knew that no one had heard that song except for my wife,

and now this one person that she said she'd played it for.

And so I knew it was really who she said it was.

And he goes, I hear you're trying to stop drinking.

He wasted no time.

I hear you're trying to stop drinking.

And I answered very honestly, well, I've stopped because I had for that moment.

See, I skip past this part, but about four or five years before I find myself in this room talking to this guy on the phone,

I had started getting an inkling that something was terribly wrong with me.

And I had tried to moderate and control my drinking like it talks about in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I had tried that.

I used to call them sobriety binges.

I'd go, you know, three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks.

I wouldn't drink.

And when I wasn't drinking, I was thinking about drinking.

And when I wasn't drinking, I was a miserable, angry, short-tempered, unpleasant human being.

Okay?

I have a name for that, you know, not drinking and not really sober state.

I call it so dryity.

You can get into that in recovery.

I have experienced it.

Not working steps, not going to meetings, not reaching out to other people,

not being engaged actively, having my heart open to sobriety,

living in the process of recovery.

I'm in so dryity, and it is not a nice place to be.

So I'd had my little sodriety bouts, and I wasn't drinking.

And he said, well, you go into meetings, and I go, what meetings?

I didn't know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous.

And he told me about these meetings, and he said...

Well, there's these meetings, and I'll tell you where one is.

He said there's one over here on Robertson Boulevard.

It's in a place called the log cabin.

Okay.

And it's a log cabin.

Now, I know here in Colorado, it's like,

what's the big deal about a log cabin?

You know, I mean?

It's like every nine dirt roads, there's a log cabin.

But in Los Angeles, log cabins are pretty rare.

Okay, trust me on that one.

Very rare.

Only log cabin I know of is over here in West Los Angeles.

It is an honest-to-God real log cabin,

and it has been an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for 20-some-odd years.

If you're ever in West Los Angeles...

7.30 in the morning, five days a week, there is a meeting of a bunch of drunks gathering in a log cabin in Los Angeles, California, Monday through Friday.

Just look for the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard, and you will be in the right place.

So he tells me about this log cabin meeting and says...

He says, you know, I got to go out of town, but I said, I'm not going to meetings.

He goes, well, if you're staying sober and you're not going to meetings, I want to know.

It was a trick.

The guy tricked me.

He goes, I want to know how you're staying sober and not going to meetings.

So I'll tell you what, I'm going out of town for 30 days.

And when I get back...

Let's meet.

I'm thinking, wow, I get to meet this guy.

And for some reason, I decided I would not drink for those 30 days.

Those were the 30 longest, darkest days of my life.

No alcohol, no meetings, no program, no clue that even such a thing existed.

So dryety.

There I was.

So dryity.

And so what happens is, I don't drink for 30 days, and I am a lunatic.

And I have a moment that I'm not particularly proud of, but in the interest of really being honest.

And so I never forget where I came from.

I got to tell you this little bit of this story.

My dear wife, who'd see me through thick and thin, you know, we've been together since 1977.

This is 1991 now.

She looks at me and she says, why don't you go to one of those meetings Paul told you about?

And I sat there, no defensiveness in me, of course.

No.

And I said, in my spiritual largesse, you know, spiritual giant I was well on my way to becoming.

I said, if he'll get you off my ass, I'll go.

Pretty gracious answer, huh?

Just a prince among princes there.

Yeah.

And so what happens is I get in my little beat-up van and I drive over to this place the next day.

And I see all these people milling about with little styrofoam cups and cigarettes and, you know, the coffee and the whole deal.

And I had made a deal.

I was a good dealmaker.

I had made a deal with myself.

I was a good deal.

You guys know about that deal-making stuff, I bet.

So I'd made a deal with myself that I would go up, stick my nose in the door,

say I had been to the meeting, leave, and that would be that,

and then that would settle this going to meetings nonsense.

So as I walk up to the steps, literally my knees were shaking.

I was scared.

I had no idea of what.

I was just scared.

Because that's how it usually goes, right?

It's because it's what we don't have any idea about that seems to scare us so much.

So I'm wobbling over to the front steps of the log cabin there in Los Angeles.

And this tall, skinny guy who I later came to learn had never gotten more than like four and a half minutes of continuous sobriety.

This was in that four minute range.

He reached down the steps to me and stuck out his hand and he said, welcome.

And it felt like he was pulling me up the steps of that meeting hall.

And suddenly I'm standing in a room, and the room is about two-thirds this size.

It's really big for a log cabin.

I mean, I don't know how big, the typical log cabin is.

But, you know, it was a pretty good sized room, and there's about 120 people in it at 7.30 in the morning.

So they're pretty serious about what they're doing.

They're all laughing and cutting up, and I walk through the door,

and of course, immediately I think every eye in the room is looking at me.

And I walk over and there's coffee, and thank God you didn't have to pay for it,

because I had like eight cents in my pocket.

And I get this cup of coffee and I go sit down

and the magic of Alcoholics Anonymous got me.

And here's what happened.

It wasn't the 12 steps.

They read them because they read them at every meeting.

But the 12 steps back in those first few hours and days of sobriety were like the Peanuts cartoons.

You know how when the adults talk in the Peanuts cartoons, all you hear is walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.

Step two, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.

I could just, none of it made any sense to me.

Okay?

But there was this six-foot three-inch tall, big, just super buff black guy at the podium.

who had been a Vietnam veteran, come out of Compton.

Obviously my story.

And he's talking about feeling like he'd been born without that extra layer of skin on him,

and how sensitive he was to the world,

and how scared everything made him, and how when he drank alcohol,

it made that something he could deal with.

And he told his story, and he told the truth about his heart.

And he was me.

And that saved my life. That is Alcoholics Anonymous. One drunk talking to another drunk coming straight from the heart, like I heard at 1230 today. And that saved me. That's what I wanted. I was like, man, this is great. I'm getting emotional just thinking back to it. I was like, wow, wow, this is amazing. I've never seen anything like this before.

So I got a book that gave me one.

They said, hey, you know, you don't have the money.

Just take the book.

You can pay it back by coming back.

And I'm like, deal.

And I went home.

And like the good alcoholic I am, I sat there.

I heard them say the programs in the first 164 pages.

I was listening.

And I went home that very first day.

And between the time I got home and the time I went to pick Victoria up from her job,

I read those first 164 pages.

I read them, man, I'm like, I'm going to get this thing.

Now, why?

So I wouldn't have to ask anybody for help.

That's the truth.

I was going to read this thing, have it figured out.

By the time I got to my second meeting, they were going to go, oh, yeah, step seven.

I was going to go, I know all about steps seven.

Let me tell you about step seven.

Because, see, that's my thing, you know.

I don't want to be vulnerable.

I don't want to show you my heart.

I don't want to show you how broken I am.

I don't want to be real.

I don't want to be real.

I'm supposed to be the mind reader.

I'm the guy that's got to stay a step ahead so you can't hurt me.

See, because you can't hurt me, I do all the damage to myself.

It's a preemptive strike.

I got the situation under control.

I love the alcoholics version of safety, you know?

It's like, I don't want to let anybody in.

They may hurt me.

So I'm going to build up all these defenses, all these walls.

Okay? Because if you hurt me, I'm going to end up scared and alone. So once I get building all my fortress and all my perimeter and I don't let you in, what do I end up? Scared and alone. Perfect. And that's my alcoholic thinking. My version of safe gets me the result I'm the most afraid of getting. Crazy, man. So I had it all figured out by the second meeting. Paul came back. I met this guy. He became my sponsor. And I was...

Off we went on the journey of the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In the time I have left to speak tonight, I want to talk about my journey in recovery.

Because my life in recovery has been everything I dreamed about in life,

though it looked nothing like any of the things I dreamed of.

So when you hear people in recovery say to you,

You know, if you make a list of all your dreams and X number of one day at a time's down the road, you know, you'd have sold yourself short.

That's my experience.

But it's not my experience the way I thought it would be.

Here's my experience.

I can be just about as grandiose as they come.

I mean, I did move to L.A. to be in the music business.

That's pretty just, that's a form of insanity unto itself.

Okay?

There's probably a program for it.

But anyway...

Here's what I find now, standing here in this room talking to you.

I had a list of all these things I thought I needed for my life, for my life to be good.

And what that list really was was the list of all the things I thought I needed

so that I could feel the way I needed to feel in this world,

to feel safe, to feel whole, to feel a part of something.

I had this list of things I thought I needed.

And that list of things I thought I needed

was wrong because it was based on my alcoholic thinking.

It was based on trying to pretend to be something that I thought I had to be in order to have you accept me.

And what Alcoholics Anonymous has given me, has given me a life that feels on the inside like everything I dreamed about those outside things would bring.

And the cool part of that is I don't have to worry about anybody taking that away.

I don't have to worry about losing it.

I can only forfeit it.

by going into so dryity or relapse rather than working my program.

And I'm a big believer in the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I'm one of those people that likes to talk about the book, you know, where I got sober in L.A.,

it was like a CCPaw meeting.

Man, we chanted.

I love that.

That just rocks.

I love the energy in your fellowship.

I am so grateful to have been invited to become and experience this, you know.

Where I got sober, that's what we did.

We chanted, we cut up, we had our little posseys, everybody hung together.

I'm still hanging with those people.

They've scattered all over the country into Europe and to New Zealand and you name it.

Hey, I have Skype.

I mean, I see people online.

I'm still online face-to-face with people that I got sober with 16 years ago.

We see each other just, I was sitting in my hotel room,

skyping with a guy still sponsor in Los Angeles before I came over here.

Technology is amazing.

Technology, by the way, we wouldn't have AA if it wasn't for telephone.

You know, Bill picked up a phone.

Yeah.

So now email, Skype, video conference, you name it, it's all fair game to me.

Any way I can connect to you, any way our fellowship can be in touch with each other,

that's just an extension to that telephone, the one that Bill picked up and called and found another alcoholic with.

You know? So here's how I'm, here's what I'm doing in my program. I don't want to go over, my God, you know, you've run along at a meeting.

You just just stirs up a lot of bad feeling. I just don't want to do that.

So I'm a big believer in living, what I call living in the steps, you know, and there's all, you're all kinds of things in Alcoholics Anonymous.

You know, I've been around meetings where they say, yeah, I worked a step a year. Man, if I'd have worked a step a year, I'd have been dead before I was 12 years over.

You know, I can't go that slow, I'm too sick.

You know, I do this thing called making movies.

Let's see if anybody else in here makes movies.