Selfie Lighting for Talking Heads

Selfie Lighting

for Talking Heads

on Lockdown Sets

by Jamie Jobb

Channel-surfers everywhere now see cable-tv talking heads yacking at home in oddly-lit Lockdown situations. Some are reporters, some are pundits, some are senatorial souls. Some may be retired, but all are full of opinions. And since Covid-19 suddenly arrived on its live-feeds, broadcast television has shown itself to be totally unprepared for stay-at-home studios.

Obviously, most talking heads put more effort into dressing their dens and living rooms than considering how to properly light these “sets”. Further muddling the picture is the fact home video “broadcast quality” ranges from HD 1080p all the way down to fuzzy VHS. Who knew that to put on a “shelter-in-place” news show, networks would have to rely on their individual correspondents’ varied broadband connections?

This same smorgasbord of high and low quality “mug shots” may also describe the status of many Zoom chats and FaceTime gatherings. Setting up home studio lights may take a little time and effort but the payoff is a sharper image. And it doesn’t take more than three or four-steps to master home video lighting.

What follows is a quick break-down of a home studio setup for illuminating subjects seen by a laptop, smart phone, smart pad or other recording device. It’s based on illumination theories practiced by studios large and small. Of course a DIY set up would use a household’s most available lights, but Home Depot sells a handy little “portable luminaire, mini spotlight” by Intertek which is quite useful as it has a rheostat for controlling light levels.

The main point to remember: the effect of a particular lighting approach can be immediately evaluated by looking at the video and adjusting things in the moments of setup until the tone of the lighting is correct.

CNN studio (left) vs. home-studio misplaced lighting

(Maggie Haberman should move her light to one side) 

* * *

The Five Lights: 

Location, Location, Location 

1. Key Light – Just as the name implies, the key light is the main light. Normally this is the first light that gets set for any subject sitting as The Talent. It’s the primary source of light on the portrait. Outdoors, and often indoors, the sun is the obvious key light. So, the location of the key is key! A “high key” usually befits an upbeat airy tone, while a “low key” can create sinister shadowing, like a crystal ball below your chin!

Carole Lombard in “Low-Key” illumination

2. Fill Light – Also as the name implies, a fill light is the light that fills in shadows cast by the key. Fine studio lighting is often distinguished by subtle fill light. Sometimes outdoor photographers will use reflective devices to bounce sunlight as fill light into shadowed areas. Of course, the fill must be of lower luminosity than the key light.

3. “Kicker” or Rim Light produces the halo-effect produced by lights positioned aside the subject to outline and distinguish it from any background. Classic Hollywood films were very very well lit, particularly because of the exquisite kicker effects on women’s hats and hairdos.

Lombard again with “kicker” hair  

Lombard in full-figure “rim light”

4. Background – The light on the background of the set. Sometimes an absence of light may be best, as black or blank-toned backgrounds may work with existing ambient light, so in some lighting setups a strong background overrides any need for rim lighting a subject.

Then, there’s always what some photographers consider The First Resort:

5. “Natural” Light, which of course, is sunlight captured wherever it falls, indoors or out. Natural light can also be “bounced”, “masked” or “filtered” to create effects of key, fill, rim or back lighting. But natural light is ever-shifting, particularly on partly cloudy days. And direct sunlight may be four times hotter than fixtured lights, so the sun can “burn out” a video image if a photographer is not careful. Shooting in natural light requires a certain fleetness afoot for cast and crew. That’s why studios were built – to avoid that ever-shifting key light, the sun.

CAUTION: The sun and other hot “key” lights – including the bright light basking faces straight out of computer screens – create problems for video self-portraiture, blowing out the exposure (see Fat Joe photo above). If the subject is sitting at a computer, it’s best to have a hotter key light to the side, so the computer light acts as fill. This is something that’s easy to see in the necessary time it takes to set up a home studio for proper “chat” lighting. Also burnt-out portions of a frame can be cured by moving the too-hot light source further from the subject.

Randall Nott in his last role “I Am My Own Wife”

I Am My Own Light

Two years ago I was pressed into service in the booth of our local community theater, although I had no experience ever sitting in that hot seat. I was to work with a sound man and handle only light cues for the play, which ran in numbered sequence through a notebook copy of the script we followed there at the boards. It was all chronological.

The man who’d normally be sitting there, handling both sound and light, was now on stage acting out 34 roles in an incredible one-man play by Doug Wright, “I Am My Own Wife”. The actor was my friend Randall Nott, whose obituary is published elsewhere on these pages.

Randy was a most loyal local theater cohort – a brave actor I often used in my own plays and whose “Random Exits” I directed at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. When the local theater honored Randy with a memorial service last year, I told this story:

It was Randy’s second “Own Wife” performance, and he was not yet fully “off book”. So he was getting lost in the early pages of the text. So much so that he failed to deliver a pair of key lines in the proper sequence – The Actual Cues! – which meant our lights were suddenly out of sync. We’d lost our place on the page.

I frantically scanned the notebook to guess where we were in the script vs. where Randy’s words were landing on stage. And it didn’t matter much until I hit one cue which plunged the whole set into darkness. The End-of-Act-One cue!

Ever the trouper, Randy continued to run lines of his one-person dialogue, but knew the cues were so off at that point that he stopped and shouted “Twenty Two!” That made little sense to the audience as it was a message meant only for the booth – a direct statement of the number of the current light cue. And Randy was such a pro, I’m certain nobody in the audience understood the stage magic that just happened!

Lighting Links

As Lekos, parcans and fresnel spots get replaced by automated 21^st Century upgrades, performance lighting has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. However older lights may be reconfigured with more energy efficient bulbs and that has prolonged the life of many fixtures. Here are some textbooks which may be helpful:

“Motion Picture and Video Lighting” by Blain Brown. London: Focal Press, 2008. Thorough handbook full of deep details for controlled studio lighting.

“Stage Lighting In The Boondocks” by James Hull Miller. Colorado Springs: Meriwether Publishing, 1995. Tailored to the needs of folks working in civic and community theaters, schools and other local venues, with an eye on DIY budget solutions of those performance situations. The book was written at the end of the 20^th Century so it does not include low cost LED fixtures which are now used.

“Create Your Own Stage Lighting” by Tim Streader and John A. Williams. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985. Another DIY manual but for more complex theater performances.

“The Stage Lighting Handbook” by Francis Reid. New York: Routledge, 2001. Includes solid technical details as well as more aesthetic design approaches. Breaks down lighting specifics of various styles – dance, plays, musicals, operas, thrust stage lighting. A very thorough and handy book.

Home Alone with Take-Out Theater

“Portrait of a Man in Evening Dress”

by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (c. 1885 )

Home Alone with

Take-Out Theater

by Jamie Jobb

Not unlike maître d's and chefs, theater people locked down at home by pandemic virus have been exploring unique plots to ply their craft in a world where Nobody’s In The House. So, as menus and playbills gather dust, restaurants are relying on Grubhub or DoorDash while performers are choosing platforms like Zoom or YouTube to convey their programs to folks ordering take-out theater at home.

It’s as if the internet has turned show business inside out: where The Audience now seems to be the focus and everybody just wants a role as casual content-providing performer “interviewed” at-home. More of a tour than an actual “show” – with lights, action, special values of live production. Stuck in its own seat, the homebound audient just wants to chat with itself?

What’s up with that?

A few critics have begun to imply the Zoom performance model lacks legs, as we say. Here’s Cleo Levin explaining that feeling in Slate:

“The truth is, no matter how much technology gets involved, I can’t pretend that I’m at a night club when I’m in the same sweatpants I’ve been wearing for two weeks (and I am too stubborn to get dressed up when I will, technically, be alone). I cannot shake the feeling of loneliness with flat images of my friends on a screen. I’ve realized how much someone’s physical presence matters—how important it is to actually have the bulk of another person beside you, the little noises they make, their micro-expressions, the ability to follow their gaze and see what they’re looking at.”

Exactly – to feel like we’re part of an actual “live” audience in “real time”, not pixel prisoners of broadband short attention spans!

Then there are the artistic directors and performers themselves, many of whom seem to believe they’re appearing on Facebook instead of on stage. They chat rather than perform! Like “talking heads” – and we don’t mean David Byrne’s great band.

Also, very few on-line players seem to have full awareness of where their “camera” is … particularly on a cellphone or a pad where more than one “lens” stares back at The Talent. This is a fatal mistake. It squelches any intimacy when a performer seems to be looking askance, or beyond us. We wonder: “Are they lost?”

Video veterans know the camera is no casual observer. It sees your eyes most of all. Any savvy on-line performer MUST account for that essential narrative “eye-line match” in performance. Otherwise the actor appears a little “nuts”, or at least clueless as toWHERE the audience actually sits, which could be literally ANYWHERE.

Plus, can’t anybody think about home studio lighting? Even stuck-at-home professional cable-news talking heads don’t know how to light themselves in front of their bookcases and framed artworks. It’s as if COVID-19 is attacking the central nervous system of performance itself!

I recently suffered through several local live-stream theater “events”, some of them involving performers and companies I’d seen many times on stage in San Francisco and Berkeley. None of these nascent “shows” on line seem even remotely dramatic.

One of them was a big disappointment, by a solo performer I know who’s incredible live – he can recreate the feeling of a neighborhood parade complete with marching band and crowded street, all by himself. I’ve seen him feed off his audience free-range in The House; but home-alone in his living room, this performer falls flat in live-stream.

We can tell his performance “chops” are not there, obviously. He’s NOT looking at us – he seems totally unaware of his “camera”. This casual “hang-out” show ain’t actually performance.

An even worse example of muddled laptop tv is an enfeebled effort at Virtual Audience Humor called “Bill Maher's Home Box Office". This sheltered-in-place-show tanks at the very top because it's so obviously faked-as-fake, that it's not funny.  Maher’s disingenuous post-ironic eye-line view of an obviously absent and historically disconnected "audience" destroys any semblance of humor he can muster as a live-streamer. We see right through his fluffery.

But these incipient prototypes will improve once home-bound theatre folk begin to think like filmmakers. Below are two excellent recent examples of how digital video may be used to heightened theatrical effect on line – well beyond what anyone could see if seated in The House. The first is a solo performance by an acting author who relied on a couple of friends to accomplish his modest live-stream debut. The second is a Shakespearean extravaganza which clearly demonstrates The Royal National Theatre’s decade-long commitment to broadcasting live works from London to audiences seated elsewhere around the globe.

* * *

Paul Sussman shows he understands “eye-line match” in live-stream show

1.

Paul Sussman’s

“Listen Up, Jimmy Carter!”

(23 minutes)

Performing playwright Paul Sussman likes to say he honed his quills for farce and melodrama during a long career in non-profit financial management. That’s not as oxymoronic a punchline as it appears, particularly in the Bay Area where Silicon Valley largess flows onto tax-sheltered ledgers of social change. This insider’s knowledge grounds Sussman’s unique world view.

I met Paul two decades ago in a Charlie Varon workshop in San Francisco. Among Charlie’s students, Paul’s work stood out for his ability to quickly pull focus, jump cut and still keep his story on track. Like Rafa Nadal scrambling to chase a cross-court half-volley drop-shot at net in The French Open.

A Monday Night Marsh veteran, Sussman also mined his developmental experience as a student/political activist, which fed the premise of his “Listen Up, Jimmy Carter!” – recently live-streamed on his YouTube channel.

An initial tech glitch paused Paul at the start. But once his narrative kicked in, it became clear the man has a knack for commanding a computer screen. He knows how to “make” closeups. His body can get physical when he has to say something his words alone cannot convey.

Sussman has written and performed well over a dozen pieces at the Marsh and elsewhere. But this was his first fully-developed solo performance in the acting author’s living room where, like the rest of California, he’d been ordered to stay by governor Gavin Newsom.

Set in his May 1976 memories of Baltimore, Sussman acknowledges his story is chronologically anachronistic. “It was a different time ... Politics was different. 1976 – it was crazy! A nightmare of a president had just been defiling the office, wreaking havoc on the land, dragged kicking and screaming into an impeachment process which the Republicans sabotaged at every turn. (he moves in for a closeup with a nod toward current events) … It was a different time!”

Within the first two minutes of the piece, Paul produced a Jimmy Carter bobble-head, which he directly addresses as a “capitalist-tool peanut-farming fraud”. Carter was the “feel-good moderate” frontrunner among a mass of 15 candidates in the Democratic primary for president that year. Sussman, a Michigan radical Peace Corps volunteer, opposed everything midstream Naval Academy Lieutenant Carter represented. Truth to Power, and all that.

At one priceless moment in the short piece, Sussman pulls out what must be his most prized possessions as a writer: his own journal from when he was six-years-old! He clearly delights to read his own youthful “flowery prose” documenting the day JFK came to town on a train: “How caboose! So cool! But I fear Kennedy's charisma may obscure the neocolonialist Cold War wolf hiding in the sheep’s clothing of volunteerism.”

Indeed, kid ... You go get ‘em!

Let’s hope Paul continues his in-house performances. As expected, he’s set a very high bar for himself and everyone else. To track what Paul Sussman is doing, subscribe to his YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCifyFkvlT992CpLNGVYOHIg

Even a living room has depth-of-field when it comes to performance space

Sussman used fixed camera to great effect, creating “closeups” by moving into it

* * *

“Some are born great,

some achieve greatness, and

some have greatness thrust upon them.”

-- William Shakespeare

Stunning stagecraft commands The Royal National Theatre’s “Twelfth Night”

2.

William Shakespeare’s

“Twelfth Night” or “What You Will”

(two hours, forty-three minutes)

In 2009, The Royal National Theatre introduced its first season of what has become internationally renowned as “National Theatre Live” now recast by the pandemic as “National Theatre At Home”.

Long before any COVID-19 lockdowns, these programs were professionally broadcast from The National stage(s) into cinemas and theaters across the planet. Depending on end-point venues, the plays were streamed simultaneously with the London performance. In some time zones, the show was delayed to more timely coincide with a local audience otherwise asleep when the play originally aired in London.

National Theatre At Home recently offered live-stream viewers worldwide an incredible gift – a free screening of William Shakespeare’s comedy of mistaken identifications -- “Twelfth Night” on YouTube. This was no light, midsummer night’s entertainment, filmed as it was before a live audience in April 2017, when such crowds were able to assemble. The almost three-hour production was so vividly intense that we watched it twice over four nights.

As suggested by the vibrant YouTube screen captures posted herein, the stagecraft is spectacular in The Olivier Theater where spectacular stagecraft is the hallmark. The Olivier’s well-rounded floor-plan harkens to Greek amphitheaters which were designed democratically – every seat meant to be within earshot of actors speaking behind masks without microphones.

Soutra Gilmour’s astonishingly flexible set was designed around the pivot point of the Olivier’s concentric-ringed rotating stages – A set of three interlocking staircases, all framed together and each opening up to provide varied backgrounds for the action. All at once, the set suddenly became a shipwreck, a hospital, a gymnasium, a courtyard, a pool and spa, a brick-walled street, a prison, a patio, a night club, a chapel, an orchard, a topiary garden. The overall design allows for most fluid transitions as players move from one scene to the next.

The excellent cast of twenty actors proved itself very nimble afoot and aface for such a dynamic production. Indeed, two of the seven members of the show’s creative team were the choreographer (Shelly Maywell) and the fight coordinator (Kev McCurdy). The opening shipwreck scene clearly demonstrates the serious circus training these actors needed to be able to pull off this play on this stage.

With a stage crew of 54 and a broadcast crew of 56, the Royal National’s profound production values are on fulsome display here. It’s easy to subscribe to the program on YouTube and each performance is backed up with tons of background video – enough for any serious theater student to acquire a virtual doctorate without paying one cent of tuition.

Next up for National Theater At Home the incredible two-faced “Frankenstein”

http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/ntlin4-frankenstein

Malvolia (Tamsin Greig) confronts Maria (Niky Wardley) as Sir Andrew waits

Malvolia (Tamsin Greig) enters in “yellow stockings with cross-garters”

The Toilet Papers

Shelter-In-Place III:

My Rolled Yards

or

"The Toilet Papers”

by Jamie Jobb

Today was a good day, strategically speaking. Eighteen days into our “shelter-in-place”, I came home from my intermittent hunter-gather expedition with TWO packs of toilet paper! Granted, they’re very skimpy packets of only four rolls each. But they were two-ply! That beats the last six-roll pack of one-ply which a grocery clerk rescued from storage for me two weeks ago. Our situation became dire after our last Costco run which coincided with the first day of The Panic Runs, so to speak. The Big Box Store had flushed itself of paper towels too. So we’ve been running low on two of life’s essentials for over a month.

Actually I was quite lucky to get the two packets today as Safeway’s One-Per-Customer limit was still in effect. Fortunately for me it was just after 6 a.m. and few people were in the store. After ringing up the sale, the checkout woman whispered she wouldn’t notice if I left the store, came back in and got another roll to take to the only other checker working that morning. Sure enough, that worked and I got our second pack.

Another clerk they call “Junky” (it’s an Philippine thing) says he’ll save me another packet (or two) Friday morning. “Just be there again at 6 a.m.” he warns. I mark that on my calendar with a note to get to sleep early the night before. Oh, how quickly does The Post-Modern Hunter/Gather adapt to ever-changing conditions of our new wildling conurbation!

Most of us recall days not long past, when toilet paper and paper towels were not endangered species. Who knew a pandemic with more impact on lungs than guts would cause such a ridiculous run on the supply chain? Things are so dire that, according to The South China Morning Post, an armed trio of thugs stole 600 rolls in a Hong Kong panic-buyer heist in February outside a supermarket in Mong Kok. Two were arrested, their knife confiscated and their haul estimated to be worth US$220.

A few of us fondly may recall those far more distant days when there was more than enough toilet paper in the world for groups of teenagers to leisurely hang it from trees.

(pause)

I guess I should explain.

* * *

Most Americans of a certain generation – those who came of age between The Depression and Climate Change – have heard about somebody’s place getting “TP’d”. Meaning their humble abode (especially its landscape) was delicately draped in scores of streaming toilet paper banners hung high from above, as if by Zeus itself.

Actually the rolls were deftly tossed by human hands. Particularly gifted were those paper pitchers who could lob a streaming roll over, around and through 50-foot oaks, without wasting one sheet off the roll. I never did appreciate that term – “to TP” someone. It sounded too Native American to me. And there was a far better expression for the covert operation.

In Alabama we called it “rolling yards” – a more proactive term. Folks there still use the term. And, it was an activity that I engaged in willingly, with friends a dozen times as a sophomore and junior at Birmingham’s West End High School. When I moved to Miami we only rolled two yards (both in luxurious Coral Gables), and Florida kids did NOT call it “rolling”. Those sun-burned wimps!

Two of my Alabama rolling friends are deceased, so naming them now could not embarrass them. My two main cohorts were pals from West End’s football team: Bobby Atcheson, our starting fullback, and Roy Sims, a B-team quarterback. I was a linebacker. When we were lucky, Joe Price might run along with us to roll a yard.

A halfback, Joe went to our cross-town rival Ramsay High, but his brother was starting center at Auburn, aka “the loveliest village on the plains” (more on that later). So Joe was very cool with us. And he was a rolling expert: he had lots of ways to toss the rolls: overhand, underhand, hook shots. He had “the touch” we all envied. A Steph Curry, well ahead of his time.

If Joe couldn’t go rolling, Bobby usually drove and was our ring-leader, although I recall Sims and I were the go-to roll-gatherers. We’d collect our toilet paper one roll at a time. It wasn’t easy, this self-imposed One-Roll-Limit. In a fast-food place full of people, you couldn’t just pop in and out of the restroom because our mission would be obvious, and we’d blow our cover!

I should further explain: The unspoken, unwritten rules in Birmingham were quite clear to those of us obeying them. Rule Number One: You absolutely could NOT purchase toilet paper for these public displays of disaffection, which almost always involved boyfriend vs. girlfriend (and usually Bobby’s girlfriends). No, no, no! We had to spend most of the night running around town, from filling station to restaurant to any available public restroom, “borrowing” the stuff.

It was all sleight-of-hand and very seat-of-our-pants. We stuffed a roll into our crotch and waddled out with it. Our night progressed like this: one roll at a time. Thus all the time it took. Three hours allowed four guys to collect enough rolls for decent visual effect.

Of course, I’m now recalling this during the Great Covid-19 Toilet Paper Crisis. Today, on April Fools Day – with San Francisco’s annual St. Stupid’s Day parade cancelled – it’s now very difficult to imagine any such foolish activity. Nobody – not even fools – are hanging toilet paper in trees these days.

* * *

The greatest “rolling” effort I ever saw did not involve me directly, but my teenage son. I just woke up to find it. And it wasn’t in Alabama, it was in California in our town outside San Francisco. So of course, West Coast kids called it a TP job.

My son obviously had annoyed someone in his senior class, maybe a fellow baseball player. And it must have been a big deal: he wouldn’t talk about it, none of his friends would say anything either.

But we lived next to an incredible creekside canopy of Quercus lobata (California white oak or “valley oak”) in a forest of at least two dozen trees. Our house was not under the oaks, which sat between us and the road. But those trees loomed over our neighborhood.

Based on my own vast Alabama experience, I know it must have taken at least six kids and maybe 60 rolls to do that much coverage. Certainly these suburban students bought all those rolls. But they were very quiet and very effective in their work. My windows were open and I slept facing the trees, so any loud disturbance would have awakened me. I assume it must have been a mix of athletes and art students, given the perfect pitch and precise installation of their exhibit.

I first saw their work on my way out to get the morning paper. I crossed the creek and looked up to see a gentle breeze slowly sway hundreds of 80-foot long strands of plush two-ply. I was struck by the sheer beauty of it all!

And it looked incredible from the street. When I came back into the house, my son was eating breakfast. I said “There’s a surprise for you in the oaks outside. Take some bags with you, so you can clean it up.”

Funny, I thought in that moment, not once in Alabama did we ever consider the parents of the girlfriends’ yards we had rolled. And, given the time and the residue of Southern Hospitality, we actually knew those parents!

* * *

Auburn’s notorious Toomer's Corner oaks – basking in their former glory! 

The State of Alabama hosted perhaps the most notorious Rolled Trees of all time, those known as “Toomer’s Oaks” which grew at the entrance of the Auburn University campus across the street from Toomer’s Drugs. After major football wins by the Auburn Tigers, fans would “roll The Oaks”. The hundred-year-old Auburn trees needed no introduction in The Deep South. Tales of Toomer’s Oaks were legend across Dixie, or at least in the Southeastern Conference.

But things got ugly in 2011 when those oaks suddenly upped and died, as they say down South. It turns out, a transplanted Alabama fan, Harvey Almorn Updyke, Jr., pled guilty to poisoning the famous oaks shortly after Auburn miraculously beat ‘Bama, 28-27, in the 2010 Iron Bowl, when the Crimson Tide blew a 24-point lead.

Updyke spent 70 days in Lee County jail and was ordered to pay a $800,000 fine. That figure was well beyond his means, so the court ordered him to pay $500 a month. But Harvey payed less than $5,000 in six years, so the Court ordered him back before the bench to explain why he did the deed yet refused the fine.

But Updyke had already explained why, on the radio. Right after the incident happened. Updyke called Paul Finebaum’s talk show to confess. It was quite a stunning admission of guilt by a guy who did not grow up in The Cotton State, where he came to learn the new term for what he’d known as a Longhorn to be simply: “TP’d”. Here’s what he said on the radio:

“When Bear Bryant died, I was livin’ in Texas. And I didn’t really understand the Alabama-Auburn rivalry. But a good friend of mine that lived in Birmingham sent me a copy of the newspaper showing the Auburn students rolling Toomer's Corner celebratin’ Bryant’s death … Let me tell you what I did: The weekend after the Iron Bowl I went to Auburn, Alabama cause I live 30 miles away, and I poisoned the two Toomer’s trees … I put Spike 80DF in ‘em.”

Of course, Updyke undid himself in that call-in confession which was traced to his phone. But the story of Toomer's trees did not end with Updyke’s tale of woe. Auburn’s arborist attempted to save the poisoned trees, but was unsuccessful. So The Corner was redone, tainted soil removed and two fully-grown Southern Live Oaks planted where the old trees grew.

Students and fans were admonished not to roll the new trees until they acclimated.  But in 2016 the trees had to be replaced a second time after an intoxicated German Jochen Wiest set one of them on fire after Auburn’s controversial last-second 18-13 win over LSU. Neither tree grew well after that vandalism, so the University again replanted in February 2017 with new trees.

Toomer’s trees after an Alabama fan poisoned them in 2011

The Moral of These Stories

Given that Alabama governor Kay Ivey has yet to issue a full statewide stay-at-home order, Toomer’s trees are not yet out-of-the-woods, so to speak. But at least, we’re all old enough now to know what we didn’t know then:

Toilet paper does not grow on trees!

1 April 2020
(last of three parts)