Pendulum in White Tie & Tails

Schickele Mix Episode #86

Part of The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive

Premiere
1995-07-08
“Peter, are you ready?”
Does a conductor perspire?

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[This is a machine-generated transcript, cleaned up and formatted as HTML. You can download the original as an .srt file.]

Schickele Mix is next. Are you ready, Peter?
Does a conductor perspire? Here's the theme.
Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal.
Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good. And what sounds good to me is the sound of our bills being paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this terrific radio station right here, within whose ivied walls I sit in solitary splendor, surrounded by state-of-the-art stuff.
Our show is distributed to the four corners of the globe. Well, a globe actually doesn't have corners, but anyway, it's distributed all over by PRI, Public Radio International.
The jazz clarinetist Mez Mesro had vibrantly strong opinions, and in his autobiography, Really the Blues, he wrote, Symphony means slavery in any jazz man's dictionary, 100 men with a furor, a musical battalion hypnotized by a director's baton.
Written music is like handcuffs, and so is the pendulum in white tie and tails up in the conductor's stand.
Of course, to those of us who love classical music, there's a little bit more to it than that.
But today's program is about conductors, and pendulum in white tie and tails seems as good a title as any. It provides a jumping-off place for our examination of the less public side of these glamour pusses of the orchestral scene.
But first, Schickele Mix presents, A Brief History of Timekeeping.
Now, according to Grove's dictionary, let's see, in ancient Greece, the rhythm both of choral and of instrumental music was marked by stamping on the ground with the right foot, to which was attached a piece of iron. I'll bet that tended to get your attention. Let's see. Oh man, look at this.
In the Paris Opera, during the 17th and 18th centuries, the conductor originally sat on the stage and beat time on a table.
Later, he moved to the orchestra and hit the floor with a long stick, which made just as much noise.
Grimm, in 1753, said that it sounded like a man chopping wood. Can you believe that?
Well, I happen to have here. Here's a very lovely excerpt from Lully's opera, Armide.
It is a very lovely excerpt from Lully's opera, Armide.
But, if you were attending the first performance back in 1686, I guess it must have sounded like this.
Oh,
Very touching. Very moving. It makes the bass drum in a Sousa march seem like the soul of discretion.
Now, there were a lot of contemporary complaints about that practice, including, I should think, a posthumous one from Lully himself. He is supposed to have accidentally hit his foot with the stick while conducting. The wound became infected and he died. You know, if all conductors died when they beat time incorrectly, there'd be a lot of empty podiums in the world. Anyway, there are a lot of audible ways of keeping the beat.
[No speech for 25s.]
Oh, One, two.
The beginning of PDQ Bach's Concerto for Horn and Hard Art with the authoritative voice of George Mester, salvaging a seemingly irreversible disintegration of ensemble synchronicity.
In many kinds of music, most listeners would agree, you don't really want a constant beat sounding monotonously throughout.
So musicians started indicating beats silently with a finger. I'm not kidding. In the Renaissance with a finger or a hand or a violin bow or a baton or a roll of paper or anything else that happened to be handy. This is good. One writer even suggested using a handkerchief and another proposed a mechanical arm.
These days, I must say, you see batons more often than mechanical arms.
It's getting towards the end here. Now, here's a good one.
Andrei Kostelanetz once observed that the conductor has the advantage of not seeing the audience.
But you know, that wasn't always true.
Musicians in the past often had to make do with seeing the conductor's back, which if they were like today's musicians, they probably preferred to his face. Now, judging by this illustration here in opera, conductors sometimes stood right up against the stage with the orchestra behind them and the singers in front of them.
And let's see, this is about the end now. Safinoff, in the early 20th century, abandoned the baton allegedly because he had once forgotten to bring it to a rehearsal and used his hands, a method which had been practiced by Cipriani Potter in the 19th century and was followed by Stokowski and others in the 20th.
Well, I think that's about it for our Brief History of Timekeeping.
Boy, I love that echo knob. You know, it really makes the difference between local radio and world-class audio communication.
Now, one of the troubles with calling the conductor a pendulum in white tie and tails is that the description doesn't do justice to the enormously wide variety of stylistic technique among conductors.
Take Leonard Bernstein, for instance.
Bernstein jumped up and down, swayed back and forth, and emoted so egregiously on the podium that Oscar Levant said of him, he uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting.
Whereas Fritz Reiner. Fritz Reiner's beat was so small that at a rehearsal once, a bass player is reputed to have whipped out a pair of binoculars to follow it.
Now, when it comes to Toscanini.
Mez Mezro refers to the symphony orchestra as 100 men with a furor.
Although he was certainly anti-fascist, Toscanini embodied the furor image.
As a matter of fact, you could understand furor as a German word or an English word when it comes to Toscanini.
His temper tantrums were legendary. He is said to have thrown things, fired people on the spot. After a performance he was unhappy with, he called his orchestra assassins.
And he told a trumpet player, God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
Although he was conducting an American orchestra at the time, I think only a European man conducting, of course, an all-male ensemble could have said, After I die, I shall return to earth as the doorkeeper of a bordello, and I won't let a one of you in. Sir Thomas Beecham, on the other hand, was a pussycat.
His rehearsal remarks included fierce admonitions like, We do not expect you to follow us all the time, but if you would have the goodness to keep in touch with us occasionally.
What a macho dude.
Speaking of macho dudes, my name is Peter Schickele, and the program is Schickele Mix, from PRI, Public Radio International.
We're talking about conductors, and here's a delightful little tidbit. Well, actually, it's about ten minutes long.
As a matter of fact, let's officially call this tidbit time, just for the contrary pleasure of having the tidbit be the longest thing on the program. On another edition of Schickele Mix, we hear some tapes of Beecham and Fancarion really rehearsing, but this one's a little different.
I'll set the scene here. Beecham is recording with the Royal Philharmonic in Paris. As the tape rolls, you can hear an engineer say, numero dos, number twelve, and something goes, something blows a fuse or whatever, and that gets talked about, and then it starts to rain, and you can hear it in the studio, and so, well, let me just say that if the session were happening in this country, in this day and age, with symphonic recording costing hundreds of dollars a minute, there is no way in Satan's backyard that you would hear the following.
Something fused or blew up outside.
I think it was that water. It's not the streptococcus, they call it.
Stereophonic. Stereophonic? Stereophonic. Stereophonic. Well, not streptococcus.
Well, anyway, whatever. It fused. Did it blow up anybody?
Oh, I don't think so.
Oh, it didn't blow up. Failure. We'll do this minuet again.
Quite so well.
Some rain that can be heard on the roof. Could you ask the orchestra to please be quiet?
Rain.
Yes, we want to listen as we can hear the rain.
Oh, gentlemen. Quiet, quiet. Everybody, please, for just one moment.
Yes, we can hear the rain. The minuet, the trio will be affected, you see.
Just have to wait a moment, I think. We'll have to wait until the rain stops.
Then I'll stop for the next week.
It's very effective. It can be very effective.
I made a most exceptional record once. It was in the town hall, city hall, Leeds, Leeds Festival. I was playing the Tempest music of Sibelius. And I got to the Tempest, and then was the thunderstorm. And they recorded this, recorded this. It was quite remarkable.
Rumbling, thunder, shiver about somewhere.
What about drinks all round?
Put it up to them.
We pay extra money for thunderstorms.
Where is it?
A very old gentleman whom I hadn't seen for a long time met me the other day.
He said, you know, as far back as 1910, I went to a rehearsal.
I was changed to a rehearsal of yours in Covent Garden at Salome. And I remember so well that at a certain moment you stopped and you said, where is the prophet?
And I've been wondering all this time whether you were referring to somebody on the stage
or the financial condition of a company.
Now, which was it?
I said both.
Tell them we like this. I ordered it.
You're cute, sister.
I am in a very awkward dilemma. I'd like a little advice.
I went to the cup final, and before I went to the cup final, I indiscreetly let it be known that my sympathies were with Manchester United and, of course, Bolton on as one.
On the day of the cup final, I received a letter from Bolton
reminding me that I was the chairman, not only of the musical society but of the football team.
I said, what do you do?
How do you get out of that?
Both Lancashire teams.
I think I divided my heart and mind.
The intellectual and better part of me, of course, was with Bolton, and my compassionate sympathies were naturally with Bolton.
How does that go?
Do you think it'll go down?
Was the second goal a foul?
No.
Oh, it was a real goal.
How is the time going by? Is there anything we ought to rehearse?
Is there anything nasty? Nothing here.
Not that I want to rehearse.
I'm all against rehearsing.
A tedious and unnecessary affair.
After a very long experience, I've discovered that the only way to have a really living and vital performance is not to rehearse. For everyone to be struggling hard with the music. That makes a great tension, you see. I assure you, it affects the public in that way. They don't know what's going on.
They feel there's something unusual.
I've always laid it down as a golden rule. There are only two things requisite.
The public is concerned for a good performance.
That is for the orchestra to begin together and end together.
In between, it doesn't matter much.
Now there's the weather prophet.
Are you the weather prophet?
What do you think that means?
I'm going to turn out the lights now.
Why not?
Let me just hear a bit of it.
Thinking of that expression, I may tell you that many years ago, a strange-looking man came to me and said,
sir, we are going to put on the screen...
I don't think he said the screen.
I think he called it the film.
On the film, to a private view of Goethe's house and music.
Small room, I sat down.
Watched with amazement and listened with consternation.
We came to the scene of Margaret and Faust.
The guard occupied about 40 seconds. He said to me, this is where we must have the jewel song.
I said, but it takes eight minutes, what you call the jewel song.
And his face fairly said, oh, couldn't we have a bit of it?
I then retired from the scene.
An important engagement somewhere else.
Now you have a bit of it.
Let's have a bit of this.
[No speech for 105s.]
Sir Thomas Beauchamp, pretending to rehearse the Royal Philharmonic in Haydn's Symphony No. 104.
Now let's move on to Eugene Ormandy, the conductor for many, many years of the Philadelphia Orchestra. At least three people have given me copies of a list of remarks attributed to Ormandy, and they are delightful.
They combine a slightly askew mind with a slightly askew use of the English language, which was not Ormandy's native tongue. I identify with that aspect of the quotes because my father didn't grow up speaking English.
Although he spoke it very well as far back as I can remember, he did have a way with idioms. For instance, he once said to me, Peter, you're a chip off the old shoulder.
Now, I won't read all of these. By the way, legato means playing very smoothly, okay?
But anyway, here are some of my favorites
from the collected podium remarks of Eugene Ormandy.
[No speech for 11s.]
There has been confusion since I stood here 35 years ago.
Something went wrong.
It was correct when I studied it.
During the rests, pray.
He's standing up there turning pages of the score.
There is a shadow on every page.
Start four before he.
Percussion a little louder.
Percussion players say, we don't have anything.
That's right, play it louder.
Let me explain what I do here.
I don't want to confuse you more than absolutely necessary.
Now, Stravinsky was famous for the short staccato that he liked in his music. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And Ormandy working on a piece by Stravinsky said, that's the way Stravinsky was.
Bop, bop, bop, the poor guy's dead now.
Play it legato.
Why do you always insist on playing
while I'm trying to conduct?
Congratulations to each and every one of you for the concert last night in New York and vice versa.
I can see none of you are smugglers. That's why it's so loud.
He is a wonderful man and so is his wife. I'm conducting slowly because I don't know the tempo.
I guess you thought I was conducting, but I wasn't. The notes are right, but if I listened, they would be wrong. After two minutes after this time and I am already here. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds good.
That was perfect. It was just the opposite from what I said yesterday.
Please follow me because I have to follow him and he isn't here.
It is not as difficult as I thought it was,
but it's harder than it is. Even when you're not playing, you're behind my beat. A musician says, Maestro, there's a terrible draft on stage.
Ormandy says, yes, yes, I saw it.
Do you know where we're going to start?
How could you?
I don't.
And then just the quintessential one. Relax, don't be nervous.
My God, it's the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Dimitri Metropolis conducted from memory.
He said, I never use a score when conducting my orchestra.
Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
Well, that's not really a valid analogy.
The score is not a book on how to conduct. It's not even a book on how to conduct that piece.
I mean, the lion tamer part is apt, but there have been plenty of great conductors who kept the score in front of them.
Nevertheless, it is true that by performance time, the score should only be a gentle reminder.
Hans von Buhlau was right when he said that you must have the score in your head,
not your head in the score.
One of the best rehearsal stories I was ever involved in was when I was doing a PDQ Bach concert with one of the major symphony orchestras in this country.
And unusually enough, the principal conductor was working the concert.
Usually it's the associate or assistant conductor when it's a PDQ Bach concert with a major symphony orchestra. Anyway, he was working with it, and apparently the night before he had done a regular subscription concert and played a repertory piece.
I think it was Heldenleben by Strauss. And at one point he had turned two pages instead of one
and gotten mixed up and conducted incorrectly, but the orchestra pulled him through.
And what I was very impressed with was that he started this rehearsal
by acknowledging that to the orchestra and thanking them for pulling him through.
And so then we went on and started working on the PDQ Bach,
and much later we got to the last movement of the Concerto for Piano Versus Orchestra, and I said, okay, now at this point the violins and violas just keep repeating this measure over and over and over and over, and you don't even notice.
Your head's in the clouds and it goes over and over,
and finally I'll get up from the piano and I'll come around to your podium and I'll turn the page for you.
And the conductor said, where were you last night when I needed you?
And he said, where were you last night when I needed you?
And I said, where were you last night when I needed you? And he said, where were you last night when I needed you?
And he said, where were you last night when I needed you?
[No speech for 64s.]
Sounds like a movie music cue when you stop it there, doesn't it? That was part of Ein Heldenleben of Richard Strauss
with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi, not the conductor or the orchestra, by the way, of my anecdote.
I'm Peter Schickele.
The program is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's show is called Pendulum in White Tie and Tails.
Very funny.
But what most people don't realize is how difficult it is to be a good conductor. You have to know the score in such detail to rehearse effectively. You have to hear in your head how you want it to sound.
I didn't realize how true that was until I conducted music by somebody else.
Most of my conducting is my own music, which I know very well.
But when I conduct pieces by other composers, I realized, boy, I don't know this piece as well as I think I do.
And finally, and this may be the most important and trickiest of all, you have to be able, in one way or the other, to inspire the musicians. Although some orchestras, especially in England and a few here in America, are self-managed, it's hard to get away from the animosities
associated with the one-boss-controlling-many-workers model.
Richard Strauss's father was a horn player, and he said, You conductors are so proud of your power. When a new man faces the orchestra from the way he walks up the steps to the podium and opens his score before he even picks up his baton, we know whether he is the master or we.
We're talking serious power politics here.
Musicians can be very unforgiving, and it's easy to understand why. They have to submerge, or at least accommodate, their personal inclinations not only to a large group, but also to a conductor, often a conductor, it must be admitted, who does not know his craft as well as they know theirs. There are a lot of mediocre conductors in the world.
A well-known classical record producer went so far as to say, Show me an orchestra that likes its conductor, and I'll show you a lousy orchestra.
Many musicians become bitter to a point that they find it hard to respect even, to my mind, find conductors.
A violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra once told me about Bruno Walter rehearsing the Mozart 40th Symphony. It has a magical opening.
Before beginning it at the rehearsal, Walter looked at the score and said, I've been conducting this piece for 50 years, and I'm still not sure how it should start.
The violinist said to me, Well, I know how it should start. Let me up there.
So much for humility in conductors.
Now, in a way, I know what the violinist means.
Too much talking from a conductor can be counterproductive. But in point of fact, even experienced musicians do not necessarily make good conductors themselves.
Knowing what's wrong and being able to do it right are two quite different things.
I was once part of a group of musicians who got together just for fun to read through some famous big band arrangements that a guy who had been in the original big band had brought along. And he would start things off like this. OK, let's run this chart down.
Here we go. One, two, one, two, three, four.
In the end, though, all that matters is the performance.
Conductors may sometimes get what seems like more than their share of credit for a good performance, but they also have to take all the blame.
The sign on Harry Truman's desk, The Buck Stops Here, also applies to conductors. Listen to the beginning of this German dance by Schubert.
I think it has got to be the most out of tune playing I have ever heard on a commercial recording.
In the end, I think it has got to be the most out of tune playing I have ever heard on a commercial recording. I think it has got to be the most out of tune playing I have ever heard on a commercial recording.
Where does the blame lie?
Does the blame lie for that orgy of awful intonation? Was there too little rehearsal time?
Was the orchestra simply not up to the key of A-flat?
Whatever it was, the conductor, whom I will do the favor of not identifying, gets the blame.
You know, that opening section we heard comes back a couple of times later, and it does sound slightly better each time. But you want to work things out in rehearsal, not in front of the audience or the microphone.
As usual, PDQ Bach had a way of immortalizing nightmares.
[No speech for 24s.]
Not yet.
No, no, I'll tell you when.
Now!
The opening of PDQ Bach's Concerto for Two Pianos versus Orchestra.
And once again, you heard the voice of the conductor George Mester, this time almost exactly 29 years older than it was on the Concerto for Horn and Hardart recording. Speaking of blame, another tricky thing about being a conductor is that you have to accompany soloists, who sometimes make up in ego what they lack in competence.
No matter how unmusical they are, you have to...
Well, I'll let Anna Russell explain.
The next example is for the singer who can't count.
And who has...
And who has one or two loud notes at either end of the voice and nothing much in the middle.
This is the operetta waltz song style.
In this you can hurry over the dull bits and stretch out the effective bits as much as you like.
The conductor and accompanist will of course object to this. But don't take any notice of them because it's their job to follow you.
And if you don't end up together, you're perfectly justified in throwing a fit of temperament. Because why should anybody with as great a voice as you presumably have,
have to bother themselves with such boring details as correct tempi?
In fact, one of the reasons that you have such a great voice is that you have resonance where your brains ought to be. Anna Russell telling it like it is. But hey, listen, the bottom line is that good conductors are invaluable.
They do much more than keep everybody together and make them play in tune.
They adjust balances, decide on the proper articulation of notes, and introduce and control the little retards and accelerations, often not notated by the composer, that breathe life into the mere approximation of a piece that is the printed music. Listen to this Mozart German dance.
Fine ensemble, spirited playing, good kinetic energy, but with delightful variations in the tempo at appropriate times.
This is what a good conductor can do.
[No speech for 131s.]
OK, I played a little tricky wiki on you there. That was the last of Mozart's six German dances, K5 67, played by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which performs without a conductor.
And as far as I'm concerned, they sound at least as good as, if not better than, most conducted ensembles.
Now, I should say that this only works with smaller orchestral pieces.
If you go to something like the Straus Ein Heldenleben, you just can't do that kind of thing without a conductor.
But the Orpheus are terrific.
I sometimes wonder how they do it.
I mean, it's hard enough to get two musicians to agree on how a piece should be played.
And that's got to have that thing we just heard 20 or 25 players, I should think, at least.
How do they?
You know something?
It just occurred to me.
I know a lot of those musicians. In fact, you heard some of them playing in the PDQ Bach Two Piano Concerto.
I wonder if I could actually call one of them right now and ask them how they go about it.
Let me get my address book out here.
Let's see.
Don Palmer, he's with Orpheus.
He's a bass player.
Let's just...
What do we got to lose, right? Let me patch this through here.
Hello?
This is Don.
Hey, it's Peter Schickele, Don.
Peter, how are you?
What's happening?
Okay.
Listen, I'm doing a program here on conductors. And I've been talking about the Orpheus gang there and conductor-less orchestras.
Okay, if I ask you a few questions about how it works?
Sure.
Go right ahead. Because, like Francis, one thing is, is the concert master always the same?
No.
We rotate our concert masters. We have nine violins in the section. And we usually, during a concert, we'll have three or four different concert masters.
So how does that get decided?
Who does which piece?
Well, people usually, at the beginning of a season, will put in their bid for a particular piece that they're interested in. And then we'll go through the roster to see who's doing what during the year and try to split it up as equitably as possible.
I see, yeah. And we also find that certain players have an affinity for, you know, maybe a classical style or a 20th century style. And they tend to lead more of those kind of pieces.
Right.
So then what's the first thing that happens at a rehearsal? Do you read through the piece first?
Well, a couple of years ago, we instituted core rehearsals where there'll be a group, usually a string quartet or quintet and maybe two or three winds, depending on what the scope of the piece is. We'll get together and read through it and make some major decisions on tempi and phrasing and bowings and things like that.
I see, yeah. So then when it comes to articulation, like whether to put a space between these two notes or something like that, that'll be really sort of worked out by that small group.
Well, it's worked out in theory.
But then again, in actual practice, whether it works when we're all together is another
point.
So anybody at the full rehearsal, anybody can make a suggestion? Anybody is free to speak up at any time. Does it ever get testy?
It gets testy, yeah.
In our early days, it got very testy and confrontational. In fact, we used to sit with the winds facing the strings during rehearsal rather than behind the strings.
And we would scream at each other and take votes on how we were going to phrase something and then people would get up and storm away and everything.
Right, right.
I've heard about string quartets where people stomp out of the room and stuff like that.
Yeah, exactly.
But that's changed now.
We're a little bit more civilized, although once in a while things get a little out of hand.
But it's all healthy and after the rehearsal, our friendships have endured. Yeah, right.
So how about repertoire? Who decides what you're going to play?
Well, again, usually people suggest pieces that they would like to include in the season.
And what we do now is have one central person who coordinates the programs with the office.
We set up a particular season, of course, usually two years in advance. And he'll take the suggestions of the players, try to work them into a season, coordinating with the concert presenters, with the office, and with the recording company as well.
Now is that person you're talking about a member of the orchestra?
A member of the orchestra, yeah. That's different.
I did that position for two years and now there's someone else doing it. So somebody sort of volunteers to do it or gets voted on or what?
Yeah, they volunteer and if there's more than a few volunteers, then there'll be a vote on who's going to do that job for that particular timeframe.
Well, I've got to say that I think the performances, as I've heard them on recording, are just tremendous and they sound every bit as beautifully thought out as one with a conductor.
And they also just have tremendous spirit.
I love them. Well, thank you.
It's sort of combining an extended string quartet with an extended woodwind quintet.
Yeah, even though actually, I mean, sometimes the orchestra would be up in the 30s, right?
Yeah, we've gone to about, I think about 38 was as big as we've got, and we feel that's about the maximum where you can control the forces
and also just the attention at rehearsal.
If you get too many people without a focal point, you can lose that sort of attention.
Also, if you just literally get too far away from each other on the stage, it gets harder and harder to stay together.
Exactly.
And so just one last question then, speaking of that.
I've never seen you perform live.
Do you stand up or sit down when you play?
I mean, the string players.
Oh, we sit, except for me.
So then in terms of retards and things like that, does the concertmaster lead those?
Not necessarily.
It really will depend on who's got the primary voice at that time.
Oh, I see.
Right.
There's even some movements and some retards that I get to leave. Get out of here.
The bass player gets the lead?
Oh, sure.
Oh, man.
I don't know what this country's coming to.
Yeah, I know. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. Okay, well, look, thanks very much, Don. You're quite welcome.
Great to talk to you, and we'll see you soon.
Okay, Peter. Okay, right.
Bye. Great.
All right.
Donald Palmer, bass player with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
I really didn't have any idea how they worked that out.
That was very interesting.
Okay, now, before the show's over, I do want to say that as much as I love the Orpheus
Chamber Orchestra, I don't mean to imply that that's the only way it should be done.
There are a lot of terrific conductors out there giving tremendous performances with
other fine orchestras.
But, you know, it's been a sort of an unusual show today, a lot of talking to the amount of music, which is the kind of conductor that musicians hate the most.
So let's go out with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra again.
We'll go out with Mozart's March No. 1 in D major, K. 335.
We'll go out with Mozart's March No. 1 in D major.
All right.
And that's Schickele Mix for this week.
Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by this radio station and its members.
Our program, if I have conducted myself well, is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number.
This is Program 86.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi.
You're looking good.
See you next week.