A few years ago, I was asked by a network executive to videotape interviews with the alumnae of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, including Betty White.  The show had been off the air for many years but Mary clearly maintained her star status, and the rest of the cast deferred to her as such.  I, however, only had eyes for Betty.  Then, as now, she lit up the room with those smiling, sparkling eyes, and the sincere attention she gave to those around her.  Listening, I am more convinced all the time, is the secret to relating to the world, and Betty listens with the best.  Her ego does not get in the way of her reception, and as a result, her picture is always crystal clear.  What you experience is not the illusion of a human being, it is human.  It is not a portrayal, not a role.  It is true character.

After we had completed our interview, Betty and I had a chance to talk, and I got to tell her the one thing I really wanted to tell her, how my mom had been a big fan of hers since the Password days, and how she celebrated the relationship between Ms. White and her dream husband, Allen Ludden.  Then, on pure impulse, I asked Betty she’d mind calling Fern on my mobile phone and saying hello.  This was a no-no for someone doing my job, a line you did not cross, it was like kitchen help taking a seat at the dinner table.  But all I could think about was how happy Fern would be to get a phone call from Betty White.  “Of course I will”  Betty said.

Fern was not home.  The call went to voice mail.   Betty didn’t miss a beat.  “Fern, this is Betty White,” she said.  “I’m standing here with a handsome young man who claims to be your son, and he tells me you’re a Password fan.  That is so sweet of you.  We had so much fun on that show, didn’t we?…”  I don’t remember the rest of what she said, but I remember that the tone of her message was as if she and Fern were old high school classmates who hadn’t seen each other in ages.  Which, in a way, they were.

A couple of days later, the network executive called and the conversation eventually came around, as I figured it would, to the subject of the call I’d asked Betty to make to Fern.  “At first, I thought what you did was okay, and later I thought it wasn’t okay,”  said the exec.  She said she had no choice but to fire me.  I could not have cared less.  The happiness in my mother’s voice when she phoned to tell me about the voice mail from her BFF, Betty, was worth a thousand gigs.

I imagine that Betty White’s life has been a series of encounters just like this one, in which she has given the gift of herself, and treated her fans as her equals, her collaborators in a joyful conversation.  (”We had fun, didn’t we, Fern?”)  This is why she is still young and her world is still unfolding at the age of 88, and she’s hosting Saturday Night Live tomorrow night.

3 AM, French Lick (Indiana) Casino

I see this same spirit in my mother, who, at the age of 82, still lives on the farm in Indiana, quilts, bowls, plays bingo, gambles in Vegas, sings in the choir, gardens, cooks amazing meals, mows the huge yard and can drink with the young folks at the Shamrock Pub until closing time.  When I talk to her on the phone, she’s usually the one who ends the conversation because, hey, she’s got things to do and has to get going.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mother!  Break a leg, Betty!  We love you both!

No, they improvised.  And by that, I don’t mean they flew by the seat of their pants, or made it up as they went along.  From the CEO on down, they jumped into the conversation with the audience and performed aggressively to build a narrative that countered the media hysteria around the recall and the ambulance-chasing members of the legal profession who fanned its flames.

This is what improvisation is.  A conversation designed to connect the performers with their community.  Not a monologue, a strategy, a script or a campaign.  A dialogue. Observations and comments.  Listening and responding.  Action and reaction.

AdWeek this week highlights one component of Toyota’s conversation with the audience:  a Digg Dialogg with Toyota’s head of U.S. Sales, Jim Lentz.  One of the more telling beats in the article is how skeptical J.D. Power & Associates, the traditional arbiter of performance and quality in the automotive industry is about this tactic.  They don’t see ‘movement’ in their polls, they say.  The jury is still out, they say.  What the J.D. Power people fail to grasp is that the conversation itself is the movement.  The fact that it happened, along with untold other interactions between the brand and audience, constitute a flow of events that defy any one snapshot’s (i.e. poll’s) ability to capture its effectiveness.  Trying to measure one data point in a narrative with a million data points is foolish.  J. D. Powers is trying to apply old school metrics to a new school process.  It’s like taking a poll about how people feel about Rings and using it to gauge the audience’s perception of Lord of the Rings.

No doubt there’s a major problem with Toyota’s process, the company has admitted as much.  Its quantity got ahead of its quality.  It began thinking of its audience as consumers instead of customers.  It’s a big, big, issue, with immense implications for the brand.  What’s impressive is that they didn’t let the immensity overwhelm them.  They didn’t look for an epic solution to the epic problem.  Rather, they began a journey of epic proportions., and they are conducting it one conversation, one scene, at a time.  They are contrite, but they are not backpedaling, or wasting time deliberating.  That would cause the narrative to lose its momentum.  They didn’t script a narrative and then try to force it on the audience.  They improvised, with the conviction that their journey will eventually re-connect them with their community, and win back its confidence and its applause for their performance.

Lisberger and Me

“For most of mankind’s existence, our subconscious mind has been hidden.  Now it’s on full display in the network.  Everything you can dream of is there and accessible instantly.  And the question is, what are we going to do with it?”

“People need a new way in.”

“If one aspect of work, access to information, has gotten infinitely easier, the laws of physics tell us that another aspect, one that maybe we don’t recognize yet, has gotten infinitely harder.  We expect things to always get easier, but that’s not necessarily true.”

“On one side of the equation you have the swarm, the hive mind, whatever you want to call it.  And on the other, you have all these tools, and this demand for productivity.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, it will get revealed quicker.  So you have to really know what you’re doing.  The swarm has to be grounded in capability.”

“The network and the tools are amazing.  If people learn how to use the network and the tools, they’ll be amazing, too.”

“One result of networks is the democratization of quality.  When all content is pumped out and made accessible, it creates a kind of middling format.  It leads to a common denominator effect.  This is why elitism matters.  Not just anyone can tell a good story, or create a good design.”

“Intellectual bullying perpetuates the wrong argument.”

“With improvisation, you can do a scene where one person plays the landlord and the other person plays the tenant who’s behind on the rent.  Then those two people reverse roles, and from that process, you learn how to go about resolving the problem.  In business, that never happens.  No one switches sides or changes roles.  If you play for the Blue Team, that’s the team you stay on.  If you’re on the Yellow Team, you stay on that team, and you argue for that side.  And you just keep on having the same argument, and it’s terrible, because nothing changes, and nothing ever gets resolved.”

“What you’re doing with GameChangers is fracturing and realigning the sides of the argument so that problems can get solved.”

“The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize time.  It exists in a permanent state of ‘now.’  In this sense the subconscious mind is like a child, who doesn’t know anything but ‘right now.’  When the subconscious mind makes itself visible and instantly accessible in the network, and everything exists in a state of now, it breeds immaturity.  We begin operating at the level of awareness of an 11 year old.  Maturity is something you can only get to over time.  It’s linear in that sense.  The ethics and perspective that come with time and maturity are what’s missing in this environment.”

“Maturity comes from mastery in the physical realm.”

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.

Michael Wilson and Al Baker, writing in today’s New York Times about yesterday’s ‘Miracle on the Hudson.’

The words ‘yes’ and ‘and’ do not have to be spoken literally, of course. It is the spirit of the phrase that matters. A common improv exericise invokes this spirit by having players begin every exchange of dialogue with those two powerful words, spoken literally.

If we are in a scene together and are ‘yes-anding’ one another, by the third line of the scene, it will not be about your reality, or my reality, it will be about our reality. Now we have the ability to work together toward an objective. It is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference. Anyone can say ‘yes’. It might get me a reputation as a being a positive person around the office, but it will not necessarily make me a productive player.

Let’s put it this way: ‘Yes’ is agreeing to a marriage proposal. ‘Yes and’ is agreeing to a life together.

Pay attention to the people in your network who are skilled communicators. Analyze your scenes with successful entrepreneurs and top salespeople. They never deny their scene partners’ reality. They add to it. They augment it. They build on it.

‘And’ is the catalyst, the propellant, the push. What are you going to add to the scene that will advance it toward its objective? It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Business scenes can turn into a battle for control of the narrative. They can fall victim to players who play ’status games’ designed, for example, to give the top-ranking player in the scene the last word. They can get derailed by players who insist on being the naysayer (or the ‘Yes but’ ter), and conversely by players whose flights of fantasy (’Yes and it’s where Israeli girls can go to meet Palestinian dudes’ ) hijack the team for a trip to Crazy Town.

Some tips for ‘Yes-anding’ in your scenes:

1) First listen. If you don’t hear what your scene partner is saying, your ‘and’ won’t mean much.

2) Add in increments. The ‘and’ does not necessarily have to be some earth-shattering addition to the scene. It does not have to have the drama of a marriage proposal. It can be simple. Small. A show of support. In improv theater, this is known as ‘playing slow’. It takes skilled, disciplined, patient players to play slow. Slow and steady progress toward the objective is preferable to lots of dramatic, news-making behavior that ultimately lands you right back where you started.

3) Agree to the underlying game. If you and your scene partners are at cross purposes–you’re in it to learn more about a problem, and they are in it to eliminate the problem–no amount of yes-anding can turn it into a productive scene. First agree to ‘why’ you’re in the scene, then you can deal with ‘what’ the scene is meant to accomplish.

4) Deal in objective reality. There are times when unfettered bouts of brainstorming are helpful. At the beginning of a project, I usually invoke the ‘No Bad Ideas’ Rule, in which any idea, no matter how far-fetched, extravagant or unlikely, can be put into play. But business gets transacted, for the most part, in the Real World. What do I have, how much am I asking, how much are you willing to pay? That’s reality. The yes-anding should acknowledge reality and work with it as the raw material of a scene the way a sculptor works with clay.

Today (Wednesday) at breakfast, we sat in Manhattan Beach with two guys named Rick, one from L.A., one from Chicago, and mapped out how the movie studios can change the game with distributed production models made possible by a new broadband network called Darkstrand that comes online in January and can move data at 40 gigabytes per second. Darkstrand is the newly-privatized network that until now has been the exclusive domain of the Defense Dept. and university research scientists. See, the two Ricks were literally describing how to turn swords into plowshares. Or Disney shares anyway.

Today, we hung out in a garage in East L.A. with a friend of ours from Florida, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur living in Santa Monica and two mechanics from Colombia flown in by our Florida friend to install an Italian-made hydrogen fuel conversion system called JiffyGas in a car originally manufactured in Japan. All the players in the scene had connected with one another via Google. Later this week, the friend from Florida and the two Colombians will do a JiffyGas conversion on a test car for NASA.

Before the end of the day we introduced the friend from Florida to an acquaintance from Denver who is a partner in iCAST, which creates jobs for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad. Next week, our Florida friend will talk to iCAST about how to build a jobs-creation scene with gasoline-to-hydrogen conversions as the game.

And now here you are. Welcome. Feel free to connect and play along.

(STORY NOTES: When we left my cousin, Rich, he was trying to get the (fictional) ‘MasterPro’ company’s Customer Center to retrieve the SuperChief Pro with Herculon they’d mistakenly delivered to his home and replace it with the SuperDeluxo with Fabulon, the model he had, in fact, ordered.

Nearly three weeks after he’d ordered the product, things are more confused and further from resolution than ever.

Those of you who enjoy the ‘Scream’ movies or novels by Franz Kafka about characters caught in nightmarish bureaucracies in Eastern Europe in the 1920s, are going to love this. Customer Center = Corporate Communists? Now there’s a concept that deserves some dialogue.

Like Kafka, we have assigned algebraic values to the names of the MasterPro characters, who, as you’ll see, are neither masterful nor professional.)

Rich writes:

1. I call Home Delivery, talk to X. No work order has been entered into the system by the Customer Center (CC), therefore X. can’t assign us a delivery date or time until they do that. X. puts me on hold and calls the CC himself, and they enter the work order. X. picks my call back up and asks that I call back 24 hours later. He can’t ‘access’ the work order until 24 hours after it is entered by the CC, and he can’t process a set-up appointment until he can access the work order. Essentially he can do nothing until the next day and I need to call back after 24 hours have passed to schedule the appointment for the home delivery of the SuperDeluxo with Fabulon.

2. The next afternoon, I call the CC and follow the automated voice menu. I press ‘6′ and sit on hold with no message, no music and no response for more than six minutes. I finally hang up and call again.

3. This time after pressing ‘6′ the call is answered promptly, I think by M. She verifies that the work order has just been entered but reiterates that we can’t schedule anything for 24 hours because the CC software doesn’t ‘talk’ to the Home Delivery software. I ask if there is someone she can pass my call on to who might be able to provide more assistance. M. responds no. There is no one.

4. The next day, I go to the MasterPro store at Metropolis Mall, and Z, our original salesperson, is working. Z. has been exceptionally apologetic and helpful throughout this process, and that is again the case on this day. She makes her own calls to both CC and Home Delivery and expresses her frustration that neither department seems to be interested in assisting the Customer. As I need to leave for an appointment, she offers to continue her efforts to resolve the situation and promises to follow up with me later in the day.

5. Z. calls me back a few hours later, only to report that further calls to CC, Home Delivery and someone ‘like her Store Manager’ have been futile. She says the lack of support for the CUSTOMER was very disappointing to her and she finds it odd that all these people are supposed to be working for one company and on behalf of the Customer, yet the store staff seem to be the only ones trying to assist the customer. Her frustration is evident, but is again overshadowed by her sincere regret at what is truly a simple administrative error. How it could escalate to something as difficult as this is ridiculous (my words, not hers).

6. Well, she had had it after that — plus she was leaving town the next day, so I say I will call Home Delivery myself. I called yesterday and the earliest they can come out and make the change is three weeks from now. So after I schedule that, I reach out once again to the one individual, D., who had bothered to reply to my earlier e-mails (in which she had told me she understood from the CC all the problems had been resolved to my satisfaction). D. is the Director of Public Relations for the firm. She replies that she will make some phone calls and get back to me. For once they are good to their word, she does get back to my that very same day, but only promises that someone from Home Delivery will be calling me tomorrow (today) to get another date set up. Don’t know what their working hours are but my day is almost over. I never hear from them today.

7. For a company whose product advertising claims to be a product that will make physical ailments go away and provide a healthier living environment, it makes it all the more baffling to me as to how they treat customers. Obviously you know that if we treated our customers (at Conseco Fieldhouse) that way and made them jump through so many hoops before they could spend their money with us, no question, we would be out of business and my team and I would be out of jobs. One thing is for sure, when my days of running Conseco are over, I know that there is a world of companies out there that have no clue and I can make a second career in consulting business for those that want to improve and actually care.

8. Here is an example of how we try to treat our customers: Last night in downtown Indianapolis there were three major professional sports events, all starting at 7:00 pm – Indianapolis Indians at Victory Field, Indianapolis Colts at the new Lucas Oil Stadium and our own Indiana Fever here at Conseco Fieldhouse. With all the tailgaters and what not, parking was at an absolute premium. At about 6:55 we had very long lines waiting to get into the parking garage and moving very slowly due to the fact some had complimentary parking, others had to pay and yet others park in the garage as part of their business. I contacted the manager of the garage and suggested that with all the ballgames ready to start that he should consider just getting the folks in and parked (if he still had room) – just waive them in and get them on their way. The potential for backlash of angry customers was weighed against all other options, and good customer service and preservation of future good feelings won the day. Five minutes later there was not one car in line to get in. Probably took a small hit in last night’s revenues, but it was the best option we had.

9. The latest: Home Delivery said they’d deliver the mattress last Saturday. We alter our weekend plans so someone will be home when the SuperDeluxo with Fabulon arrives. When Sabrina (Rich’s wife) calls to confirm the delivery, the people in Home Delivery act like she’s crazy. They tell her its a holiday weekend, and that they don’t do deliveries on holiday weekends. This is despite the fact that Sabrina is holding the confirmation order in her hand with last Saturday’s date on it. When the product does get delivered – if it ever does – it will not be the fulfillment of a dream, as it could have been, but the end of a nightmare. Big difference to the brand.

An undesirable artifact of the Networked World is the ability of a bureaucracy to use the network to create Endless Loops of Unproductiveness (ELUs). Such loops create a false sense of security within an organization and are completely antithetical to value-creation, transparency, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, to a brand’s liveliness in the marketplace. We have all been players, at one time or another, in SuperDeluxo scenes.

Here is the GameChangers analysis of this scene:

1. ‘Yessing’ is not the same as ‘Yes-anding’. Just saying ‘yes’ (or ‘yes-but’) to your scene partner is not enough to move the scene forward. The improviser’s obligation (IO) is to move the scene toward its objective by adding useful information or (better yet) taking productive action. Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 above demonstrate how a player can say yes to something and contribute zilch to the scene. No. 8, by contrast, shows how yes-anding moves a scene forward.

2. Customers play two roles. Unlike improv theater, where the line between the stage and the audience is clear, business scenes often blur the line, and players are frequently ‘in the audience’. An example of this is a job interview, in which the interviewer has a responsibility to make the scene productive, and then passes judgment on how productive it has been. In sales scenes, the customer always plays a duel role. Rich is a player in the SuperDeluxo scene, and he’s also the audience. As a player, he’s not enjoying the scene one bit, so it comes as no surprise that as the audience, he’s giving it a thumbs down, and if it drags on much longer, he’s going to want his money back.

3. Make strong choices! Good improvisers make strong choices, and then live with those choices. Weak improvisers, by contrast, they ummm, they, uh, they hesitate. They contradict themselves. (No, they don’t, who said they do? Because they don’t.) They repeat information, and they also repetitively generate redundant data. It’s not always easy to make strong choices, especially if, as illustrated in Nos. 4, 5 and 6 above, the culture discourages them. In the Networked World, hesitation, contradiction, repetition and other weak moves get assessed harshly by the audience and punished in the marketplace. Strong choices get rewarded. So make strong choices, improviser!

When Rich wrote me this week to describe a recent unhappy ‘customer service scene’ in which he was a player, I knew to pay close attention. First of all, Rich is a very even-tempered guy. It takes a LOT to agitate him. Second, nearly every customer service experience pales in comparison to Conseco’s, so I knew that for him to write to me about this one experience in particular, it must have been extra bad, and that there’d be a lot to learn as a consequenc. In fact, there is so much to learn that it’s a two-parter. A mini-series of customer misery.

The names of the company, its staff and its products have been changed to protect these goofballs from themselves. Those of you who grit your teeth as a habit may want to go get the mouth guard or pop a couple of sticks of Wrigleys before reading.)

KILLING A BRAND BEFORE THE BED IS EVEN SLEPT IN

Dear Mr. CEO (wrote Rich):

I am quite possibly your newest dissatisfied customer. It happened before your delivery team was even out of the house.

You see, we ordered a MasterPro SuperDeluxo With Fabulon two weeks ago from your local store. Upon delivery today, we discovered that we received a MasterPro MegaSupremo With Herculon and not the SuperDeluxo.

What should have been a no-brainer fix has me seeing red. The MasterPro Customer Service Dept. has informed us that it will be another week or two before the replacement product can ship. Asked if the order could be expedited, we were told NO.

Asked if it could be overnighted, we were told NO. In fact we were told that the reason was that it would take that long was that the SuperDeluxo “needed to be manufactured” and that that would “take time.” Huh??

So let me get this straight – you do not have existing inventory of SuperDeluxos anywhere – each product is custom made – it will take a week or two to do that – and then only when it arrives do we call Home Delivery to set up the replacement, and how long will that take beyond the actual receipt of the product??? So now we are looking at over month from the date of purchase to get what we ordered.

To rub salt further into the wound, we received a promotional flyer in the mail today (after the incorrect product was delivered) that offers the current 3-year no-finance charge program. When we made the purchase on Aug. 7 we were able to get the 18-month no interest program.

Don’t think it can get any worse? Well to me it does. When talking to your Customer Service Dept. I was told that it would be impossible for us to use the finance program we originally signed up for.

Even though we have started this relationship very poorly and I do not feel that we were receiving the correct information nor were we talking to individuals who wanted to address our concerns, I was unable to be transferred to the next level of Supervisors to get a further explanation–even though I requested to do so–basically was told that I was at the end of the road.

After further discussion, I was told was that in order to change the finance program I would have to be charged an extra $100 over the price we paid. OK, now we were getting somewhere. So I agreed.

I was then challenged as to whether or not I had the additional credit line to be able to add $100 to our account. Unbelievable!!! Your person was baffled as to why I did not have my credit line right in front of me. She finally actually looked at her computer to see that we clearly had the credit line. Argumentative for the sake of being argumentative?? You decide.

Needless to say, I do not think ownership and use of even your finest SuperChief Executron would give me satisfaction after an experience like this.

How can your company afford to treat customers in this fashion in the current economic times we are in? Especially new customers who willingly and freely choose your brand to spend their disposable income with? And who, given a positive experience, would more than likely help spread the good news of MasterPro Customer Service. Now, I don’t think so.

I too am in the business of making sure the customer has a positive experience.

Your Customer Service Department is your own worst enemy.

Let’s look at this scene in terms of improvisation. Naturally it’s a disaster from the beginning.

1. Important information was withheld from the customer early in the scene. Rich was never told that MasterPro manufactured to order. When he discovered this later, it only added to the negative impression already forming. In building a scene, provide information early that will helpful when called back later in the scene.

2. Denying and blocking happens all over the place. How many times did Rich have to hear the word ‘No’? The obligation of an improviser is to ‘Yes-and’ the scene. Build positively on your scene partner’s (e.g. customer’s) experience. The MasterPro Customer Service team showed no ability to ‘be in the scene’ with the customer. There was no empathy. No helpfulness. No support. No gifts. There was just…No.

3. In terms of the ongoing performance of the MasterPro brand, this was one scene, call it The Customer Gets the Wrong Model Home-Delivered. And yet, as happens too often with bad customer service scenes, the players in the scene acted as if they had no responsibility to one another, and instead played it as if they were in their own little siloed worlds. This is a recipe for disaster in any kind of improvisation. The service center, the delivery team and the manufacturer left the customer, Rich, feeling isolated, onstage alone, and getting no satisfaction from the MasterPro performance.

(To be continued…)