All the Naked Ladies
Last night, a group of about 30 P Clubbers trucked over to the Baryshnikov Arts Center to see Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show. The work lasted a little more than an hour, the post-performance q&a about the same and our discussion at the Concrete Bar was still going strong close to midnight when I had to hustle to Port Authority to catch a bus to Jersey (don’t ask).
It was one of the more vociferous discussions I can remember (I still can’t get over how smart and interesting you all are – hope some of you will restate your thoughts about last night here). But the curious thing was that there was virtually no disagreement; other than a couple of folks who liked it, and had generous and thoughtful things to say, pretty much everyone’s responses fell somewhere within the irritation/boredom/anger register.
L-R: Hilary Clark, Regina Rocke and Katy Pyle. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
I mainly vacillated between the three (there were spikes of admiration for the performers, especially the marvelously strong and subtle Hilary Clark and Katy Pyle, who do a lot with a little; that is not a pun). I’m often a fan of Lee’s productions, and artists are allowed to have bad days in the office – it’s vital, actually, I think – but UFS is disheartening in a lot of ways.
As has been widely discussed, UFS began as a word-heavy production but bit by bit (and apparently torturously, with Lee likening the process to, uh, war) turned into a wordless, clothes-less dance. As I understand it from last night’s q&a, Lee’s explanation for this shift, beyond how difficult it is to make a successful play that sets as its subject feminism, is that audiences were latching onto the words too intensely, getting upset by them and often thinking the production was making a feminist argument that it didn’t intend to be making.
I didn’t see those early showings at the New Museum (please chime in if you did). But I so wish that there had been some sort of an attempt at an argument in what Lee and her cohorts ended up with, and that it had been something worth getting upset about. Instead, what was upsetting here was the astounding lack of serious, contentious or thoughtful material, and the lazy way in which related but distinct and complex fields such as feminism and gender were conflated. I would so much rather watch artists plunge into too-deep waters then paddle around the shallows; as one person said last night, the jettisoning of language here felt like an avoidance, or a capitulation.
Structurally, too, UFS is lazy. The choreography is by Faye Driscoll (who seems to have become contemporary theater’s go-to dance gal), Morgan Gould and Lee, in collaboration with the performers, and it lacks any sense of the strong and vibrant guiding hand which Lee’s productions often have. It feels, frankly, like dance made by theater folks: simplistic and schlocky, with no understanding of what it doesn’t know. Someone last night (feel free to out yourselves, folks, and to clarify if I mangle your smart points) noted Lee saying that it became clear to her while making UFS that the words being spoken were no match to what the performers were saying without words, and that this seemed like a rookie’s dazzlement with a form that takes as a given wordless communication.
I don’t know how much dance Lee sees, but the structures she and her colleagues settled on are crazy boilerplate. Everyone gets a solo. Violent shaking is used to convey violent emotion. There’s a slow-mo fight. There’s lots of cookie-cutter patterns and fakey-fake dancey-dance. Imaginary penises are sucked and then hacked off, all for laughs.
Watching, I kept thinking of a choreographer like RoseAnne Spradlin, who was sitting a few rows in front of me last night and who has forged a gritty career out of painful, thorny explorations of the female form, feminism and society’s expectations toward women. Her pieces aren’t easy to watch (or, I gather, to make), and they don’t always succeed; but her involvement in her subject matter and the depth of feeling and force she and her dancers bring to the table stays with you. Even when her dancers have clothes on, they’re naked.
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I was the moderator at last night’s talkback. And I recently wrote a “feminist” essaty/review about the show at:
http://culturebot.net/2012/01/12383/young-jean-lees-untitled-feminist-show-the-pro/
I don’t think UFS thinks of itself as a serious “dance” peice, per say, and thus I do not think it should be critiqued in the same way that we would talk about a dance performance that understands itself as a dance performance. Some of the performers are not even dancers! It IS a theatrical production that employs and experiments with choreagraphy as a medium and a vehicle. To me, this distinction allows and makes room for a kind of over-the-top campiness. I do not think the peice’s playfulness should somehow negate the rigor of the process nor the conceptual framework that informed the movement. And yes, gender and feminism are indeed distinct, complex domains, but related material, no?
I was really frustrated by this piece. Ditto to everything Claudia, and this article by Andy Horwitz has a lot to do with what I want to say here.
http://culturebot.net/2011/11/11663/visual-art-performance-vs-contemporary-performance/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+culturebot+%28Culturebot%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Of course, it’s talking about visual artists vs. dancers (although with fancier language), but the type of frustration he’s talking about with the non-sophisticated use of movement feels relevant to me.
I don’t understand why any artist would choose to use an art form they aren’t familiar with, and then not take the time to fully investigate that field. It feels quite disrespectful actually… To be more clear, it feels like when one culture appropriates another culture’s symbols and then waters them down to meaninglessness. The historical president of white people (my own culture) doing this makes me particularly sensitive to it… and I do not like it.
And regardless, whether UFS is defined as “theater” or “dance”, for me it wasn’t effective at pushing any boundaries or sparking any new ideas either formally or intellectually. I hope that Lee continues to explore dance-style theater, but that she delves into it more deeply!
(I haven’t seen the show yet, and I still really hope I like it.) That being said, your penultimate paragraph might be the funniest, most sharply-written passage from a review I’ve read in a while. “fakey-fake dancey-dance” and “crazy boilerplate” are entering my vocabulary this very moment.
Jeffrey! You’ve made my day. I really hope you like it, too – please report back either way…
Hey Cassie,
Many thanks for writing, and for the link to your essay.
Yes, gender and feminism ARE related, of course – I do say this in my post. My issue is not with the two domains being linked, at all; there’s lots of fascinating ground here for discussion and debate. I do object to the way in which they were linked in the piece, and in the way Lee talked about that linkage – it felt really fuzzy and muddy to me, not thoughtful at all.
And I also am in complete agreement with you that playfulness and rigor can go hand in hand – often the former serves the latter, especially when it comes to softening and shading material that might otherwise come across as didactic. Sugar making the medicine go down and all that. I didn’t find this to be a playful piece; the humor in it, with a few exceptions, felt forced and shallow.
In terms of whether or not UFS thinks of itself as a dance piece or not … I dunno about that, or why that should be important. I don’t go into a dance piece thinking, ok, this is a dance piece so I have to judge it with a dance-specific set of criteria – I don’t do that for theater, either, or live visual art of performance that falls between the cracks. And I think that way of approaching art gets a lot of critics in trouble – creates all kinds of weirdo expectations, and puts artists in rigid little boxes (kinda the way women get put in those boxes ….) And lots of choreographers use nonprofessional dancers, have done so for decades. It’s a grand and proud tradition, and should be taken seriously.
(as for over the top campiness – meh. there’s an awful lot of that on our stages.)
If you’re going to create a work “that employs and experiments with choreagraphy as a medium and a vehicle” than you’d damn well better know how to drive the car. (yeah yeah i know the old gag about critics…)
Hi Claudia and P-clubbers,
oh boy oh boy oh boy (I just realized that might not be an appropriate euphemism here – but what the hell.) I’d really like to spend the rest of the day writing a response to all this – but alas…
1st – Full disclosure, I am not whatsoever an impartial observer since we hosted YJL and her amazing group of collaborators at Mount Tremper Arts (MTA) last August and held a preview performance of UFS. However, I’ll side with Cassie here (to a degree) in that lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about context and the role that plays within a WOA, and how we as viewers bring a great deal to that particular table. Granted – I’m struggling right now since I want and need to keep this brief and the logic of my thinking could really use a longer form then this – but a quick observation or two or three:
While the UFS showing at MTA was an earlier version of the work and was actually lacking in some of the more ironic elements, in our history of presenting (short but intensive) we have never had a show that received such an enthusiastic / emotional / spiritual / dramatic / passionate / positive response from our audience as UFS – nothing else even close. We had a wonderful and amazing group within the audience that included a diverse set of individuals, including a large contingent (maybe 40% of the audience) of older lesbian couples from the local community. Certainly one of the more obvious reactions was a great joy, pleasure, and gratitude regarding the diverse body types of the performers, and how that was expressed and utilized throughout UFS.
Granted, art is not a popularity contest. Yet this work had a deep and profound effect on our audience, and I simply can’t discount that fact. One thing that’s being spoken about here is the pitfalls of a theatre person working outside their field of expertise, but I wonder if expertise is at the core of many reactions. Can too much knowledge hinder how we might experience something? It makes me wonder to what degree we (as in our NYC insider art community) has become a bit jaded in how we experience art and what we bring to that particular table.
Who experiences a WOA? What is the context and setting? What do they bring to the encounter? Is a WOA a static fixed entity that can be objectified or is it a fluid transactional encounter? It’s said that if a show passes muster with NYC audiences, then its clearly worthwhile, but is that really the case? Certainly criticism can be a form where we can make ourselves distinct from the crowd, allowing the illusion of the ego to fly and prove how insightful and smart we are (I know since I’m a bit of a contrarian myself.) However, is it ever useful to approach a WOA with innocence and openness? I don’t mean to imply that we’re all egotists who want to prove our expertise, but I can’t help think about the radical differences between the experiences of p-clubbers in NYC, who are all smart, curious people, but with maybe a bit too much expertise? In comparison to the reactions of our upstate audience, granted who are also smart, curious people, but may not know the differences and subtlety’s of a theatre person exploring dance and the rich traditions involved, but certainly responded to UFS with a force unlike I’ve ever experienced as a presenter.
Matthew brings up an interesting point, one that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I was pretty frustrated with UFS (basically for the reasons that Claudia and Gillian lay out here), even while I found it to be fun and entertaining. Still, I couldn’t dismiss the genuine enthusiasm of the audience, especially during the talkback on Tuesday night. It’s clear that people were deeply moved by this piece, and I give YJL a lot of credit for being able to elicit that kind of response.
I think that about 5 years ago—before I had seen RoseAnne Spradlin’s “beginning of something,” before I had seen Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the MoMA, before I had seen Daniel Leveille’s “Amour, Acide et Noix,” before I had seen Heather Kravas’s “The Green Surround,” before I had seen a lot of other pieces investigating, in one way or another, the naked female (and male and transgendered) body in unusual, provocative, disturbing, riveting, eye-opening, and inherently feminist (without proclaiming themselves to be) ways—I would have had a similarly profound reaction to UFS. I am, I suppose, one of those people with “too much expertise.”
I’m reminded of how, in college, I saw a certain company perform at the Joyce—one of my first encounters with modern dance—and was utterly blown away. Now, having been exposed to a lot more, having built up a broader context, that same work strikes me as almost unbearably clichéd. But at the time, that company really showed me something I hadn’t seen before and opened my mind to new and exciting ideas. If YJL can reach a wide audience and provide a similar experience for people, particularly those who haven’t been steeped in experimental theater and dance, I think she is doing something worthwhile.
But the role of a critic, as I see it—or of anyone (like many a p-clubber) who cares about the progress of dance, theater, performance—is to maintain a broad overview of the field, to be able to locate and assess new work in relation to what is happening (or what has happened) around it. That’s our job: To be voracious, to experience as much as we can, to amass as much context as possible, so that we might be informed in asking: “Is this advancing us forward, or pushing us back, or just causing us to run in place? Has this been said before? Is this saying anything new?”
UFS may touch individual viewers in real and lasting and positive ways. It may advance the field in that it gets those people to come back and see more theater and dance. It may delight and entertain, as it did with me: I laughed a lot during the show; I had a good time; I thought the performers were incredibly talented and charismatic. But in terms of revealing anything new or surprising about what the body can say without words, in terms of exploring the meaning of feminism in 2012, it is a running-in-place kind of show.
My greatest frustration with UFS was its cute, clever circumvention of looming questions. Like: What does “feminist” mean, anyway? Not in its first or second or third wave, but right now? Is the term even relevant or useful anymore? What is its relevance for different people from different backgrounds and different parts of the world? I had hoped that a “feminist” show by a celebrated female playwright would grapple with these questions and help me make some sense of them. Instead, I got recycled images of women with a lot of pent-up rage to let out (look how liberated they are!); movement motifs that I see all the time in experimental dance and that, for me, have lost their impact; and engagement with such pressing issues as sweeping floors and pushing strollers. Really? Is that what feminism, in the 21st-century, is about? One male PClubber pointed out that, as a guy who does a lot of chores around the house, he didn’t have much patience for the domestic-labor-hip-hop dance. And speaking of men, why not put more of them onstage? To have a feminist show without a predominantly female cast—that would have been interesting.
Just one more thing, to revisit something I touched on earlier: Having gone to a women’s college that really drove home ideas about female empowerment (sometimes to an “enough already!” degree), I tend to think that the most feminist acts are those which do not announce themselves as such but that inherently demonstrate women’s capacity to be leaders, innovators, and influential thinkers, to say whatever they want and transform themselves into whatever they want to be. Choreographers and performance artists are doing this all the time, and they have been (in this country) since, let’s see, the 1910′s. (I’m thinking of Isadora Duncan, who was a feminist in her day.) Indeed, the fact that Young Jean Lee can make such a successful career as a female playwright is itself a triumph for decades of feminist activism, a greater triumph than her “Untitled Feminist Show.”
Good posts on this one, everyone. A few thoughts:
Young Jean is not (nor is any artist) beholden to any rules or obligations or duties relative to the themes or content of their work. Just cuz her piece has the word “Feminist” in the title doesn’t in any way mean she is obligated to address feminism at all in any particular way using any particular forms of expression nor does it mean she can be criticized for not doing so.
If audiences at some theater outside NYC experienced UFS as a huge orgasmic festival of totally identity-reinforcing wonderment, that is not unique to them. The night I was in the theater in NYC, there were definitely a lot of folks having that experience, and then leaving for their apartment on Ave. B. The almost universal dislike for the piece among PClubbers comes, I think, from one thing only – PClubbers have seen a lot of shows, have thought a lot about performances, are familiar with its history, are in many cases struggling to create important performances themselves, and are just a whole lot more aware of, and desirous of, and emotionally ruled by the presence of the sine qua nons of innovation in the performing arts. And when they see something that is regurgitating old forms and calling itself (and being praised as) revolutionary, they say nay.
Institutions are going to love this show, it will tour the world, it will be praised for years, because it is a good commodity and it sells seats. It gets a whole lot of people to feel something powerful because they identify with what’s going on in it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Shakespeare, Spielberg, and Snooki do that from varying positions of artistic interestingness. It is the first store to be set up in the brand new Young Jean Mall. Cheap emotional moments market-tested (aka workshopped) to make you feel comfortably invaded by poignant zaniness in a mild sauce. That tells you what arts institutions are worth.
From where I’m at, this is a really boring show. I was seriously bored in a way I haven’t been in a show in a long time. And I don’t get bored when a show is bad, because its badness makes me cringe, and cringing isn’t boring, it’s creepy. Bored is my mind is elsewhere, I’m looking at something that’s not grabbing me, and I’m kind of just like half there. There were moments when I was roused, like when Hillary Clark head-banged, but then again, there’s lots of headbanging compilations on youtube, and the effect was fleeting.
I am simply amazed that there are still huge groups of people out there who think that women running around naked doing things in front of other people, whether they look like Victoria Secret models or Womyn’s Fest mud wrestlers, is cathartic, important, radical or interesting. Wow. Really? Do you have an Internet connection? Are you aware of the countless acts of female performance nudity that have been conducted over the last 50 years? Do you really need your body or its proclivities to be justified by bodies of similar shapes and proclivities showing themselves fully exposed in public? Your body and its proclivities should justify themselves. Needing them to be justified by others is a pretty big alarm that you might want to not go to a performance and instead do some personal private at home deep thinking make a change in your self approach definition world work.
The dancing in this show was lame ass predictable. The fact that the dancers were naked made zero difference. In fact, they weren’t naked, cuz their nudity prevented them from getting naked.
Maybe the point of this show is that girls just want to dance and shimmy and show their bodies, and then be suckled and ripped and plopped about and made to feel “out there” via the perspective of an admiring adventurer. And they love to fold and enfold and jut and thrust and have their skin be something more than skin. And they are all playing for keeps or not, but you never know which, cuz they’re a blend of rage and giggles. There is something presentational yet clandestine about them. They are mounds and layers and their history is rejected and demanded at every moment as they plunge thru your desire in order to be what it is yet never quite become it. And when they get together and ask “what is feminism?” they end up running around naked, unable to speak, doing things that they learned from a Disney movie they watched when they were 5. I actually like that about girls, so that’s cool by me, but it doesn’t give me an art boner.
My girlfriend once said to me “O, yeah, Faye Driscoll, she has the dancers do whatever they want and calls it her choreography.” Slam!
All the performers did a wonderful job. They were all beautiful and happy and amazing. And the show is like a big vacuum of meaning. It makes you think and wonder if it’s worth thinking and wondering about. Maybe that’s feminism?
Art is great when it attempts something daring and wild and new. I sense the artists in this piece felt that being naked did that for them. They are wrong.
In the creation process of this, I think Young Jean was railroaded by some very dynamic and powerful performers, or “stars” as she calls them, and thus the whole thing got leveled, turned flat, fell flat, became a juvenile exercise in everyone being satisfied by not being inconvenienced by having to do something that might test their validity.
Listening to the performers sit around in the talkback discussing their periods and their cramps and their vaginas and their opinions of the penis was as fun and enlightening as sitting around with a bunch of male rednecks talking about exactly the same things. It was reification in the name of independence which is instantaneous regression oppression.
Just like the Shipment, this show is stuck in the 80′s. It presents ideas that were in vogue then, but which many people have moved beyond. I just think Young Jean is there in her head, and it’s kind of tiring.
Is it beautiful to be fat, or is there something actually reprehensible in today’s world about eating (and thus shitting) three times what you need to?
Like Matthew, I feel I ought to go long form to add worthwhile points to this super discussion. Time not permitting, I’ll try my best…
What if UFS had a different title? I personally decided about halfway through the performance that I didn’t think it had much to do with a conversation about feminism as I understood it, and watched the remainder of the piece with that perspective. For me, it worked a lot better that way. Does that mean the show sucked, or that YJL failed to make a decent performance relating to feminism? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Death to the author, and all that, right? But then, what *did* the show do, if it wasn’t about feminism? Again, I’m not sure exactly what, but my own better-than-lukewarm-if-not-quite-strongly-positive reaction makes me think it did something.
Does it matter that the “dancing” was kinda lame (by dance standards [whose dance standards?])? Does it matter if we watch this as a theater vs. dance piece? Should every serious artist who utilizes a form they are not thoroughly versed in be responsible for investigating that form? I think in some obvious ways, it certainly matters whether we watch UFS as a ‘dance’ or ‘theater’ work–it would be pretty pointless to criticize the absence of deep movement investigation or choreographically sophisticated group structures in a traditional staging of “Hamlet”, for example. Perhaps most of us feel we are at a point with art where crossing traditional boundaries of different forms is not in itself interesting, hence not needing “dance goggles” or “theater goggles” to watch. Yet, like my consciously putting one of those black boxes over the title instead of the breasts, choosing to watch this performance *not* as a dance work did, in fact, I feel (do those contradict?) change how I saw the performance. I didn’t care that the choreography was “crazy boilerplate” (agreed)–come on, how much downtown dance these days does think seriously about choreographic form–because I felt the dancing was a tool with which to move the ideas, which didn’t necessitate “inventive” choreography.
And though I don’t have much to say about it at the moment (give me 5 years to think about it), obsession with the “new” in art and performance can sometimes feel suffocating. Nearly every critique in this thread points to YJL or UFS lacking anything new to say about feminism, or dancing lacking any new investigation, etc. Is new necessary? Isn’t it something that we are talking about feminism at all as a result of this show? Is there nothing to a performance if it’s not avant-garde? (Look at YJLTC mission statement for a quick controversial thought on this: http://youngjeanlee.org/about ).
I guess it indicates something that I’ve had more to say about the thoughts in this thread than I’ve had to say about UFS. But that’s also to say I don’t think it was all that bad. Not really avant garde. Not really interesting dancing. Not really about feminism. But was it bad theater, just because I might have been hoping for these things? I don’t think so. I felt it was actually pretty decent theater. And even if it didn’t give me much critical thought relating to feminist theory, it certainly provoked some critical thoughts about female bodies and how I think of them and react to them.
I really appreciate Fivel’s comment here. I think it an unfortunate thing when a peice’s percieved accessibility automatically undermines its worth. I don’t think our role as smart and critical and savvy and sophisticated viewers is somehow lost if a show ALSO finds a way to appeal to a more general or mainstream audience. I think UFS has multiple entry points for people of all different backgrounds and I think this is its strength actually, not its weakness. I love/prefer/identify with avante-garde work as much as the next New Yorker, but I ALSO can appreciate a work that does not alienate people who may not be as familiar with these vocabularies. And I think this is an intentional part of YJL’s mission as a playwrite and director. She manages to be provocative and find ways to appeal to a larger audience. It is a mistake in my mind, to conflate this kind of accessibility with “bad art.” That is just lazy, “sour grapes” critique, if you ask me.
And just to add this… Fivel wrote, “And even if it didn’t give me much critical thought relating to feminist theory, it certainly provoked some critical thoughts about female bodies and how I think of them and react to them.”
For me, a work that “provokes some critical thoughts about female bodies” and how one reacts to them, IS a meditation on feminist theory. I think we are all really priveleging language here as if it is the only way to investigate theory or ideas in general. Additionally, I really felt as though all the early, discussion-based iterations of the peice were still very present, very palpable in the final, movement-based version. I think that all those tough conversations and investigations were actually captured and embodied and represented in the choices made by YJL and the performers.
That is all for now…. Thanks everyone for such a good discussion!
I didn’t find this piece accessible. I found it simplistic and dull. That’s a pretty big difference. So, for me, UFS did not have points of entry (beyond my admiration of the performers). That said, I don’t much care one way or the other if a piece is made for a mainstream or an experimental audience (I’m skeptical of those categories to begin with, at least as monolithic entities), and I think actually it’s not an either/or. Tennessee Williams is a good example of this. Or, in more recent years, the Wooster Group – talk about multiple points of entry.
I think it’s really dangerous for us to frame a discussion around audiences having seen too much or too little –it’s a weirdly classist distinction and it presumes a hell of a lot about people (and we should remember that the P. Club itself is not a monolithic group). And, really, I just think it’s a straw man.
That said, isn’t it a good thing when critics are discerning? I love going to big blockbuster movies. That doesn’t mean I expect Anthony Lane to share my love of them, or see him as lazy/full of sour grapes when he doesn’t. (I don’t, for that matter, expect people who have seen as much as I have to agree with me about contemporary performance; my colleagues and friends and I disagree about work all the time. It’s part of what I love about criticism.)
Hey Claudia… I agree with everything you say here about classist pitfalls and the unreal “line” between mainstream and experimental works. And of course critics should be discerning… My only issue is when people dismiss a piece’s value simply BECAUSE of its commercial success or appeal to wider audiences. That is what feels like a “lazy” lack of curiosity to me….
Speaking of feminism… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPhh7mch5zo&feature=player_embedded
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Goodness! For people who hated the show, you guys sure are spending a lot of time writing essays on it
I bet YJL, as any artist would be, is thrilled to death that her show is stirring all of these emotions up in everyone, particularly you snotty dance critics! How exciting. As an artist myself, it makes me jealous you’re all giving her so much attention. Even if the show was “boring and dull”, Claudia, it seems like at least you’re finding joy and excitement in talking about how much you hated it for hours. So it seems like you got your money’s worth. Good for you!!
Ummm, thanks?
For the record, Sarah, most folks in the club aren’t critics, snotty or otherwise. A lot of them are artists, some are in the various fields of performance and art in other capacities and some are audience members.
Sarah J – I find it very presumptuous to assume that those involved in the Performance Club are “snotty dance critics” because we like to share our opinions and attempt to create a critical dialogue around the piece. I also find the tone of your comment to be extremely condescending.
Hey Sarah – Not sure how much time you’ve spent exploring this site, but one of the cool things about it is that if you want more attention for your work as an artist, you can tell people what you’re making/doing here on the Bulletin Board:
http://theperformanceclub.org/2012/01/january-bulletin-board/
The work is clearly resonating for a lot of us, and these comments deepen and recontextualize the piece; that’s what a lot of po-mo work does, it seems to me. What might on first blush seem play becomes something else. That playfulness grabbed me, and I’m really interested in the evolution of the work to a point where text was no longer desirable. I know the process was difficult (is it ever anything else?), and perhaps a bit of that difficulty, that battle, could have found a way out to us, but the liveness and vitality was tonic for me. Sometimes a play is really “play,” and that’s absolutely ok for me.