Possible Audition/Sound Check Selections
Dec. 8th, 2012 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dirtydirtychai
NARRATOR
OPENING LINES
OPENING LINES
Jack Baker’s student room was larger than most, as befitted the Head of Second Year and one of the more promising students at Harvard School for Engineering. It was on the ground floor of the squat three-floor dormitory: a long, narrow space with a bed crammed into one end and workbenches pushed up against the remaining walls. Clare often thought it was a grim room when empty, all grey curtains and greasy machines, but Jack’s personality filled and brightened it – visitors rarely noticed the bare student furniture and lack of creature comforts when Jack was there.
“Go on,” Jack was saying, while Clare contemplated the machine in front of her. His movements were almost manic, excitement vibrating in every muscle as he showed off his new invention. “Put a coin in.”
Clare eyed the oddly-shaped assembly in front of her with skepticism. “A coin?”
“Sure,” Jack said, pointing to a metal box on one end with a slot in the lid. “Any old coin will do.”
“And then what happens?”
“Put a coin in and find out,” he said, a little impatiently.
Clare rolled her eyes and reached into her pocket, miming the search for a coin as she rubbed her fingers together to Create one. She held it carefully so Jack couldn’t see the blank stamps on either side, dropping it into the box he indicated.
The box dipped slightly and she jerked back – Jack’s inventions were unpredictable and good reflexes were recommended – but nothing exploded. A lever flicked a switch which set a cogwheel spinning. A platform at the heart of the contraption rose up and a book fluttered open. Each page was attached to a little metal finger, and they flicked past almost too fast to see until something clanked and it stopped, just as a lamp lit up above the book. A scroll of thin linen snapped open, startling her, and a projection of the open page appeared on it.
ESTABLISHING THE SETTING ON THE AIRSHIP
In the days that followed, Clare grew to enjoy the midafternoon break as the best part of the day. Their piloting schedule meant that Jack’s dinner, Graveworthy’s breakfast, and her shift’s end fell around tea-time, a rare moment when all three were awake at once. Jack would heat water over the steam-engine and usually have a pan of cured sausages or pickles – she anticipated becoming very tired of pickles – to present to her as a snack. Graveworthy, yawning and stretching, took a cup of tea gratefully and usually sat on the narrow steps leading to the pilot’s chair until he was properly awake. Clare and Jack could always find something to talk about, or Jack and Graveworthy would engage in the perilous process of refilling the water in the steam engine, and Graveworthy would give them lessons in Australian dialect.
What made the brief afternoon tea best, though, was Graveworthy’s habit of telling stories to pass the time until his shift began. When piloting, he sat with a notebook propped on his knee and spent most of his energy on writing; when his shift was done he would check over the ship, re-stowing badly packed bags or charting out the course for the rest of the day. When he was just waking, however, all he seemed to want was hot tea and an audience.
Most of the stories he told were fairy tales that Clare and Jack had known since they could remember, but he told them with a charisma that kept them rapt, Clare leaning down from the pilot’s chair and Jack seated on the deck below with his arms around his knees. He told stories that might or might not be true; he asked them questions about their lives and made Jack share the ancient lore of Harvard‘s year-end pranks. Even Clare, bereft of an idea for an actual story, was coaxed into an encore of some poetry recitation she’d learned in school.
Ellis
ELLIS' STORY TELLING
"Napoleon Bonaparte marched on Egypt two years from the turn of the century, eight years after the death of LaRoche," he said, as Clare settled down on the step below him. "He sailed for Egypt and took Malta and Alexandria like a charming man takes a lover – little resistance and easily overcome. The British tried to chase him around the coast but they met nasty weather, and Egypt lay before him as a gateway to the east. He planned to dine in Cairo by August. A little further south, Jack," he added.
"It'll take us off course."
"I'll steer us down the Red Sea tonight; it won't take any more fuel than traveling straight on," Graveworthy said, and continued after Jack adjusted course again. "The Mamluks gathered to defend Cairo, with Murad Bey's army twenty-one-thousand strong, fifteen thousand of it good cavalry, on the west bank of the Nile. Murad's fellow general, Ibrahim Bey, lay on the east bank with reinforcements, but Bonaparte's forces defended against a crossing. Imagine the cannon-blasts and the charge of horses, the rattling swords and the musket-fire, all very nearly in the shadow of the great pyramids. Through the smoke both Cairo and the pyramids were visible. The Mamluk cavalry, the pride of Egypt for thousands of years, could not halt the progress of the French troops into their homeland. Imagine the screams of the horses as they were shot to pieces, and the men and women groaning bloody on the sand.
"In the late afternoon the cavalry threw itself on the French artillery and began to die in earnest. France had overrun the village of Embabeh and begun to butcher the Egyptians there. It seemed that Bonaparte would triumph. Their homes would be looted and destroyed by foreign soldiers who had come into their land unprovoked, for no other reason than that the French wanted their best military mind far away from any chance for political power.
CONDESCENDING ELLIS:
“Yes, and she’s a horrifying gossip. The word will be out within the hour that I’m on board. This way, at least people won’t bother me; it’ll be an open secret that I’m incognito, and everyone will treat me like Eric Smith. What webs we weave,” he said, scratching at the bandage on his neck. “I shall have to do a great deal of talking to people, I suppose.”
“You seem to like talking to people,” Clare said, a slight edge to her voice.
“As much as you may dislike me right now,” he replied, his voice calm and even, “you truly know very little about me, Mrs. Parsons. I am not by nature someone who…appreciates the company of others on a constant basis. Thank you,” he added to the waiter, who had returned with the soup. “I know both of you must have many questions, but I suggest you take this opportunity to amuse yourselves. You are young and you are traveling in a luxury few will ever experience. There will be time enough to fret when we arrive. If you have no objections, Mr. Parsons, I would like very much for you to examine a machine I’ve brought with me – I believe it may have been jostled unnecessarily.”
EARNEST ELLIS:
What I mean to say is…" He set his notebook aside. "There are millions of people in this world who get up and go to work, meet their friends, come home for dinner, play with their children, go to bed – they live in the world as a part of it. That's what being human is, being part of a tribe."
"No-one I know ever has done that."
"No, they haven't. Because some of us give it up. We give up knowing what ordinary people know, having friends and dinner at seven and children. All but the most understanding don't understand at all. You sacrifice who you could have been, to make something for all those people. Jack's sold his soul to build this…beautiful machine, left behind everything he knew, everything he was, to come on this journey. I've sold mine many times over to be the great mind, the literary genius, a man who married his books instead of a wife. You've never even known a life like Clare gave up when she came along. We aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just…carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands." He shut his notebook. "You don't live for yourself, de la Fitte. You never have. You've lived for your crew and maybe for this library your mother kept, but your life is the most strange and adventurous imaginable. You sold your soul for your freedom."
ELLIS'S READING VOICE;
Once upon a time there was a toymaker named Geppetto who was alone and childless, and knew himself to be growing old. His greatest joy was making toys for children, especially puppets that they could bring to life with strings and rods. He loved to watch the puppets dance, and he was a very skilled artificer.
Geppetto had also, however, learned through secret practice the art of witchcraft, condemned by the church and the law. At night, when no-one could see, he would take puppets that had no strings and make them dance and play together without using his hands, as if they were his children. He loved children and wished for a child of his own, but he had to content himself with the puppets and the children who came to his shop.
As he grew older, the toymaker yearned to have a child and his puppets no longer satisfied him. Even as he practiced his witchcraft he prayed to God to bring him a child of his own, and when God did not answer he decided to carve a perfect little boy for himself. He worked on it for weeks, and then months, while the children stopped coming to the toy shop that was always closed. He worked until his hands bled.
ELLIS'S LETTER
I understand why she might have done it, why she might have felt forced to do it, but I wish she could have felt she could show herself – if not in public, then at least to me. I wish I hadn’t found out the way I had.
When she finally turned to me – and in my mind it was the first thing she did, though I could be mistaken – she said, “I’m sorry, Ellis.”
Annie, I tried as hard as I could not to fall in love with her. I really did. She aggravated me well before we even arrived in Australia. She questioned my art, she treated my work for the Crown like some light adventure, she was pompous about my admittedly loose morals, and besides all that she was so young. Of course I thought she was beautiful, and she lost none of her beauty in the change, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t been with beautiful women before.
She was nothing I thought I wanted, and then she turned around and I knew. I was angry with her, but that wasn’t new and anyway it wasn’t that at all. Everything about her suddenly fell into place, but it wasn’t that either.
I was jealous. How absurd, I know, but I was. I was jealous of Jack because he obviously had known for some time, and jealous of the Wiradjuri because it was blatantly clear that she belonged to them, no matter that she’d been raised and educated as a white woman in America. I was angry and jealous and there are only a few people who can raise that combination of feeling in me, and all of them have been people I loved with a depth of affection that I could scarcely afford for Clare bloody Fields.
JACK BAKER
WHIMSICAL JACK
"I hate to be the voice of reason in the face of true love," he said quietly, "but there's one other problem, you know. You've no idea if she feels the same."
"No, but I'm devising experiments for that," Jack said. Ellis stopped, lifted his hand, and stifled his laughter again.
"You can't quantify the human heart, Baker!" he said. "It doesn't put out consistent rates of energy."
"There are ways to measure things," Jack insisted. "How do you feel when you're in love?"
Ellis fell silent, thoughtfully. "It's been rather a long time."
"Well, I've read a bit about it."
"Oh, have you!"
"Yeah, in your books, so shut it," Jack sounded amused. "Your heart beats faster, and because it's beating faster you can't breathe as well so you get dizzy, that's the lack of air to the brain, and you say stupid things. So I've been monitoring her heartbeat and her breathing. And someone in love smiles more when the other person's around, so I keep track of how much she smiles at everyone."
Ellis couldn't help himself. "Any solid results yet?"
"Well, she smiles at you and me more than Clare, but Clare smiles at you more than she does at Purva, so I think maybe that's just a girl thing."
"She does?" Ellis asked, curious.
"Yep. And Purva doesn't breathe as deeply around me as she does around you, either. So I'm pretty confident she's at least forty-five percent in love with me," Jack continued.
FUNNY JACK
"Come ON!" he called a second time, half an hour later. "Clare, there are steaks. There are potatoes. There's bread and fresh butter and chicken and beer! And you are preventing me from eating ALL OF IT!"
Purva rolled her eyes as she buttoned her shirt. "The beer will not vanish, Jack Baker!"
"IT MIGHT!"
"You'd think he'd find the hot water taps more fascinating," Clare said conversationally.
"I CAN HEAR YOU!"
SCIENCE JACK
"It takes about an hour to fill a half dozen bladders," he said thoughtfully. "Working full-tilt, with plenty of supplies and a few of the students helping, I suppose we could make quite a lot in a few days. Storage is a problem, but I do have some compressed-air canisters that we could put it in."
"You're on payroll," Jack said, beaming and holding out his hand. Sir William laughed as he shook it. "I've got to run off, but I'll come again tomorrow morning to make the arrangements."
"But why do you want so much helium?" Sir William asked, as Jack pulled his coat on. Clare, anticipating as always, was already buttoned up; Graveworthy was only delayed by having to stow away his notebook and cap his pen.
"There are some things it's better not to know," Graveworthy said to him, as Jack fitted the glass bottle into his pocket. "Jack will provide you with his research notes, of course, once his experiments are concluded."
Outside, Graveworthy hailed a cab and helped them into it. As soon as they were moving, Jack held out his hand. "Can I use your notebook?"
"Certainly. Ignore the scribbling," Graveworthy said, handing it over.
"So, there's the weight of boat, steam engine, propeller, infrastructure – fuel for the engine, and water –food supplies, two men…does it have to be two?" he asked, taking a pencil from behind his ear (he'd have to return that to Sir William) and writing furiously.
"Absolutely, at minimum."
"All right. Then I'll need to know mass and lifting power of the helium. Damn, plus helium jars. I'll have to calculate dissipation so we know how many it'll take to get to Australia, which means distance and approximate speed of the finished ship. I need to build a prototype and some test bladders and add in some allowance for wind. Once I know lift, weight, and speed I can figure out how big the bladder will have to be."
A sudden tension in Clare's shoulder, pressed against his, made him pause and look up; Graveworthy's expression was one of amused tolerance, but Jack couldn't think of anything he'd said that was incorrect. He went back to writing formulas.
"Let I be Infrastructure and F be fuel plus water for the boiler," he said, sketching out a line of letters. "H plus S for weight of the human element and food and water and such, added to I and F, producing W. Divide by lift power of one unit of helium, call it B, equals amount of units needed for lift, or L. F is variable based on distance and speed. Damn. Well, take L and factor for dissipation, that will affect the heliumcanisters, which will affect weight…"
JACK IN JAIL - MENACING AND HILARIOUS
"Oh well. My family doesn't like it when I'm mistreated. They think I'm kind of fragile. But working on engines makes you strong – I've got a punch like a horse-kick. Wouldn't think to look at me, would you? Anyway, they're very protective of me. They'll probably come get me soon. When they do, I want you to know that I'm sorry, and I'll make sure nobody desecrates the corpses."
"You talk loads of shit," the other guard said, joining the first at the bars. Jack lay down again on the floor and looked along the row of mortared-in bars.
"You just never know," he said, squinting.
"He's just trying to scare us," one of them said.
"Absolutely. You should be really scared," Jack replied.
"Oh yeah? What're they going to do, talk us to death like you?"
Jack stood up. The guards were quite close together, and quite close to the bars of the cell. It would be the work of a moment to grab their lapels and pull them against the iron rods, knocking them silly and giving him enough time to get one of the thick batons hanging on their belts. Dangerous, though, and without the keys to his cell, hanging on a distant wall, there was no real point.
"I can't say for sure, but I can tell you this," he said, leaning his face against the iron. "It won't be pretty. All this," he waved his hand around his cell, "is just a good excuse for what they were planning to do anyway. And I guess you're just doing your jobs, like I was, so I'll give you a tip for free. When the shouting starts, get your heads down. Nobody likes to shoot someone just because they're in the way."
The men looked like they wanted to be more skeptical than they were. Jack beamed at them and lay down on his bunk.
"From the top, gentlemen," he announced. He grinned, inhaled, and began to sing again.
CLARE FIELDS
CLARE'S LETTER-VOICE (WRITING ABOUT ELLIS)
I thought he seemed pretty ordinary, and Jack wasn't in the habit of paying close attention to people then. He was just this brown-haired man with brown eyes in a brown suit and still pretty tanned from being out west, too. Bland all over. The only thing that really struck me was his voice – rich and dry and with such an elegant accent. But in all honesty given how very ordinary he seemed, I thought he was a little pompous. And he was very nosy. He asked all kinds of questions about us, while Jack was busy breaking machinery. Ask Jack sometime about getting kicked out, I'm sure he remembers it.
I mean, that was it, really. We just happened to meet. I think it was fate. Not in some ridiculous poetic way, just in the way these things happen, where one inevitability follows another until it's like a runaway train. We had to meet that day, so that all the rest of it could happen. I'm not overly given to religious faith, but I do believe. I think if a divine hand isguiding us, that was a pretty good day's work for the Creator.
EXASPERATED CLARE
"Yes, I think it was. They seemed trustworthy – his sister and her husband. They've asked if I'll carry a letter back, when the time comes."
"You told them?" Ellis demanded, eyes snapping open.
"Yes."
"Clare, of all the stupid – "
"Is it all right if we just don't have this fight?" Clare asked. "You're tired, and shouting at me won't change anything. They offered to help. They're not going to turn us in, even if they knew about you –which they don't, by the way – or where I was staying, which they also don't know. I made a decision, and I don't think it was the wrong one, so you can stuff your superior nonsense, Ellis, the job's done now."
KIDDING AROUND WITH JACK:
“Mm,” Jack replied, glancing out one of the windows. “Rain’s coming down hard. What’re you doing today?”
”Oh, I thought I’d get one in Graveworthy’s eye and try re-readingGeppetto, if they have it.”
Jack grinned. “Remember when you got that copy from the shop up on Copp’s Hill?”
“How could I forget! I’ve never been so terrified in my life that I was going to be arrested. And they just had piles of them sitting there.”
“Bribed the police, I guess. And then I took a whole two days from my gating allowance and we spent all night reading the horrifying bits aloud. I learned a lot from that book.”
“Not much of use if you ever want to marry a girl.”
“Well, no knowledge is ever wasted,” he said.
“So, that’s what I’m going to do. You may find me in the library, far away from some freezing ship’s bridge, reading pornography. Thrilling, isn’t it?”
CLARE BEING VERY FRUSTRATED TRYING TO FIGURE OUT ELLIS
Clare Fields was perched on one of the cushions, wearing a threadbare dressing gown over her light blue nightdress. She ducked her head and twisted her fingers together in her lap.
“Are you all right?” he asked, pushing himself up on one elbow. In the bed, Jack snorted and slept on.
“I finished re-reading Geppetto,” she said.
“Did you read all night?”
“Pretty much,” she said.
“And your conclusions?”
She turned her head, giving him a slightly scornful look.
“What? Obviously you wanted to speak with me. Here I am, awake at…” he fumbled for his pocket-watch, sitting on the end-table, nearly dropping it twice as his arm protested. She Created a ball of light for him to see by. “…thank you – two-eighteen in the morning, and available for discussion, dissection, criticism, or praise.”
“I was going to pick at all the things wrong with it,” she said, dousing the light.
“Quite right. Life is in the details.” He rubbed his face and rested his shoulders against the sofa’s arm. “Pick away.”
“I don’t want to now.”
“Also all right; no-one really likes to hear what’s wrong with his work. What do you want to do?”
“The story,” she said, taking a deep breath. “It’s not just about… inverts, is it?”
“Not exclusively. It’s about the search for love and acceptance, and the ways in which unthinking people prevent it.”
“How do you know so much about it?” she asked. “How can you possibly know all that? Everybody likes you.”
“Well, yes, now that I’m famous and I’ve spent years learning to be likable,” he replied, drawing his knees up to give her more room. “I wasn’t always the golden boy. We all struggle with universal things like love and truth. Some of us struggle more than others.”
“I don’t want to like you,” she said. “You took us away from school, you manipulated Jack – “
” – like an exquisite toy,” he agreed. “Surely I’m not the first; you must have had teachers who influenced you. Someone told you to go to the Trade Schools; someone fostered Jack’s adulation of the steam engine. You’re far too intelligent to be wasted in another two years of school. You want someone to show you the world, even if you don’t know it.”
“And now you’re manipulating me,” she said.
“I’m telling you the truth. But I spoke, just now, in the plural – I include Jack in my assessment. If you don’t want to like me, but find me irresistibly likable at any rate…” He smiled gently. “I suggest you enjoy the journey, Miss Fields. Your life will be infinitely more interesting.”
She sighed, tilting her head up to the ceiling, and was quiet.
“I am thirty-four,” he said, after a while.
“No you’re not. You’re already going gray.”
“I cultivate my premature gray and the gravitas ascribed to me. Age makes a man respectable, makes him seem harmless. Fifteen years ago I learned hard truths about the world, more than I had already known. I spent years pursuing something I didn’t realize I didn’t want; then a woman showed me the path to the life I wanted to claim as my own. Both the schooling I left behind and the work I left it to do are equally important to me, and three years wasted in the span of thirty-four is not so much. When you are thirty-four, this will have been a mere minute in your life. And perhaps you will take more from it than you dreamed.”
“And you get what you want,” she said. “A flying machine.”
“What I want, what Jack wants – what you want for Jack, because you love him,” he said. “I suspect when you talk about Geppetto you only understand the feeling of solitude that comes from having no-one to love because you remember a time after you were taken from your parents and before Jack, when you were terribly alone.”
“I hate how much you see,” she said.
“So do I,” he replied. “But I see it anyway. Go to bed, Miss Fields. When you wake up in the morning, imagine a world in which you don’t dislike me so, and then see if you can still fit into it.”
AND FINALLY, THE MOST CRITICAL SCENE, PROBABLY WITH THE MOST HEIGHTENED EMOTION CLARE GETS WRITTEN IN....AND DAMN, IT'S HARD TO JUST TRIM IT TO HER DIALOG.
“What if you had a Creationist to negotiate with directly?” Clare asked. Ellis nearly bruised her shoulder in an effort to make her be silent, but she shrugged off his hand. “What if the Creationist we brought you had conditions of their own?”
“A white man’s conditions?” Saturday said.
“What if the Creationist wasn’t a white man?”
“White man, white woman, not much difference.”
“Clare,” Jack said, concerned.
“All right, Jack, I know,” she replied, annoyed, before turning back to Saturday. “What if we had access to a Creationist who supported your cause out of something more than Mr. Graveworthy’s political expediency? Would your Elders listen to someone who genuinely had the interests of the Kooris at heart?”
“How could they prove that?” Saturday asked.
“Libris,” Clare said, turning to him, the blood pounding in her ears. “You said if you sent messengers you could have Kooris come from everywhere.”
“Sooner or later. Most of the westerners will have to walk,” Libris answered, a guarded expression on his face.
“Do you trust me enough to send for them now?”
“Clare, what are you doing?” Ellis hissed. She turned to him.
“There’s something you should see,” she said. “But there are more important things at the moment than your curiosity. Libris, send for them.”
Libris looked at Ellis. “You trust her?”
“Of course,” Ellis said immediately. “But Clare, I need to know – “
“Please, send for them,” Clare said. Libris glanced at Saturday; she hesitated, then gave him a nod. He brushed past Ellis and Jack, out through the secret door.
“Dr. Saturday,” she continued, turning back to the other woman. “Are the Wiradjuri Elders nearby?”
“Yes,” Saturday said slowly.
“Take us to them.”
Saturday shrugged and pushed through them, opening the panel door and holding it for them once she was out.
“What are you doing?” Purva asked, as they walked down the hallway. “You are not Captain here!”
“I am now,” Clare replied.
“You have a secret?”
Clare looked at her, then at Jack, who was holding Purva’s hand as they walked.
“Something like that,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Jack asked, jostling around Purva, falling into step between the two women and neatly blocking Ellis from getting too close.
“What else am I supposed to do, Jack?” Clare asked, in a whisper.
“Well, I don’t know,” Jack answered, voice equally low. “But it seems like maybe not the best idea and Graveworthy’s going to be really angry when he finds out.”
“I don’t live my life to please Ellis Graveworthy,” Clare retorted. There was a cough from behind them. “Ellis, you’re out of your depth right now, be quiet.”
“When have you ever known me to be quiet when I’m out of my depth?” Ellis asked from behind her.
“It’s just, there’s a time and place,” Jack hissed.
“And this is it,” she replied. She turned to the Elders, speaking perhaps more loudly than she needed to. “My name is Clare Fields. I am the daughter of a white woman named Miranda Fields and a man named Christopher Fields, who lived in Melbourne twenty years ago.”
“There are plenty of men named Christopher,” said one of the men. “What does that matter to us?”
“He was a Koori,” she said.
The Elders laughed, looking at each other in amusement, and before Clare could speak, Jack shouted, “Don’t laugh at her!”
They fell silent, warily, but one of them shook his head. “You’re not a Koori, girl.”
“Aren’t I?” Clare asked, and she dropped her glamour.
It was a relief, as it always was, like stepping out of clothing just slightly too tight. Over the years she’d grown used to the constriction, but it still felt as though now she could stretch again, could move more freely without the constriction of the glamour. She looked down at her arms and hands as her skin darkened, turning from pale pink to deep rich brown. Her straight blonde hair, framing her face, darkened and curled lightly, brushing her cheeks. She stretched her shoulders, rolling them, reveling in the freedom.
The Wiradjuri Elders stared at her, some with mouths agape. She heard a choking noise behind her; when she turned, Ellis was standing next to Jack, his expression a mixture of surprise and revelation.
“I’m sorry, Ellis,” she said quietly, and then turned back to the Elders. “So you see…now I’ve come home.”
no subject
Date: 2012-12-08 11:11 pm (UTC)...though I'd recommend putting most of this under a cut tag - i.e. <cut> [...] </cut> - for the sake of people's Reading Pages.
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Date: 2012-12-08 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-09 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-09 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-09 04:12 am (UTC)jj is obviously pendantic by nature, tis true
Date: 2012-12-09 04:25 am (UTC)For extra fancy points, you can change that 'Read more...' default text by inserting text="[what you want it to say]" into the first part of the cut tag, i.e. changing it to <cut text="[what you want it to say]">.
Re: jj is obviously pendantic by nature, tis true
Date: 2012-12-09 04:32 am (UTC)Re: jj is obviously pendantic by nature, tis true
Date: 2012-12-09 04:39 am (UTC)I am very fond of expandable cut tags. (Very, very fond..) Thank you for your patience with my proselytizing of its joys. ;o)