1952 By Devon Pitlor

1952 by Devon Pitlor I. The Caterpillar

When one of his suction cups broke and the Caterpillar slipped out of his invisible holding bracket and smashed himself dead on the concrete at the side of the Equitable Life Building, I lost most of the romance I had always felt for the silver screen. The Caterpillar died on the spot of a massive cranial trauma and was speedily replaced by the onsite stunt coordinator with a new Caterpillar along with new safety devices, and the show went on. They were shooting movies all over Branchhaven with the new cinema tax breaks, and my assignments remained the same. At least four new production projects were in the making, and that day I was scouting for a narrow ivylined street suitable for a car chase and some kind of coolish tea room where Unitar could plant a phony gypsy for a phony scene in a phony adventure script that I had not even taken the time to read. I never read all of Unitar’s scripts, just the locations which concerned me. I didn’t know the Caterpillar either, and the tiny news article on the Internet announcing his unfortunate accident fell embarrassingly short of criticizing the slack management of his special effects team. The Caterpillar star, as opposed to the Caterpillar stuntman, made some mumbling comments in the news video about John-somebody being an “able body” and a “good man.” Then the whole incident was forgotten. I ate a quick banana sandwich and continued my trek around downtown looking for my narrow street and gave very little thought to having witnessed from a distance a man’s death. Such was the film industry. Poor Caterpillar, I thought and trudged on. Branchhaven was filled with migrant workers and homeless vagabonds and scores of individuals who just liked to be around when

scenes were filmed and some who maybe thought they were going to get hired as extras. A lot of them hit on you for handouts too. I paid very little notice. Downtown Branchhaven blossomed in full urban decay. Even the garbage collectors carried barely concealed guns, and no one seemed to care. II. The Annex to the Flat Iron Building I was drifting about with a clipboard after the Caterpillar’s fall looking for my appropriately retro street, when I noticed the wedgeshaped Flat Iron Building, a remnant of the last century when the mill town of Branchhaven was teeming with lively offices, immigrants and jobseekers whose eyes were illuminated by the promise of a more golden America. Next to the crumbling Flat Iron Building was another dirty brick structure known only as the Annex. It attached to the Flat Iron Building like an immense accretion and was about four stories tall. It was obvious that the top floors of the Annex had been abandoned years before, and now the street level only boasted a motley array of teeshirt and gold-chain shops and dark, greasy places where microwaved spaghetti was tossed over the counter on paper plates by sordid Asians who seemed to be immediately antagonistic to everyone who came through their doors. All the buildings on the street were attached in one way or another, and all dated from another and most likely better era, and era of solid brick and mortar and respectable residents and workers who wore ties and coats in and out of their offices despite the weather. People with metal lunchboxes and hidden flasks of bourbon and a sense of loyalty to their tiny paychecks. Although I was looking for a street and not a building this time, something drew me to a revolving door between two competing Afro wig shops at the base of the Annex. It was a door leading to the interior of the building, and I wondered, as cinema scouts do, exactly

what was being done in the lobby of a structure so occluded by urban decline. On the door was a sign hanging slantwise which read “push hard,” and I did. The ancient revolving door creaked and finally rotated, and I found myself inside a dimly lit alcove perched above what I immediately assumed was yet another film shoot. The lobby floor was huge and buzzing with an entire range of people, all in costumes: men wearing tweed and herringbone suits with pointed lapels and shoulder pads, women in full length knee skirts or pleated sack dresses, and a few small children, some still sporting knickerbockers, a childhood vestige of another decade. III. The “bank” The scene below me was one of a bank, a classic bank with huge marble benches and tables, green brimmed tellers behind steel cage bars and people of all ages waiting in lines or filling out papers on the marble console tables in the center. The latter were using nib pens dipped in the inkwells provided, and some were chattering happily amongst themselves. In the lines, the “bank customers” were also exchanging a few requisite pleasantries. Everyone seemed very calm and happy. I took a few minutes to scan the whole scene---as it was indeed a scene, a scene scripted directly from a past era when big downtown banks had walk-in customers, and people all seemed to know one another. Most of the men in the lines were wearing the characteristic brimmed hats of the 1950s, usually neatly pinched fedoras, and nearly all of the women wore dark-seamed hose and stylish high heels. One lady had a black cloche hat complete with a veil that covered part of her face. Another wore a clean floral apron and was holding the hand of a small boy who seemed very excited to be in a bank. The boy kept craning his neck forward to watch the progress of the teller’s line in

front of him. In his hand was a large bankbook embossed with a teddy bear. From his top jacket pocket protruded a small wad of banknotes. I noted that most of the other customers in line had visible money in their hands and pockets as well. They were either making deposits or withdrawing cash. It was more cash than I had seen people carrying openly for many years, and I had never, in reality, ever seen a depositwithdrawal book. Behind the cages, the tellers greeted each customer with a great sense of courtesy and called many by name. They brandished fat fountain pens and made neat entries in the bankbooks pushed before them. A heavy haze of smoke lay over the entire bank scene. Several of the men were puffing cigars, and others had pipes. A few of the women dangled unfiltered cigarettes from their mouths, staining them with loud scarlet lipstick. The scent of tobacco was mixed with a heavy fragrance of aftershave and perfume, but beneath these odors was another smell which occasionally wafted upward. It was the redolence of bodies, sweaty bodies, bodies that had just checked in from laboring jobs. The bank floor was not air-conditioned, and several of the men had large sweat rings under their armpits. Others had brown perspiration stains pushing up over the brims of their hats. The actors did not especially stink, but it was not today’s antiseptic and deodorized scene. Many of the men had slicked back hair, and all of those who were bareheaded had neat if not definitive haircuts with clearcut parts and symmetrical wagonwheel lines shaved above the ears. A few of the younger men had ducktails, flattops and brushed crew cuts. Such were the haircuts of the era. On the wall was a huge paper calendar with the image of the Statue of Liberty. It was the year 1952…at least in this movie. Having served on the production staff of Unitar for several years, I admired the

verisimilitude of the assembly--right down to the overpowering tobacco and aftershave fragrances and the less than modern hints of body odor. Signs advertising Liberty War Bonds lined the walls as well, and a huge exploded photograph of President Harry Truman hung over the teller cages. The scene assistants had done a remarkable job, and I wanted to see more. After all, it was something akin to my job. One of my set designer colleagues had done a more than credible job. I walked down some tiled steps toward to the entry to the bank floor but was stopped by a fluffy fabric cord strung across the doorway. A fully uniformed attendant with two rows of bright gold buttons and a pillbox cap stopped me with a sudden gesture. “You’re out of costume,” he whispered. “You will have to stay out.” Eyeing me with uncovered disgust was a strolling shoe shine boy with a wooden box filled with brushes and rags. I noticed that he was the only black person in the scene. He stared at my sneakers and realized that, unlike so many of the others, I would not need a shine. A fat man wearing a bulging waistcoat and a white striped shirt with cuffs rolled up over his hairy arms snapped his finger at the boy, who hopped over and began buffing the man’s shoes as the former waited his turn in line. I stood behind the cord long enough to see the man flip what looked like a silver quarter into the boy’s palm and shooed him away with a sharp outward gesture of the hand. The boy quickly found other customers and kept on polishing. Also, I chanced to hear some of the conversations: Korean War… presidential election…Adlai Stevenson…Japan vetoed by Stalin for entry into the United Nations…drought in the Midwest…milk rising in price from its usual fourteen cents a gallon. The talk was pure 1950s. Indeed the scene was well engineered--right down to the last detail. The bellhop-looking attendant kept staring at me and finally

said “It will only be a minute now.” He had examined a silver encased pocket watch before telling me this. A few other pocket watches appeared, and suddenly a lady with long rollerized hair and wispy finger curls came briskly out and banged on a desk bell in the middle of one of the service tables. The scene quickly broke up. People walked off in all directions and the “tellers” pulled shut their windows, not forgetting to hang a CLOSED sign on each one of them. In the space of a minute, the entire crowd had dispersed leaving only the uniformed attendant behind, and this ostensibly because of me. IV. Some unusual things and then an explanation I realized suddenly that there were no film crews present, or at least crews that could be seen. No gaffers, no sound techs, no props builders or boom operators. Somber workmen wearing flannel coveralls were closing everything down, and a janitor, dressed in a soiled white shirt with a poorly knotted tie, was pushing a broom. It seemed as if the bank closing was an integral part of the film. But where were the cameras, the lighting crew, the sound mixers? And how had the actors disappeared so rapidly into the recesses of the Annex Building? The attendant smiled at me and read my mind. “Think you’ve walked into 1952?” he said with a smile. “Well, that’s the point. I mean 1952.” “That was before I was born. But I’m film crew myself. I know the look.” The attendant stepped out of the bank floor and onto the stairs as the interior lights blinked out.

“This is, of course, not a film,” he said. “But in case you are wondering, it is not 1952 either. You can step right back out into 2009 anytime you want. And you can come here tomorrow and see the scene again. We go from eleven AM to one. Then it is over. Five days a week. No weekends.” “So if it is not a film, what is it,” I inquired. “A living fresco,” said the red breasted attendant. “Like a Nativity scene outside a church at Christmas or a Civil War combat reenactment. Only we keep on going every day. It is hard to explain why, and I’m not sure I’m the person to do it.” With this the attendant put a gloved hand in mine, smiled and walked outside, and, like the others, just vanished into the crowds. V. Millicent’s reaction and its aftermath I met Millicent for our usual five-thirty drink later. She had been scouting some other scene for Unitar, something about a cellphone tower that a desperate refugee could climb. It was another dumb script. Why would a refugee want to climb a tower? Millicent, as blasé as I over our scouting assignments, had no idea. She asked me if I had been around when the Caterpillar had his unfortunate fall. I told her about it, but then changed the conversation to the bank scene. “Ever heard of a living fresco,” I asked. Millicent had not, but in my description of the scene, Millicent, characteristically, chose the details that offended her. She was already seething about the Caterpillar. Being a modern twenty-five year old, her sense of contemporary propriety was deeply offended.

“You say there were kids?” she snapped. “This is a school day. Why weren’t they in school?” “Child actors,” I proposed, not satisfying Millicent. “And body odor! Yuck. We’re not doing smell-o-vision here. Why did they need that? And what about all that loose cash in a neighborhood like this? And why 1952 and a black shoe-shine boy? Wasn’t there segregation and a Cold War back then? And Harry Truman…the greatest criminal the world has ever known. He was the only one so far in history to use the atomic bomb….” I cut her off with a shrug. Our words returned to the Caterpillar, whose name according to Millicent was John Draper, an old Unitar stand-by. She accused our employer of gross negligence and said that she would testify if asked in any court or police examination, of which there were none because as it turned out Unitar paid everyone off bigtime, and stuntman John Draper became less than a dim footnote in the sordid history of filmography. But Millicent, who apparently had known Draper, continued to fulminate. Unitar had not taken adequate precautions. They were always in a hurry. The Caterpillar had already gone into dual production for a series. A man who climbed walls. How utterly ridiculous. Just another Spiderman ripoff. How could they dare? Didn’t they care about human life? I felt a certain passion in Millicent’s words and wondered what it might be like to get closer to such a fiery activist. For a fleeting minute, I felt a rush of attraction to her angry demeanor, but we had never gone beyond the drink-after-work phase. We had always ceased to know one another after six-thirty PM. I started to regret this a little. Millicent was, in effect, rather pretty---something I had not particularly noticed before. She had fire and radiance in her outraged emerald eyes. It drew me in for a minute. But then burned away like

a morning mist in heat of day. As we each went our separate ways, she shouted back at me that she wanted to see the living fresco tomorrow at 11:30 and asked me to meet her outside the revolving door. I promised to do so. VI. The revisit As it developed, Millicent and I, both dressed in jeans and sneakers, entered the alcove above the bank fresco at twelve noon. The air was already heavy with smoke, and I could see Millicent making a note of how many children were being subjected to the poisonous atmosphere. She immediately curled up her nose at the odors too. “B.O.,”she exclaimed, “and a lot of it! This is gross.” As we stood by the rail watching, I noticed that the “customers” were more or less the same, but I also noted that some new ones had arrived too. More women with flamboyant hairstyles. More men with suspenders and more talk about Joe McCarthy and the service he was rendering to America by ferreting out the hidden Communists. The most shocking thing I saw was that everyone from yesterday had advanced somewhat toward the teller cages from whatever position they had held yesterday. The little blond boy, still beaming with excitement, was next in line for the teller and still tugging at his mother’s hand. I watched as he approached the teller and smacked down his deposit book with obvious pride. He pulled out some dollar bills from his jacket pocket and shoved them under the window, saying something about his allowance for cutting the hedges and grass. The teller was very pleased and carefully counted the boy’s money and noted his deposit in the bankbook. Then he proudly produced a large decorated certificate which turned out to be a U.S. Savings Bond, Korean War issue. The boy grabbed the bond and was ecstatic, as was his mother. She said something to the teller about

“We’re going to win this war and defeat the Commies.” The teller seemed happy with this remark and began counting her cash deposit as the little boy disengaged himself from his mother’s grasp and took a seat on one of the chairs lined up against the wall. He immediately lost his character, and a blank look overtook his once shining face. Then as soon as his mother had finished her transaction, the two of them rejoined hands and walked off the scene, only to reappear seconds later at the rear of another line as excited characters, rekindled and waiting behind five more people to get to yet another teller. The boy once again had a pocket full of bills, and there was no savings bond in sight. In another line, a stylish woman with a huge hatpin stuck through her twisted turban lit a long, unfiltered cigarette and accidentally blew a cloud of smoke in the direction of the little boy, who coughed briefly. A thin man smoking a short pipe snapped his fingers at the shine boy who scurried over to his feet saying “Yassir, yassir…shine right away, yassir.” An older gentleman wearing a jewel pinned cravat stood briefly out of the line and spat a huge wad of tobacco into a receptacle on the floor against the far wall. Several customers laughed aloud at the length of his spit, but most of the women grimaced. A little girl with blond locks and soft curls tied with bows, who was also carrying cash in her hand, said “Nasty!” It was, of course, 1952, and spittoons and chewing tobacco were already going out of style. I knew from scene planning that before long they would totally disappear from public places. One of the male customers said to another for no particular reason “Adlai is a sure thing. All Ike wants to do is let the niggers go wild.” Another customer, despite sporting a stylish Eisenhower jacket, shook is head in avid agreement. This was more than Millicent could take. Suddenly, she rushed down the stairs and up to the uniformed and capped attendant who still guarded the rope across the entrance.

“This is immoral and illegal,” she shouted. “Smoking and children and racism in a public place. I work for Unitar, and I am ready to report all of you! This is a Unitar production, isn’t it?” she demanded. The attendant blocked her entrance and shook his head. No, it was a living fresco, he whispered, not a Unitar production. Millicent was not dressed to enter; she could not pass. The attendant motioned to a policeman standing by the far entry. The policeman quietly tapped his truncheon into his palm and stared at Millicent. It was clear that he would not be hesitant to use it. Millicent backed off and came back up to my side, enraged. I looked down at the cop and the attendant and put a finger to my mouth. There was more here than met the eye. Millicent needed to be quiet. “I’m coming back,” she muttered. “And I’m going to rat my hair or wear a Mamie bang and get a crinoline poodle dress from the costume shop. I’m going to slide into this scene and stop it. It is totally indecent.” VII. We return Millicent looked like a debutante out of Better Homes and Gardens the next day when we returned. She had trouble navigating in her strappy high-heeled mules, however, and it appeared that it was the first time in her life that she had worn them. Her ill-fitting petticoat was visible under the hem of her dress, and a couple of women customers made a point of noticing it. She was instantly admitted beyond the rope onto the bank floor and motioned by the uniformed attendant to take a place at the back of one of the lines. By the purest of coincidences each line was tailed by a man smoking a cigar and puffing out voluminous clouds of smoke. Millicent turned up her nose and demanded to see the bank manager

or the production manager, whichever he or she was. “There are at least fifty health violations here,” she shouted at the attendant. “Where is the locations director?” Then she stood, arms akimbo, in a threatening pose against the side of one wall. The customers glanced at her but seemed to have little concern. One woman offered her a Lucky Strike. Another gently pointed to one of the fake lashes that was falling off her right eye. Millicent was not used to the heavy mascara of the day, and her pin curls were wilting in the heat of the room. Presently, a squat little man wearing hopelessly outdated pince-nez glasses and carrying a stack of leather bound ledgers came trundling out. Like the tellers, he was wearing a green visor. He fumbled for a cigarette as he approached Millicent. I was expecting fireworks when suddenly Millicent jumped forward and looked squarely at a tall and rather distinguished man dressed in gray flannel trousers who was counting money at one of the windows. She totally left the “manager” behind and stared at the man in what looked like disbelief. He turned his head sideways, grinned at her and kept on counting his banknotes. Uncharacteristically, Millicent turned abruptly and fled, totally ignoring the “manager” she had previously summoned. When she got to my side, she said “Let’s go.” And a few minutes later in our accustomed café, she grabbed my hands with hers, stared widely into my eyes and said “I’m dead.” “What on earth do you mean?” I inquired with a total lack of balance. “You and I, Randy, you and I. It never was, was it? We both floated around for Unitar and came here for a drink or two every day. But we never…we never…”

“I didn’t know that you..” “Maybe you should have known. Don’t your mothers teach you some of that stuff? Anyhow, it is too late. I’m dead. You will hear all about it tomorrow. It all came to me when I saw him, and each of their faces confirmed it. I’m dead or very nearly so. You are talking to a ghost. Too bad about us. I mean you and me. Co-workers for a whorehouse industry. Us. Together. What could have been? Who knows? We both should have been more aggressive with each other. That’s a problem these days. At least those people used to go on dates. We don’t even know what a date is, do we? Her voice trailed off and she stared at her rum and coke. “I’m dead,” she repeated. “And I need to go now. Look at the news tomorrow.” I hadn’t realized that Millicent had been taking photos with her cellphone. At length, she shoved the phone in my hand and curled my fingers around it with hers. “Go look,” she groaned. “There’s a place online where you can research a photo. Look for the little girl with the ringlets. Ginny something… Died in a fall from the window of a burning church--a church that burned just a little more than the set directors had planned. The kid had no choice but to jump, and it killed her. It wasn’t Unitar but some other big production company. Check it out.” For the first time, I saw something other than an angry young woman in Millicent. The thought of sex with her had, of course, crossed my mind before, but for some vague reason I had dismissed it. Millicent seemed more like a symbol than a person, a symbol of some sort of righteous indignation aimed at Unitar and other film production companies engaged in shooting low-budget movies around the country. She seemed passionless, except for pushing issues of health

and safety. But suddenly I saw a sort of recessed light burning in her eyes. I felt her slipping away from me and wanted to retain her somehow. I wanted to make up for the indifference I had always shown her. I had no idea of what love is and still do not, but a desire to satisfy and possess Millicent began racing through my mind. I saw her high cheekbones and wide set eyes in a new light, and the warmth of something vital that I had never felt before began coursing through my veins. I took her hand in mine and found it to be limp and cold, like a dead eel. She withdrew it immediately and stared at me. “I’m dead,” she whispered again. “Or soon will be. Forget anything that you might be thinking. It is too late. Check out that kid. And check out…” “Who?” She grimaced at her watch and rose from the table, not finishing her drink. “John Draper,” she said suddenly. “The Caterpillar. The dead Caterpillar. That man at the bank window, that was him. Check out the kid. See if you can locate any of the others. They are all dead stand-ins or secondary actors or stuntmen. To be on that bank floor in that so-called living fresco you have to be dead. I went in and they accepted me thinking I was one of them. I touched Draper when I walked up to him, and he knew and then I knew. I knew that I would die soon because once you’re in that scene, you have to stay in it. I’ll be there tomorrow. And very dead.” I began to protest, but Millicent shrugged her shoulders and bent down to give me a quick, furtive kiss. Her lips felt cold, as had her hands. Then she rushed out of the café and vanished into the milling crowd. The sterile and hollow odor of 2009 invaded the café. Some

kind of reality about love and affection that I had previous shielded myself from washed over my person. I realized suddenly that when Millicent said she was dead, she was totally correct. Millicent was dead, dead in every possible way. A salty tear came to my eye. I tried for more because I would have liked to cry, but I didn’t really know how. VIII. Conclusion Needless to say, I never saw Millicent alive again. It was an electrical mishap, or so they said. That evening she had located her cellphone tower, and a stray cable had fallen along with the branch of a rotting tree and electrocuted her on the spot. Unitar would later acknowledge that she was on assignment and eventually paid for the funeral arrangements. Another dead employee. Another small notice in the online obituary section of the Branchhaven Eagle. And it was all true. She stood in line the next day and played with her over-long painted nails and a massive string of fake bakelite pearl beads that she wore as a period-piece necklace. Her alligator handbag, appropriately huge for the era, hung open at her side, and a small wad of bills bulged out near the zipper. She was waiting to make a deposit and maybe buy a war bond. Beside her in another line stood the Caterpillar, John Draper. Draper was smoking a thin cigar with a plastic mouthpiece and blowing smoke in all directions. Millicent didn’t seem to care. She arched her neck in order to see how many customers were still in front of her. The netting of a thin black veil falling from her flat hat concealed one eye and a part of her soft wave bob. Her lipstick was cherry red and over-applied. Dark mascara ringed her wide eyes. Though a period piece, she was, I thought, still beautiful, still fiery. Using her cellphone photos, I had done some of the research by that

time. Five places ahead of Millicent, stood the portly aproned woman holding the hand of the excited little boy with a pocketful of dollar bills and an innocent 1952 smile creasing his face. Before the scene’s closing, he would deposit the money again and buy another war bond to save America from Communism. Before the scene’s closing, Millicent might even make it to the window, but the boy, I knew him now. Tommy Easton of Prestwick, New York. An unfortunate child actor run over by a fake limousine in a chase scene two years before. Poor Tommy Easton. He had not been famous enough to merit much of a review or an obituary. It did not matter how much smoke he inhaled now on the murky bank floor. He was dead like all the others. And the dead girl was Ginny Conlove, dropped from the window of a burning church in 2004. It was the first time her family had ever consented to allow her as an extra in a film. I tried to avoid Millicent’s stare and walked down to the roped off bank floor. The attendant pointed to my clothes and once again denied me entry. “You don’t want to be here, anyway,” he said firmly. “I think we have all the extras we need for the moment.” But Millicent, despite the bobbed hair, high heels, nylon stockings, garter clips and visible slip, now held a power over me she had never held in life. I felt an attachment that seemed to come out of nowhere. Just hours before, she had touched my hand and cheek. It had ignited something. I am at a loss to say what but I felt an attraction to this retro-wardrobed “dame” standing in an impossible line in some inexplicably staged living fresco, which I now knew was composed only of the dead. How many of them had sacrificed their lives for the film industry and its seemingly endless spill of B-movies and madefor-television episodes where renegades for reasons not explained climb phone towers and men dressed like insects scale walls to prevent catastrophes or save the world? And for what reason? To re-enact a scene from the idealized past on the floor of a crumbling downtown

building. I worked in the outer orbit of an industry that churned out meaningless productions that were forgotten within weeks of their release. Why should there not be a place for their unhappy spirits to keep on acting, if only for a few hours each day, if only for the chance to perform? I glanced up at the gallery rail above me. A couple of old ladies, dressed appropriately like old ladies of 2009, watched the scene with great interest and approval and pointed out details to one another. They shook their heads in approbation as if to say “They got it right. We know because we were there.” It was another chance for them to see the world of their youth before being extinguished forever. Another chance to relive a part of 1952, and no admission was charged and there was no labyrinthine or convoluted plot to struggle through. Just a partly hidden door into a building where no one went---and ghosts, ghosts playing parts in some era that most of us had never known. The attendant seemed to read my thoughts. He smiled politely and whispered in my ear “The fresco will be moving soon. 1952 is almost over, and there will be a new fresco. If you like this one, you will have to get in costume.” Millicent was there. That was why I liked it. I had no particular affection for 1952, but I knew that this was the right production for me. There was, I learned, a musty costume shop just a few blocks away. And so the noon hour found me on the red carpeted floor of a bank, dressed in a gabardine double-breasted suit and smoking a pipe. My wallet had the remainder of my last paycheck in it, about $25 dollars. I stuffed the money into my top jacket pocket and took a place in line. The attendant spritzed me with strong cologne as I took my place. In

a few minutes I would reach the teller window, well behind Millicent. But Millicent knew, she glanced a veiled eye over her shoulder and saw me waiting and watching her. With deliberation she pulled out a tube of red lipstick, and attempting to freshen her already over-red lips, dropped it on purpose. The lipstick rolled toward the marbled banking tables, and Millicent left the line to retrieve it. She did not return to her place but rather beside me. She took my hand in hers. It felt warm and lifelike. We became a couple, much to the approval of the uniformed attendant. “Good coupling,” he remarked quietly and brusqued away. Together now and this presumably for the rest of eternity, we walked hand in hand toward the green-visored teller. We each had a bank book, but the attendant exchanged both of them for a joint account. The scene worked better that way. _________________________________//// Devon Pitlor October, 2009