GOODBYE, GRAY

The other day a woman stopped by to check out our gray walls. She's tired of the look of her living room and when she told her daughter she was thinking of going gray, the daughter suggested a trip down to Grand Avenue to see our "absolutely perfect gray". Why, thank you. Except that when the woman walked in, I was up on a ladder, painting over the very color she had come to see. "But why?" she asked. "I thought gray was getting to be pretty popular!"  Exactly.

When Debra hired me back in 2010, our walls were painted Sheetrock White. OK, that wasn't the actual color actual name, just what it looked like on the walls: nothing. All the cool pieces that Debra had found were dying against the bland background, so my first order of business was to change that background. I went with dark gray instead. Much better.

Actually, the "new" paint color was a fairly easy choice:  I just re-used the same shade  of gray that I had used thirty-five years before, when I moved into my very first post-college apartment. 

One of the reasons I took the apartment in the first place was that, although the place was dirty, it still had its original glass block walls, terrazzo floors and twelve-foot-wide enameled steel Venetian blinds. I couldn't have afforded to replace the blinds--even if I wanted to, which I didn't--so I had their glossy gray finish custom-matched by Elmer, the old guy at my neighborhood Benjamin Moore store. There's a hard way to do things and an easy way. I chose the easy way: I let Elmer do it.  

The building had been a tony address when it was new in 1940, and its apartments' spacious dimensions turned out to be a drawback. What little furniture I owned looked totally lost in the big rooms, so I used paint & dim light to create the illusion of warmth & intimacy where there was neither.  Dark gray & I go way back.

And although my handsome gray walls matched the blinds, they somehow had a depth & liveliness that the blinds didn't have. Of course, in the dark ages before HGTV turned everyone into a design authority, nobody ever had heard of full-spectrum paint, but that's probably what I got from Elmer, who matched anything you gave him  

and he did it all by eye, not by pushing a button on a digital scanner. Nowadays, guys like Elmer are a vanishing species.  

I stuck with the gray, even after the place started filling up with antique furniture, and when I moved to my next place--the upstairs of a big Victorian house--I painted my bedroom the same gray as that first apartment. Why mess with success?

And ten years later, when I moved to an apartment in Chicago--a 1950 high-rise overlooking Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan--I went all-gray again.  This time I matched the steely color of the lake in winter. So I have no problem with gray.

  

So why, then--my visitor to the shop wanted to know--if I liked the color, and it looked good in the shop, was  I getting rid of it?  I couldn't argue with her about its looking good in the shop. It did look good. Really good. But here's the thing:  

six weeks after I painted the shop gray, a mass-market store lately known for its overscaled furniture and its equally overscaled catalogs painted their store what's basically the same color, so, after people started asking me "Is this Restoration Hardware 'Slate'?"--and it's not, but there's no point being coy or making people guess--I started giving out hand-painted samples of our color. That way, those who liked it could take it to their own paint store and have it matched. After all, there's more to being a merchant than just selling stuff. A hundred-odd years ago, Marshall Field started serving home-made chicken pot pies to lady customers faint with hunger after a morning of hard shopping. I'm no cook, so I'm not about to  do that, but I can paint and hand out paint samples. Whatever it takes.

These days, of course, that's hardly even necessary, because dark gray walls are everywhere you look. And while, in principle, I have no problem with copying--either my own, or others'--I hate it when new customers think that I've copied the shop right across the street--or the one two doors east of us. I sure hope my color sources aren't that obvious. Fortunately, inspiration is all around us.

 Anyway, since, after a few years, I've become bored with this no-color palette- (which, if I get to missing it, I can still see, simply by looking in the gutter out front)

 we'll be going--finally, after a year of talking about it--in a fresh, new direction. 

I'm not saying where or when I came up with the idea for this particular color, 

Green River by artist Stacy Bogan.  

but if you were in Chicago last weekend, you might have an idea.

NESTING SEASON

A terra cotta keystone on an apartment building on North Clarendon Street in Chicago

Judging by the mounds of dirty snow in my apartment's shady courtyard, it's still the dead of winter in Chicago, but spring has to be close because there are already crocus budding a block away, birds I haven’t seen since Thanksgiving are back in town to check out the available nesting spots in the neighborhood (and, too, probably wondering what happened to the two white mulberry trees that were still in the front yard when the birds left) and here in the shop, customers who winter in Palm Beach and Montecito are starting to show up again--with tans. Those are all good signs, this time of year. I, of course, retain the normal pallor that comes naturally to one who spends most of his time indoors and whose southward travels generally go no farther than Cermak Road. Mayor Anton Cermak--in whose honor 22nd Street was renamed--went down to Florida one year about this time and look what happened.  There's no reason to take unnecessary chances just to soak up a little sunshine.  The stuff's over-rated.    

The view out the window above my bed. Sometimes, it's easy to forget I live in a city of almost three million people. 

Then somebody's stupid car alarm goes off.

 

No, I'm staying right here, close to home, and in recent days, it’s Chicago's year-round residents that  I’m seeing--and hearing: just  more of them. The raven that hangs out in the ancient cottonwood across the street wakes me up like he does every morning, no matter what the season is, but lately, he seems louder. Maybe I'm imagining it. And just this morning, I saw four fat cardinals in the tree right outside my window.  Like me, like ravens, cardinals stay put when the weather turns cold, but still, I've never seen that many cardinals together before. Then again, Why not? The city's homeless population may be struggling more this year than in years past, but at least the cardinals are being well-fed. To him who has, more will be given, I guess. Soon enough, the noisy sparrows--who never think they have enough--will be fighting over snippets of the colored yarn that one of my neighbors threads through the bare twigs of the barberry hedge out front. The Circle of Life is a wonderful thing.

 

 

Meanwhile, down on Grand Avenue, the hyacinths & forsythia are blooming, I’m down to the last dozen or so of Debra’s rubber faux tulips and our Slush Gray walls are splotched with test swatches of green & yellow paint. Winter may have one last blizzard up its sleeve—face it, it is only March, and we are in Chicago—but at SG Grand, it is now officially Spring. Let the nesting begin.

 

Jacob Wrey Mould's limestone carving of 'Spring' at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, NYC, courtesy of SummerQueen's photostream at Flickr.com

 

Do a good deed for somebody today: everybody deserves a home.

 

Chicago with Love

 

Yes, there's a book called Chicago with Love, by novelist Arthur Meeker--and it happens to be one of my favorites, with gossipy stories about the larger-than-life personalities of the city's social & cultural muckety-mucks, back in the first half of the last century--but that book, while fascinating, is not what I'm talking about today. I just borrowed its title.

This is mostly about Chicago landmarks of one sort or another, landmarks that we loved--and lost. Here's the thing: any time you get two or three Chicago designers or architects together, it's only a matter of time before somebdy brings up a lost masterpiece or building or one that's currently endangered. At the moment, it's Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Prentice Women's Hospital, and the outcome doesn't look rosy.  Any time you go to court to present your evidence and the judge shows up with the decision against you already written, it's not a good sign, even if he grants you a token hearing, for, you know, appearances sake. Unfortuntely, that approach is an old Chicago tradition, like dyeing the river green: bulldoze first, ask questions later. 

In his classic 1975 book Lost Chicago—now in its umpteenth printing—my friend David Garrard Lowe achieves the perfect tone between celebration of our city’s great architecture and elegy for the masterpieces that we’ve lost, and are continuing to lose.  

Photo by Ken Hedrich of Hedrich-Blessing, available excusively from ArchitecGallery.com
 

Lowe especially mourns the loss of Holabird & Root's elegant Michigan Square building of 1929, with its fabled Diana Court. In this large semicircular room, cream & brown  marble columns rose between carved glass panels of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, the "hunt", presumably, being for the kind of expensive clothing and fine jewelry on offer in the tony shops lining the curved balcony.

 

Those  carved glass panels--sidelit for extra sparkle--were the work of Chicago sculptor Edgar Miller, and next to the stairs stood a fifteen-foot-high fountain with a nude bronze statue of the goddess by Carl Milles. It was surely the most glamourous room in town--and back then, Chicago had a lot of glamourous rooms. 

Another iconic shot by Hedrich-Blessing, the greatest architectural photographers Chicago has ever seen

Unfortunately, by the time I saw Diana Court, the place was already closed and awaiting demolition. In fact, I only managed to see it at all because a salesman at the old Dunhill Store—as I remember, the last tenant left in the Michigan Avenue storefronts—was nice enough to unlock the shop’s lobby entrance so that I could take a look. I came prepared to bribe him, but as I said, he was a nice guy and he wouldn’t take my money. Then again, maybe he declined the cash because he needed the deniability: in case I got caught trespassing, he could claim he didn't know anything about it. If those concerns were why he turned down my crisp new twenty, he probably wasn't born here. A real Chicagoan, back then, would have taken the money, then denied doing it. That used to be the the Chicago way, although, judging by the article in this morning's Chicago Tribune about our former congressman, for some people, it's still the Chicago way. 

 At any rate, the Dunhill salesman let me in. And even dark & dusty, and already stripped of some of its elements, what had been Diana Court still gave off a powerful whiff of glamour. Well, that and a bit of damp, abandoned-building smell. The  heat had probably been turned off. Soon after, most of the place was bulldozed.   
 

                                            Historic Images.com                           

These days, poor naked Diana is shivering her nubile butt off on an outside terrace down in Central Illinois, and what’s left of the temple-like space she used to reign over is a garishly decorated hotel lobby. If, to avoid future problems, a developer asked a designer to come up with a decor guaranteed not to elicit even a whimper of protest when it got ripped out, it would probably look like this.    

 

                                Same space, same view, different clientele

But it’s not only high-style landmarks that I miss. The other night our Grand Avenue neighborsUrban Remains opened their new showroom, so after I closed the shop, I walked over to check out the place. Eric, the owner, has lots of cool stuff, and I ended up talking with a guy about old signs. He brought up the old Magikist signs, which, for anybody who grew up in the area, used to be the unofficial welcome signs to downtown Chicago. Most of the major freeways had one and it killed me to see the last of them torn down a few years back. I always thought the city should designate them as official landmarks--even if the company they represented was defunct--as well as the more distant giant spinning neon atom sign that used to mark the halfway point into the city from the western suburbs.  But they’re gone, too, now--all of them.

                                                magikistsign.com

Well, OK, not quite gone. Somebody here in town rescued one of the smaller versions of the Magikist sign, maybe the one that used to flash on & off high up above glitzy Randolph Street which, back in the day was Chicago’s own version of Times Square, complete with miles of neon, blinking chaser lights, hookers, porno shops and all-night greasy spoons. All that stuff's gone, too, now, but the sign, somehow, survived--sort of. That is, it's still around, but its fragile neon tubing is long gone. The thing needs a ton of work.  But for those who loved the signs, all is not lost.

No, the big red lips don't welcome drivers to downtown Chicago anymore, but they're not completely gone--not as long as there are memories. And, more importantly, computers.  Then again, I spent a few frustrating days online trying to track down a decent video of the Magikist lips, and I still came up empty: twelve gazillion pages and not one video of one of Chicago's iconic images. Who has time for that? Sometimes, it's just easier to do it yourself.  So I did. Anyway, so that's my own rendition of the sign at the top of the page.  And here is, again. It's like having to look at a dozen identical cellphone pictures of somebody's new grandbaby--which I hate doing. The difference, of course, is that this baby is mine. 

I  had no idea what I was doing when I began, but it wasn't difficult. In fact, it took me less than two hours to create the individual frames in plain old MS Paint and then upload them. Why no one else  had ever bothered to do this before now, I don't know. My prediction is that, given Chicagoans' affection for the lost touchstones of their childhood, this little GIF file may well outlive me. 

Then again, I'm hardly the only one inspired by low art. A few years ago, artist Derek Eerdman, who, like the signs, formerly worked in Chicago, appropriated the Magikist sign to make his own statement. That is, he flat-out copied the sign--in the same deadpan way that Andy Warhol copied soup cans and Brillo boxes. The advantage that Derek's version has over Magikist's original signs, of course, is that this one, at only four feet wide, will fit in the average living room while the real deal would not, and the advantage over a Warhol original is that to own an Erdman, you don't need to sell your house. The guy's still around, and he's still busy cranking out the art. The only bad part is that Derek's just not in Chicago, anymore, which, as far as I'm concerned is another loss for our city, because he's also a funny guy. What can I say? The hits just keep coming.  

 

Speaking of hits, though--and to end this up on an upbeat note, not one of regrets over what we've lost--here's a great little Youtube video that just happens to combine today's two other themes: goddesses & lips. It's a fan video by et7waage1--whoever that is--celebrating the movies' Film Goddess of All Time, featuring The New Vaudeville Band playing their catchy 1967 mega-hit Dear Rita Hayworth.  OK, the term 'mega-hit' is, I admit, a bit of stretch--the song was 45 years old before I ever even heard it--but I instantly fell in love with it, and at this time of year, its innocent yearning seems just about perfect.

 

I Can Dream Can't I?

The Winter Antiques show opens this week and, as usual, I planned on being there. Of course, I've planned the same thing these last two years, and I didn't make it those times, either. Two years ago, I ended up with the flu the week of the fair. Last year, I was perfectly healthy and it was the weather that threw me for a loop. A big winter storm messed up a lot of people's travel plans, not only mine. This year I've been under the weather again--so to speak--and although I can't say I'm actually sick, I don't have the energy. There's really no point in traveling 1000 miles to spend a week in bed because you're too tired to go out. I know.  I've done it.  

Seeing the Antiques Show--especially, the stuff from Newport, this year--isn't the only thing I'll miss. I don't like flying but I love taking the Lake Shore Limited to New York because it's one of the few trains that still has a real dining car,  although, truth be told, even in there,"dining" isn't quite the word. Not anymore, it isn't. But, at the moment, it's the best thing available, so I don't complain. Cary Grant wouldn't complain. Not, of course, that I'm comparing myself to Grant, seen here dining on the 20th Century Limited--although we do have the same sunglasses. Of course, I don't wear mine at the table.

 

And although the rooms on my would-be train don't come--even if I were getting on it, tonight, which I'm not--with quite the same level of appointments as the rooms on the 20th Century Limited did back in the old days, well, let's be honest: even back then, not everyone's bedroom included Eva Marie Saint.

And if Amtrak's lounge cars aren't as elegantly streamlined as the one in which Cornel Wilde met the radiant Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven,

or as glamorous as the one where Farley Granger met Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train. I have to admit, today's trains  also don't seem to attract good-looking psychos the way the more stylish trains seemed to do.  Or, at least, if they do, none of said psychos have tried to chat me up. Which, feeling the way I did for the last few weeks, is probably just as well.

No, when I travel, I don't want excitement & intrigue, I want calm. I just sit in my chair and stare out the window for long stretches of time. Hours, sometimes. Or I read. Sometimes I have to read the same paragraph over and over. Stare, read, repeat. Then I fall asleep and drop my book. What time is it? I ask the attendant  (mostly so I know how long I have to wait till they start serving dinner) which question I would probaby ask even if I were wearing  a watch, which I'm generally not: on vacation, there's no need for a watch. I'll get there when I get there. 

Then I rouse myself and go down to the diner, where I always follow Eva Marie Saint's suggestion and tip Floyd the Barber's brother to pre-screen  the people he seats at my table. Attractive people, yes--as long as they don't give off that looking-for-trouble vibe that the blonde in the first picture has. That I don't need. If there are no good-looking people, then interesting-looking people are great. Just no psychos. Either way, I get better service. Why wait till after the meal to give a tip, when it's too late to do any good? 

Then after a stop in the club car for a cocktail (or two or three, depending on who's there) it's time for bed. Of course, the Lake Shore Limited is only a dim echo of the 20th Century Limited, but it shares the same route, right along the water, and nothing's more therapeutic than staring out the window at calm water under moonlight, even if, sometimes at this time of year, the water is frozen.  Not this year, probably, or maybe never again in our lives. We'll find out soon enough, I guess.

At any rate, once again, the train is pulling out without me. Oh, well. I can't take the train I'd really like, anyway: it's last run was decades ago. Fortunately, however, I can visit the Antiques Show-- vicariously, anyway, via Reggie Darling's blog--and as far as the trip itself goes, I 'll just have to imagine the winter landscape speeding past my windows as I lie at home in my own non-streamlined, non-mobile bed. Not that I don't have physical reminders of the mental journey.  I have, rolled up in closet, somewhere, Leslie Ragan's classic poster of the 20th Century Limited in its glory days, which era I missed by about three-quarters of  century, and which poster I bought thirty-five years ago but never got around to framing. That's OK. It probably wouldn't go with the decor at home, anyway. But next to my bed, I have a a sleek, gray-enameled Thermos carafe designed by the great Henry Dreyfuss--who just also happened to have designed the train it was inspired by. Like you couldn't guess that by looking at the two pieces. I guess I'll have to dream the rest. 

The Winter Antiques Show 2014: I'll be there. 

What Time Is It, Anyway?

November? Already?

Forgive me: I seem to have dozed off there for a few--well, months.  You know how it is: you close your eyes for just a minute and next thing you know, it's three months later. We all do it, so don't lie. Fortunately, a number of faithful readers noticed my long absence and recently sent me email wake-up calls. OK, John H & Nicole sent me emails, but hey, two is a number. And speaking of sleeping, don't forget to set your clocks back an hour tonight.

Writers of newspaper articles tell us that a lot of people will be sad to see it get dark so early from now on, but not me. No, this is my favorite time of year--cold, gray and damp, with soggy grass, and dead leaves skittering over the sidewalks. After night falls, it's even better. Nothing beats coming home on a cold night to find all the lamps lit and dinner ready

John Hookham's The Painted Parlour by Firelight, from Twentieth Century Decoration by Stephen Calloway

--even if the lamps are on timers and dinner comes in a cardboard box from Pizza Hut. Actually, I'm fine with both of those things:  I just pretend it's the servants' night off.  Anyway, that calm, settled, cozy look works just fine at home, so I decided to try to create the same atmosphere here in the shop.  I figure if I have to spend as many hours here as I do, then being here needs to feel as good to me as it does being at home, and since, after a year and a half,  I've made friends with a lot of our customers, it should feel good to them, too. After all, we're not the only antique shop in town: our customers can shop at a lot of other stores--and most of them do--but it's nice to go someplace where you feel you're more than just a name on an account, and if a shop has a place to sit down

 

and chill after a hard day of work (or shopping), well, it seems to me that that would be a good thing. So, in a few weeks, we're going to start staying open late one evening a week. Maybe I'll have some company, and maybe not. And if somebody does show up, maybe they'll buy something while they're here. Then again, maybe not. Maybe they'll have already spent all their money before they get here. Maybe we'll just sit around and talk about decorating. I don't know. I tend to do that anyway--talk about decorating--and most of my friends reached the saturation point a long time ago: they don't want to hear it. At any rate, I really have no idea what will happen, but I'm going to find out. This moody painting by Haddon Sundblom perfectly captures the relaxed vibe that I'm hoping to recreate in the back corner of the shop for the next month or two (or, at least, until somebody buys the bits & pieces, whichever comes first) although I don't want to give anyone false hopes:

 

that is, there will not be a private chef cooking steaks to order in our fireplace. That would be hard to do, since our fireplace in the shop is just a fake.  Beer, on the other hand, is on the Definite Maybe list. We'll see.

All Art is Copying

Picasso said those words--allegedly--but he was probably just repeating something he overheard at a party. Still, when it comes to copying others, Picasso ought to know better than most, since he often used others' work as a basis for his own paintings. Not, of course, that he was the only one to do that. Copying is as old as that cave in France.

Speaking of which--France--the woman in the charcoal portrait above is the Empress Josephine, and it's a lovely drawing: you can almost feel the downy softness of Jospehine's cheek, and I love the luster of her black pearl earring, but it's in fact a copy, taken from a tiny (but important) detail of Jacques Louis David's monumental painting of Napoleon placing the crown of Empress on his wife's submissively bowed head.

Technically, even that's not quite true. The image at the top above is a copy, all right, but it's actually five removes from the original painting, not one: that is, it's a computer scan of a charcoal sketch that was copied from an enlargement of a Xerox copy of a reduced halftone reproduction of the painting in an art history book. That's a lot of in-between steps, but I should know, because I'm the one who copied it: yes, that's my drawing above. What can I say? I'm good--as long as I'm copying a genius, which David clearly was.  With his weathervane politicking, I wouldn't trust the guy any farther than I would trust Picasso, but he was still a genius, and that's the secret to successful copying: picking the right model to copy.

Anyway, Josephine comes up because last Saturday we sold two matching sofas, a big rug, a massive table, a 1930s galvanized steel cart and a lamp, and all of it from the small area of the shop formerly known as the Castaing Corner.  Once again, the place looked stripped.

Naturally, I did what I always do when this happens: I called Debra. Unfortunately, there was a little problem with my timing this go-around. The good news was that Debra was already preparing to head down to Atlanta to restock anyway, but the bad news was that she wasn't going to be back to Chicago with new things for at least ten days, at which point I probably started muttering about looking picked-over again. So to shut me up, she told me she had two metal daybeds that she would drop off in Chicago before leaving town, which, she said, should hold me until she got back. That's all she said: there were two daybeds, and they were metal. Also, they had trundle gizmos underneath.

By now, of course, I should know to trust Debra's eye, but it had been a hot, miserable week, and the combination of the phrases "metal daybeds" & "trundle beds" sent visions of sugarplums dancing through my head, and not in a good way: white enamel curlicues, flouncy, bouncy pillows in bright-colored prints, and...slumber parties. Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with any of that, I suppose--if you're a nine-year old girl. All I know is I hardly slept that night for fear of what I'd find waiting in my store.



But I was worrying over nothing, because when I walked in last Tuesday morning, what greeted me was not your typical mass-market metal daybeds but a handsome pair of steel-&-brass campaign beds, which is another thing entirely. Better yet, these beauties were clearly patterned after similar steel-&-brass beds sold in the 1960s by Jansen, probably the greatest French decorating firm ever.

And Jansen's elegant beds were inspired by antique originals in the Directoire & Empire styles, which,  in turn, were modeled after the the kind of collapsible metal bed used by Napoleon during his military campaign in Egypt in the 1790s. Of course, the splendid rooms of Napoleon's palaces at Malmaison & Saint-Cloud were a long way from the spartan fittings of a military encampment, but Napoleon's in-house designers Percier & Fontaine made sure everybody got the message by a liberal use of military motifs in the sumptuous decor: silk drapery hung between gilt tent poles, gilt-tipped spears used as curtain rods, trophies, laurel wreaths, winged figures of Victory & draped beds with big round bolsters placed lenthwise against fabric panels.

Josephine--whose bedroom this is--probably never went camping in her life, but at Malmaison, she roughed it in a bedroom tented in gold-fringed red silk and open to a painted sky. Compared to the gorgeous splendor of Josephine's room, Napoleon's nearby bedroom was downright spartan, but even there, draped walls were still the room's main feature. So, when I found myself faced with a pair of early-Nineteenth Century style steel beds & a blank-walled corner, what could I do but follow suit?  

The problem, of course, was how to recreate the sophisticated vibe of Josephine's tented room at Malmaison without stepping over the line into Little Princess preciosity? Well, first off, no red. In some photos of Josephine's room, the fabric already looks dangerously close to Barbie-pink, so none of that. Also, nothing shiny. The campaign beds' steel frames are unpolished, with only a coat of wax to make sure they'll age naturally. So whatever I went with on the walls, it had to be in keeping with the mellow sheen of the beds' frames. Nothing glitzy here. 

Fortunately, I knew a room that had exactly the feel I was after: Millicent Rogers' tented New York living room of 1935: no shine to the fabric and, at least in the monochrome photo, no color--even though her actual room was red. What I liked best, though, was the informal draping of the heavy fabric as compared to the perfect swags at Malmaison. Of course, I had no fabric, heavy or otherwise, on hand, but that was nothing that a late-Saturday-night trip to Home Depot couldn't solve.

The two dropcloths I bought were stiff & full of stubborn wrinkles, but soaking them with Fire'z Off not only relaxed the wrinkles, it also made the draping the stiff cotton easy. By Sunday morning, the fabric had dried into crisp swags, and all that was left to do was trade Mme Castaing's turquoise-bead chandelier for one made of rope & rusted iron and hang Josephine's picture above the bed as a visual clue to the backstory for those attuned to such things.


Of course, it's not like I haven't been through the whole drill before: below is a shot of my great-grandmother's linen sheets pressed into service as summer curtains in my former apartment.  There's nothing like making-do. But hey, practice makes perfect. And as I always tell people who come to me when they find themselves stumped for decorating ideas: History has all the answers. All we have to do is look them up.

By the way, if you want to see this cozy little corner, please stop in, but do it soon. These beds only made their debut in their new setting on Sunday but they're already sold--presentation is everything--and at this point they're just waiting to be picked up, at which point, I'll be right back where I started, with a big hole on the floor. What can I say? The circle of life is a wonderful thing. 

Meanwhile, pleasant dreams. I'm beat.