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John Ruffolo "The Decider" article in Sept/Oct 2018 edition of PIVOT

In many minds, John Ruffolo is already the most important person in the Canadian technology scene. Now he’s coming for the rest of the world. (Photographs by Daniel Ehrenworth)

Features | From Pivot Magazine

The decider

John Ruffolo, a CPA with an entrepreneurial itch, is bringing Canada’s once-dormant tech scene into the global limelight—one start-up at a time

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Every day, John Ruffolo walks past a graveyard of gadgets. Just beyond the entrance to his downtown Toronto investment firm, OMERS Ventures**, three glass panels shield a mini-museum of amusingly retro machines: a Super Pong IV console circa 1975, a Macintosh Classic computer from 1990, a dusty Palm Pilot. Next to a bulky Motorola DynaTAC, the first commercial cellphone, a placard reads, “Everyone wanted to be the first to get their hands on these awesomely unwieldy portable analogue brain-fryers.”

The geeky shrine is a reliable conversation piece for visitors and a welcome distraction for anxious entrepreneurs, many of whom have gazed at it moments before trying to convince Ruffolo, a 52-year-old CPA-turned-venture capitalist, to fund their supposedly world-changing start-up. But the gallery’s most important function is perhaps to serve as a daily reminder to Ruffolo and his two-dozen staff: today’s revolutionary technologies are tomorrow’s quaint junk. Any clever gizmo or app can get a company going; it takes a lot more—constant tinkering, organizational savvy, limitless passion—to build a successful business. As the CEO of OMERS Ventures, Ruffolo’s job is to find the most promising dreamers and give them what they need to end up less like Palm and more like Apple, a company that parlayed that clunky old Mac into a global dynasty.

As it happens, an ancient machine played a part in one of Ruffolo’s biggest deals. OMERS Ventures, which launched in 2011, narrowly missed the first two chances to invest in Shopify, the Ottawa-based online-retail giant. “Shopify was the one that got away,” he says. “We weren’t ready for them yet.” But Ruffolo hardly accepted his fate. He assigned a Ventures staffer to keep tabs on the company, stay in touch and make sure that when Shopify was looking for more funding, their firm was at the top of the list. “OMERS sent us this antique cash register, which we put in the lobby of our office,” says Russ Jones, who was Shopify’s CFO at the time. “Through all of our interactions with them, they became almost the de facto choice.” In 2013, Ruffolo met with Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke for what was supposed to be a 30-minute coffee; they ended up speaking for more than two hours, during which they agreed OMERS Ventures would lead the company’s next round of financing. Within a month, Ruffolo’s team had persuaded a handful of other venture capital firms to join them in investing a total of $100 million, then one of the largest rounds in Canadian tech history. Shopify, which now has a market cap of nearly $23 billion, has since become shorthand for national success. When discussing what Canada needs to do to rival Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs have a habit of saying, “We need more Shopifys.”

Earlier this year, OMERS Ventures announced it would open offices in Silicon Valley, London and Singapore, making it the first global venture capital firm based in Canada.

Most businesses court Ruffolo, not the other way around. He invests in fewer than one per cent of the companies that pitch him, but, for those lucky few, he provides a Midas touch. Yes, he chooses companies that are poised to succeed, but it’s equally true that they succeed because he chooses them. Through OMERS Ventures, he has invested $400 million in nearly 40 of Canada’s most promising companies, including the social media management platform Hootsuite, the online storytelling sensation Wattpad and the restaurant software company TouchBistro. Plenty more, including the fintech powerhouse Wealthsimple, have gone through OneEleven, an OMERS Ventures-backed accelerator that houses and scales mid-sized start-ups.

In Canada, there is a sense that everyone in the tech community plays for the same team. When one company wins, the whole country thrives: bright minds move here, massive companies set up shop here, foreign investors park their cash here. Ruffolo is the closest thing that team has to a coach. He may not get the glory of its most celebrated players (Shopify et al.), but his behind-the-scenes efforts are what prepare them for the big leagues. That goes far beyond cutting cheques. Ruffolo has the ear of government, which he’s used to lobby to secure funding for start-ups, help skilled tech workers migrate to Canada, and influence how entrepreneurs’ stock options are taxed. He sits on an almost comical number of corporate boards and advocacy councils. Most importantly, he believed in Canadian tech even after the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, when virtually every other bank, pension fund and venture capital firm stopped funding start-ups. And his success at OMERS Ventures has since persuaded them to start investing again. “He’s been a consummate champion for Canadian tech, and a courageous one at that,” says Ruffolo’s friend Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Research In Motion (now Blackberry) and another CPA. “He just soldiers on.”

Earlier this year, OMERS Ventures announced it would open offices in Silicon Valley, London and Singapore, making it the first global venture capital firm based in Canada. The firm plans to invest $2 billion over the next decade in domestic and foreign companies. In many minds, Ruffolo is already the most important person in the Canadian technology scene. Now he’s coming for the rest of the world.

John Ruffolo as a teenagerA teenage John Ruffolo at the BMO branch (Courtesy of John Ruffolo)

Past the tech cemetery, the rest of the OMERS Ventures office straddles the line between buttoned-down Bay Street institution and start-up stereotype. Though the walls are austere and white, they house wellness rooms and a games nook with a Pac-Man arcade terminal, bubble hockey and foosball table. On a July afternoon, a TV in the lounge plays a World Cup game, but Ruffolo isn’t particularly interested—his team, Italy, didn’t qualify. Still, a miniature Azzurri jersey hangs on the glass wall of his office, where, on the off chance he’s not on the road or in a meeting, he spends his time at a standing desk. Behind him, a wall is lined with Raptors and Leafs paraphernalia, books and pictures. There’s one of John and his wife, Carryn, with whom he has two young children: a son, Caymus, named after their favourite California cabernet sauvignon, and a daughter, Rome, after John’s favourite city, which the family visits every year or two. Other photos show Ruffolo in far-flung locales with fellow members of Les Domestiques, a philanthropic cycling club that counts among its ranks TD Ameritrade head Tim Hockey, Purpose Investments CEO Som Seif, Mattamy Homes founder Peter Gilgan and Queen’s business school namesake Stephen Smith. Ruffolo’s affinity for the sport comes up often among those who know him, as does his penchant for blue jeans. Surrounded by friends-in-high-places portraits and shelves of awards, only the unfussy denim—described by a friend as Ruffolo’s badge of honour—hints at his working-class origins.

Ruffolo’s father arrived in Canada in 1955, a 17-year-old Italian with little money and a single suit. When he got off the boat, he was herded into a cattle train that took him to Toronto. He married another Italian and settled near Jane and Sheppard, an immigrant neighbourhood with a rough reputation but a strong Italian community, where neighbours walked between fenceless backyards to borrow tomatoes and zucchinis. “No one had any money,” says Ruffolo. “We all relied on each other.”

John, born Gianni, excelled at Catholic school, skipping an early grade and later becoming his high school’s valedictorian. During summers, when he begged to go to camp, his father, a house painter, put a brush in his hand and brought him to work. The province didn’t fund Catholic secondary schools at the time, so Ruffolo got a job at the local BMO branch to pay for his final three years. When he was 17, the bank extended its hours and promoted him to part-time manager, the youngest in company history. (Ruffolo’s mother, 73, is currently BMO’s oldest manager, at the same branch.) “When customers had a complaint, they’d say, ‘I want to speak to the manager,’ ” he says. “They’d call me and the customer would say, ‘No, I said the manager.’ ”

Ruffolo won a full-ride scholarship to York University’s Schulich School of Business, and intended to transition into investment banking at BMO. But at a career fair, his friends encouraged him to apply to Arthur Andersen, an accounting firm that sent its new recruits to Chicago for an orientation that doubled as an all-expenses-paid party. Ruffolo hand-wrote and submitted his resumé on the spot. In his interviews with BMO and Arthur Andersen, he asked his interviewers the same question: “How long until I’m in your position?” BMO told him 20 years; Arthur Andersen said nine. So Ruffolo chose accounting.

“When you have nothing left to lose, you take greater chances.”

Ruffolo earned his professional accounting designation in 1990, two years after joining Arthur Andersen. “I was surprised how much I liked the accounting firm,” he says. But he longed to go beyond taxes and balance sheets; he wanted to work with CEOs and understand, in minute detail, every aspect of their businesses. At 25, his only way in was to run Arthur Andersen’s high-tech practice, a nascent and unglamorous file where CEOs weren’t much older than Ruffolo. His first two clients were Microsoft and Oracle. “I got so much exposure to so many different industries and entrepreneurs,” he says. “I didn’t run a technology business and I wasn’t a venture capitalist, yet I felt I knew the space so well.”

Several of Ruffolo’s colleagues say he developed a deep understanding of Canada’s technology sector thanks to his curiosity: “That’s interesting” is practically his catchphrase, and he’s unafraid to ask others to explain things to him. Gilgan, a friend and another professional accountant, credits part of Ruffolo’s business savvy to his early training and experience. “The beautiful thing about doing public accounting and auditing was witnessing someone else’s mistakes,” he says. “You get a million-dollar education that doesn’t cost a dime.” (At OMERS Ventures, Ruffolo currently employs a number of CPAs, who he says are passionate, flexible and inquisitive. “If you don’t have those underlying characteristics, you will fail, at least in our organization.”)

In 2001, when he was in his 30s, Ruffolo was one of the select few to make global partner at Arthur Andersen. “It was the biggest cheque I’ve ever cut in my life,” says Ruffolo of buying into the role. “Way bigger than the house I had just bought.” As it turned out, the timing was disastrous. Less than a month later, Enron, one of Arthur Andersen’s largest clients, was booked for keeping huge debts off its balance sheets, a scandal that led to the company’s eventual bankruptcy. Though Ruffolo wasn’t involved with the account, his position as a global partner made him potentially liable if Enron took Arthur Andersen down with it. That massive cheque, his accountant designation and his clients were all on the line, and he and other partners took a two-thirds salary cut to help pay the wages of the dissolving firm’s service staff. Cash-strapped, he was living in an apartment with no furniture and bracing for the worst. “You could see it,” he says. “The brand was done. We’d hit the iceberg.” Meanwhile, he had just begun dating Carryn, a marketing manager at Arthur Andersen (she left the firm and worked as an artist when the two became serious). “I remember telling him I was fine if we only ever ate food-court food,” she says. “That’s when I knew she was the right person for me,” says Ruffolo.

Then, as quickly as things collapsed, Ruffolo’s Job-like trial ended. After Enron declared bankruptcy, Arthur Andersen Canada merged with Deloitte, and, on a Monday morning in June 2002, he walked into his office to find everything changed: logos, business cards and desktop backgrounds had all been switched over the weekend. His phone rang, and an old client began talking to him about a deal as if nothing had happened. “It was like The Twilight Zone,” says Ruffolo. His designation, his partnership, his salary—they were all safe. “I think that was the moment in his career that he started taking bigger risks,” says Carryn. “When you have nothing left to lose, you take greater chances. And when you’re not driven by money, you make sound decisions.”

John Ruffolo and his wife, CarrynRuffolo cycling with his wife, Carryn (Courtesy of John Ruffolo)

Ruffolo escaped the Enron scandal intact, but the mid-2000s was a lousy time for Canadian tech. The dot-com bubble had burst, and unless you happened to run a company called Research In Motion, things looked bleak. Investors, whose tech returns had tanked over the past few years, had no appetite for risk. Venture capital invested in Canada dipped from its $6-billion peak in 2000 to $1.7 billion in 2005, and fell only further, to about $1 billion, after the 2008 financial crisis. “That was the bottom of the pit for venture capital, and there were zero signs of it resurrecting,” says Ruffolo. “Virtually all of the traditional players, particularly the pension funds and banks, said, ‘You know what? We’re tapping out.’”

Ruffolo had a first-row seat to the drought. At the time, he was leading Deloitte’s technology, media and telecommunications practice; running the firm’s Fast 50, a ranking of growing Canadian companies; and advising the CEOs of Rogers, OpenText and RIM. (It was conceivable they didn’t know Ruffolo was an accountant; to the chagrin of his employer, he didn’t mention it on his business card to avoid being pigeonholed.) He used the position to prod institutions—government, banks, pension funds—that he thought had a duty to re-stimulate the innovation sector, publicly criticizing them and proposing taxes on those that didn’t pitch in.

At least one pension fund was listening. Like most others, OMERS—the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which pays the pensions of the province’s local government employees—had ditched venture capital in 2008. But within a year or two, then-CEO Michael Nobrega, who had been Ruffolo’s boss at Arthur Andersen, was itching to get back to it. A CPA with an affinity for high tech, he frequently drove from Toronto to Waterloo on weeknights to meet with young start-up founders. When pension funds want to invest in entrepreneurs, they typically entrust the job to venture capital firms, reasoning that the sector’s deals are too small to merit their own staff and resources within the organization. (OMERS has $95 billion in assets, compared to Ventures’ $800 million, for example.) But Nobrega resolved to skip the middleman and create a wing of OMERS that would invest in start-ups directly.

Nobrega enlisted Ruffolo as an advisor on the project, but, within a few meetings, it was clear Nobrega wanted him to lead it. “Michael said to me, ‘You’ve been poking at this,’ ” says Ruffolo. “ ‘You think you’re so smart? Why don’t you do it?’ ” Ruffolo was torn. Would he really leave Deloitte, where he was building a promising career, to start a venture-capital firm at a time when tech investment was virtually nonexistent? He decided it would be hypocritical not to. “I’d been trying for five years to fix this, and I finally felt I had the opportunity to solve the problem from the inside once and for all.”

OMERS Ventures launched in 2011 to a chorus of confusion. “People said, ‘You’re an accountant. Who the hell do you think you are running a venture capital firm?’ ” recalls Ruffolo. Rival firms wanted him to fail, so that they could soak up OMERS’ tech money themselves. A number of OMERS executives wanted Ventures to die quickly, too; they saw it as Nobrega’s frivolous yet risky pet project. Others doubted there was anything worth investing in. “John took a lot of cheap shots,” says Balsillie. “A lot of people said he was overpaying, or that he was focusing too much on Canada.” Almost everyone seemed to be against the idea. “But the entrepreneurs?” says Ruffolo. “They all went, ‘This is awesome.’ ”

Within a decade, OMERS Ventures plans to triple its assets and open three new offices abroad, something no Canadian venture capital firm has ever done.

Here’s how to get a meeting with John Ruffolo: ask. He follows two rules: always agree to meet someone at least once (“It drives my assistant crazy”), and respond to all emails within 24 hours. I heard countless stories about Ruffolo’s preternatural emailing abilities—waking up to messages from John, receiving record-time responses from different time zones. “No email goes unanswered,” says Jim Orlando, Managing Partner at OMERS Ventures. “It’s as simple as that.”

Getting a hold of Ruffolo is easy. Impressing him is not. Out of 100 pitches, he might grant 10 a formal audience at the OMERS Ventures office. From there, just one—if any at all—will turn into an investment, and that’s only after a further series of meetings, not an impulsive Dragons’ Den-style handshake. To determine which one in 100 makes the cut, Ruffolo runs through a mental checklist. Is it a tech company that could one day exit or have an initial public offering? (He likes to tell the story of a misguided pitcher who asked him to invest in what he claimed were Toronto’s best rice balls.) Beyond that, is the idea realistic and doable? Does it address a significant issue for a sizable market? If the company is already generating revenue, can it scale? And most crucially, do the founders have the right stuff: curiosity, adaptability and tenacity?

The only way to find that out is by getting to know them. “There’s no shortcut,” says Ruffolo. “You have to spend a lot of time with them, understand their personalities and watch their interactions.” He considers their experience, gauges their reputation in the tech community (“Almost every time I get pitched, I already know of the person directly or indirectly”), and tries to pinpoint their motivation: do they have an insatiable desire to solve a problem—the kind of thing that will sustain them through all-nighters and turbulent patches—or just a get-rich-quick fantasy? Pitchers’ most common mistake, Ruffolo says, is revealing it’s the latter, by, for instance, dictating how long it will take for their company to exit and how much of a return Ventures will receive. “That’s an immediate X,” says Ruffolo. “First, thank you very much, but we’ll tell you what our internal rate of return is. Number two, that already tells me you’re in it for the money.”

When a start-up signs with Ventures, it exchanges company equity for a slice—anywhere from a few million to tens of millions—of the $800 million that Ventures manages on behalf of OMERS, the Big Banks, insurance companies and others. (These institutions pay the firm a small management fee but stand to hit the jackpot if a company in the Ventures portfolio gets acquired or successfully IPOs.) As one of Canada’s largest tech venture capital firms—alongside Toronto’s Georgian Partners and Montreal’s Novacap—Ventures also has significant institutional sway; it can persuade other venture capitalists, including larger American investors, to fund the companies it anoints, as it did during the Shopify deal. “U.S. venture capital firms put their nose up at some Canadian firms, like, ‘Why would you pick these guys?’ ” says Jones, the former Shopify CFO. “But I’ve found a lot of the U.S. firms have a lot of respect for both John and OMERs.”

Jones says Ventures was more supportive than other venture capital firms, too. “Some firms get cold feet,” he says. “They say, ‘We’ll give you the money, but it’s up to you to be successful.’ A lot of them talk about doing the heavy lifting, but in the case of OMERS we actually got the support we’d hoped for.” Ventures helped Shopify find office space and connect with advisors and experts. “When we invest in a business, we work for them,” says Orlando. “They tend to be young, tech-oriented entrepreneurs, so the work we do is roll-up-your-sleeves.”

A less obvious perk of winning over Ruffolo is access to his colossal Rolodex. It’s about to get a flurry of new pages thanks to OMERS Ventures’ expansion. Within a decade, the firm plans to triple its assets and open three new offices abroad, each with its own local team, something no Canadian venture capital firm has ever done. The first, in Silicon Valley, will give the firm a foothold in the mecca of high tech and allow it to invest in more American companies, many of which are exponentially larger than Canadian businesses. The second, in London, will be fully operational in 2019, with a third slated for Singapore. They will serve as bases of operations for expansion into Europe and Asia, which are experiencing tech booms to rival North America’s. At the same time, OneEleven, Ventures’ accelerator, is opening locations in cities including Boston and Berlin, both home to a heavy concentration of start-ups.

John Ruffolo in his officeRuffolo in his office (Courtesy of John Ruffolo)

Ruffolo made his name taking risks, but expansion may be his biggest gamble yet. OMERS Ventures is a giant in Canada, but abroad it will be a small fish in a giant pond. Ruffolo will need to compete with colossal American venture capital firms like Benchmark, Accel and Sequoia Capital—a California investor currently raising a record-setting US$8-billion fund—for the attention of both worthy start-ups and first-rate staff, who will be responsible for hand-picking foreign companies with the same rigour Ruffolo uses at home.

But if Ventures succeeds, the profits from these projects will flow back to Ontario, reversing a long-standing tradition of brilliant minds and ideas—and the money that stems from them—leaving Canada. Just as importantly, these international outposts will provide a valuable pathway for Canadian companies to reach the rest of the world, just as the country’s sector is blossoming. To Ruffolo, the global play is a natural next step. “How can I tell a company to scale up when I don’t do it myself?”

Within a few years of its inception, OMERS Ventures had made believers out of doubtful OMERS execs and helped reignite the Canadian venture capital engine. “John was proven right,” says Balsillie. “Now, people are copying him.” Firms old and new began raising and investing amounts unseen since Y2K. (That trend has continued: Canadian venture capital surpassed $1.3 billion, a record high, in the first quarter of 2018.) Start-ups and accelerators sprouted across the country, and American tech Goliaths opened Canadian offices, creating thousands of jobs.

Still, there was a malaise in the tech community. In September 2015, Ruffolo invited the CEOs of the companies in the OMERS Ventures portfolio to the Drake, a trendy boutique hotel in west Toronto, to speak with Balsillie. They were concerned foreign multinationals would sideline the success of homegrown companies—how could a 20-person start-up in Vancouver, for example, compete with Microsoft for talent and attention? “When Amazon and Google are talking to the Canadian government three times a week,” says Balsillie, “do you think they’re asking, ‘How can I help Canadian tech companies do better?’ ”

That month, Ruffolo and Balsillie founded the Council of Canadian Innovators, an advocacy group that would act as a single voice for Canadian start-ups. The group began formally lobbying ministers and MPs on causes raised by member CEOs, including government funding, stock-option taxation, fast-track visas for tech workers, and national intellectual-property and data strategies. (In 2017, the NDP asked the conflict of interest and ethics commissioner to investigate the Council for promising start-ups access to Liberal politicians in exchange for a $10,000 annual membership fee, but the commissioner found no examination was warranted.)* “For a year and a half, it was us knocking on government’s door,” says Ben Bergen, the Council’s executive director and a former campaign worker for Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland. “Now it’s reversed. In a number of areas, the government really wants to consult with us.” Ruffolo himself advised Navdeep Bains, the minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, on certain files, but he says his main role is to provide a forum where CEOs can lead the conversation. “True success will be when Jim and I fade off-screen and disappear.”

When I asked Ruffolo’s friends and colleagues to gauge his influence, they emphasized his knack for seeing both the forest and the trees. He can sic the Council on a nationwide project in the morning, then troubleshoot a 20-something entrepreneur’s software problems in the afternoon. “He’s capable of weed-crawling but also gliding at 30,000 feet,” says Gilgan. Mark McQueen, the president of CIBC Innovation Banking, says this puts Ruffolo in a unique position. “He can both fund companies and help government design programs that are relevant to the ecosystem as a whole.”

David Suzuki, a longtime friend, focused instead on Ruffolo’s steadfast commitment to the environment. Suzuki is accustomed to meeting with business leaders who give sustainability polite lip service, but after he spoke at a Deloitte clean-tech conference in 2005, he says Ruffolo was genuinely motivated to act. The two struck up an unlikely alliance: a free-market capitalist and left-leaning environmentalist, dining, fishing and debating with one another. Suzuki informed Ruffolo’s thinking on issues like carbon taxes and Indigenous involvement in fighting climate change, and Ruffolo became vice-chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, roping high-profile guests into charitable events and galas, which he attends in his trademark blue jeans. “He’s an enlightened entrepreneur,” says Suzuki. “If all the business community was like John, we’d be so far ahead on environmental issues.”

“I don’t think John wants to be the top guy. There's too much bureaucracy and politics.”

On a brisk Tuesday morning this past April, Ruffolo took a seat onstage in a basement event space at MaRS, a labyrinthine complex of research labs and start-up offices in downtown Toronto. He was the odd man out on a panel of crypto currency geeks and blockchain boosters, gathered to launch Ether Capital on the NEO Exchange. (Relax, the majority of OMERS staff doesn’t fully understand that sentence either.) When the moderator addressed Ruffolo, he didn’t waste words: why would a risk-averse pension fund dive into the notoriously volatile world of crypto? “That’s a question a lot of people have asked me,” Ruffolo conceded. On the surface, it was an odd pairing. But, he continued, he thinks 10 to 15 years ahead—“self-driving cars, not flying cars,” as he put it. He was certain that the blockchain technologies undergirding crypto would soon transform modern life, and he wanted in. “I bet for tomorrow.”

What does tomorrow hold for Ruffolo? Over the years, he has rebuffed lucrative offers to join companies preparing to IPO. “I don’t think he’d ever want to be the top guy, because there’s too much bureaucracy and politics,” says Carryn. “It would be frustrating for him not to be the one to stir things up… John is the renegade in a lot of the stuff he touches.” He’s routinely one step ahead of convention: Ventures invested in a handful of blockchain companies before most people had even heard the word, and Ruffolo sounded the alarm about data privacy long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Sidewalk Labs made it the topic du jour.

OMERS recently began asking Ruffolo to look into his crystal ball on investments beyond the Ventures file, too: agriculture, real estate, infrastructure, clean technology. “Every business is becoming a tech business. If tech can hijack taxis, it can hijack everything,” says Balsillie. “Once everybody wakes up to that, they’ll ask, who really understands it best?” At which point, he says, “John will become more of a visionary than a rebel.”

Not that Ruffolo seems keen to abandon his rebellious streak. He says, if the opportunity arose, he wouldn’t be much interested in running OMERS, or in the politicking and administrating it would entail. “There are better people who really love that stuff,” he says. “That doesn’t turn my crank.” Ruffolo would much rather keep working with entrepreneurs. Keep building businesses. Keep chasing revolutionary ideas that might one day earn a hallowed place collecting dust behind a pane of glass.

(*This article has been updated to correct information about a complaint against the Council of Canadian Innovators.)

(**Update: On September 28, 2018, it was announced that John Ruffolo was leaving OMERS Ventures.)


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Topic: Newbies Only Swap Round 9 ( Partners Posted; Send Outs 05/22)  (Read 60552 times)
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I can make almost anything out of polymer clay! :P
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me and Kellan Lutz!

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« Reply #530 on: May 20, 2008 08:16:40 PM »

If you have not had contact with your partner is a long while (which you shouldn't have had and you should have sent me a PM letting me know, but I know things happen.) please DO NOT ship out your package until I have your partners DC# or postal receipt email. Let me know if you think your partner is MIA!

I still sell my clay crafts...email me if you are interested in ordering something. [email protected]
« Reply #531 on: May 20, 2008 11:36:16 PM »

whooopee!  v. excited that kwk has shipped (and braved the postal postal workers, hehehe).

my goodies are on the back seat of my car, which i will drive to the shops a little later and ship (ahoy!) ... will let you know and will avoid making eye-contact with all labelling when it arrives.

it's been sent!  should take about 10 days to deliver.  shew!
« Last Edit: May 21, 2008 05:47:53 AM by kreestar » THIS ROCKS   Logged
« Reply #532 on: May 21, 2008 05:38:53 AM »

So yesterday, which was my planned day to finish and ship out, was instead taken up by cleaning, new house hunting and then babysitting for my lovely neice and nephew. so absolutly no crafting done. So now I have to work my bottom off today and then hopefully get to the post office on thursday morning! hurrah!  Grin

« Reply #533 on: May 21, 2008 08:17:32 AM »

Let me tell everyone a fun little story. Its called the woes of being a procrastonator.

Last night i'm working on my medium project. Realize i dont have enough of something to complete it. So i go out and buy some more. Then i get home, im 75% done, and run out of something i always have a mass quantity of... so during work hours (shh! dont tell!) i'm running to another store to grab what i need so the second i walk in the door tonight i can finish up my medium project, and all of my small ones... then i have a bonus to finish... if i dont get it done i wont have to worry... but seriously, leave it to me to run out of two different items (both of which i ALWAYS have more then i shoud) in one night.

but i am excited to send out... I hope CANE loves it.

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« Reply #534 on: May 21, 2008 11:53:34 AM »

Oooh, I'm sure I will! I just really really hope you like what I'm sending. I'll be sending soon; I just need to get my boyfriend's lazy butt to drive me to the post office. While I'm waiting I might throw in an extra surprise for you, too!

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no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer

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« Reply #535 on: May 21, 2008 12:00:23 PM »

Is it just me or does it seem that as people send out and more things are in transit things get quieter and quieter in here?

I'm guessing it'll pick up when people start posting their pictures?  *grin*

I am walking 12 hours straight for my local Relay For Life event.  [a href="http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/RelayForLife/RFLFY11MW?px=16690269&pg=personal&fr_id=30095"]Please support me![/a href] I'm only 40% to my goal! =0(
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« Reply #536 on: May 21, 2008 12:27:08 PM »

It's definately quiet. I can hear the crickets...

I'm excited to see more stuff get into the gallery personally. Watching everyone else get stuff makes me even more excited to get mine. Cheesy

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« Reply #537 on: May 21, 2008 12:29:12 PM »

it does seem quieter but soon everyone will be receiving and it will get crazy!

« Reply #538 on: May 21, 2008 12:30:03 PM »

I'm ready to send! hurrah.

Ive been reading up about cutoms forms, so I know what I'm doing when I go to send. And it says I have to write down what each item is, the weight of each item, and the value of each item. How do I value things? and How do I fit it all on the form.. theres not much room?!

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« Reply #539 on: May 21, 2008 12:43:10 PM »

My customs form was super vague because 1. I have never sent a package before and 2. I didnt want to ruin the surprise for kreestar. So I'm apologizing now if SA customs rip apart your box =[
especially if they lose something! but I can tell you exactly what I made so even if they did lose something I guess you can complain...? I dont know.

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6 Essential Tips For Planning a Trade Show or Exhibition

  |   Posted In Moving Tips & Advice by

There is no denying it; exhibitions are hard work! From finalising stand designs to figuring out your data usage, product selection and sales forecasting, for a few weeks before an exhibition starts it can feel like there are 101 different things to focus on, so the top tips for planning a trade show in this article will help you kick off the planning process.

Crate Hire for trade shows

As an experienced exhibitor who has exhibited at some of the biggest trade shows in the UK including the Gadget Show Live, I’ve learnt a few tricks along the way that will help you prepare for your exhibition. Read on for our tips.

6 essential tips for show exhibitors

1. It’s never too early to start planning your exhibition!

Any stand bigger than around 10×10 is going to need thought putting into its design. For small stands at smaller shows, you might get away with a simple modular display with a few popup banners, but for larger stands, you’ll need to find a stand designer.

If you are a retailer, start planning the products you want to sell at the event as you’ll need to ensure you order extra to cover both the event and your everyday business.

Deciding on the stock is also critical as it will allow you to figure out how much stock storage space you will need to hire at the venue (generally you’ll have storage for around two pallets available at an additional cost).

2. Create a design brief and approach more than one stand designer

Before you can decide on a stand building company, you’ll need to decide on a budget and design. If you are selling, you’ll want to maximise the number of areas you can merchandise. If you are service-based, you’ll want your stand to be warm and inviting so people can wander on and get talking to you.

Whatever your business, your stand needs to fit with your visual identity, and it needs to meet your objectives of driving sales or encouraging enquiries successfully. Put together a simple list of requirements and if you’ve seen other stand designs you like, let the companies you know!

Designing Your Trade Show Stand Crate Hire UK

Whatever you do don’t just go with the first company you approach as prices and quality of service can vary greatly, even for very similar stand designs. Get this decision right, and it’s one less thing you have to worry about, but bear in mind you will need to be approaching stand builders for initial quotes and design concepts at least two months in advance.

3. Packing, storage and logistics

Once you know how much stock you will be taking you can start working out how that translates to pallet loads and how individual boxes and crates are packed. My top tip here is to make sure that all boxes and crates are labelled well on the outside.

When you start dealing with a dozen or more pallets, knowing what stock is where is essential, so it pays to be organised and packing like with like might sound obvious, but can often be overlooked.

At the very first exhibition, I project managed I forgot completely about how I’d get stock from the on-site warehouse to our stand. Luckily a friendly exhibitor next door to us was happy to lend me their hand trolly or sack barrow, but it was a close call!

Take a look at our crate handling equipment options.

If you are planning on several pallets of stock, you’ll need to book a courier or hire a van, again, do this in advance and if you can get a few quotes to compare prices as haulage costs differ dramatically!

4. Pack a stand/back-office essentials box!

Your essentials box needs to include all of those little things you take for granted, that are close to hand back in your office or at your base.

Essentials for trade shows in the past have included sellotape, blu-tac, printer paper, spare printer ink, energy drinks (lots of!), marker pens, pallet wrap, scissors, petty cash, change and tin, calculator and price stickers to change prices on the fly.

Try and plan for worst-case scenarios as best as you can, with lo-tech alternatives in case any tech or electrical services fail you on the day.

5. Make advanced bookings to save money

As soon as you’ve confirmed your stand space, think about deciding on the team who’ll attend the show and get travel and hotel arrangements sorted. The earlier you can get these booked the cheaper they will be.

Also, with significant consumer events, local hotels do get booked up very quickly so don’t leave these until the last minute, or you might find yourself facing a long trek to and from the exhibition centre each day!

6. Make a statement with funky furniture

Don’t forget that once you’ve got your stand design agreed, you’ll still need to furnish your stand with things like glass showcase cabinets to display your products, and furniture too!

Poseur style tables paired with stools work really well at trade shows and exhibitions, providing somewhere for your sales team to sit and chat to potential customers, and giving visitors somewhere to sit and take a break. Hire companies like Funky Furniture provide exhibition essentials and furniture hire to ensure your stand will look great.

Packing & Storage Crates for Trade Shows and Exhibitions

Another top tip for planning a trade show is plan early and don’t overlook your packing, storage and logistics requirements. You will want to keep your stock safe while it’s in transit so you’ll need something strong and durable. Plastic packing crates are perfect for the job. If you go for lidded options, you also have the benefit of being able to stack them, a great way to help cut down on expensive on-site storage costs.

No matter what storage crates or boxes you use, you will need a way of transporting them from delivery vehicles to your stand or storage area. For this reason, my top tip is to make sure you have a wheeled hand trolley or cart. Crates will stack easily onto these and makes it much easier to move your stock around.

Take a look at our storage crates and all of our crate handling and moving equipment.

There is no getting away from the fact that trade shows and exhibitions are stressful, but with proper preparation and planning, you can minimise stress and help to ensure you pull the event of successfully! While they are a lot of hard work, they are also lots of fun. You can’t beat being out of the office and face to face with your suppliers and customers and even chatting with your competitors can prove enlightening!

If you aren’t sure about your requirements and can’t decide how many storage crates or boxes you need for your trade show or exhibition, get in touch with us today – we are always happy to help in any way we can!

For tips and information on all things moving related, follow us on FacebookLinkedin or Twitter

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Friday, May 1, 2015

Thinking of You....Just Because

Hello Friday Friends!

If you've ever had a bad day, you can relate to this saying!  I don't like days I'm the mouse, but I love the days I'm the cat.

You simply must check out the Whimsie Doodles Paws I Care digital stamp set.  It has some super cute images and sayings and I think you just might find you need it in your collection.

Have a marvelous (BE THE CAT) day!

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Customer info

We love our customers and try to treat 'em right. Here's some info to know about buying our books (which we thank you for, muchly).

Buying our books from a retail store

Yes, you can buy Creative Minds' books at bookstores and boutiques around Australia. See a list here.

Buying online: Shipping + delivery times

If you purchase directly from our online store we aim to ship your product within 4 days of receipt of payment, but it’s usually within 1-2 days. Books ship from Melbourne, Australia. Please allow 4-14 days for delivery to Australian addresses (especially outside of metropolitan areas) and 14-40 days if you live internationally.

Please check your address details carefully, as products cannot be refunded or replaced free-of-charge if you gave us the incorrect address.

Yes, we realise that international shipping is crazy expensive - but unfortunately this is around what it costs via Australia Post. We wish it was less! Please contact us before ordering if you want an accurate shipping cost for your specific order.

Depending on what you’ve ordered from us, books are shipped via standard Australia Post parcel post or courier.

Damaged goods

If your product arrives damaged, that certainly wasn't our intention. Please contact us with a photograph of the damaged book within 7 days. Generally we will replace the product free of charge.

We aim to describe each book and its contents as accurately as possible so you can make an informed purchase. Refunds will not be given on the basis of change-of-mind or other reasons, in line with the ACCC Consumer Guidelines. Store credit may be offered if products are returned in saleable condition.

To protect the security of your digital transactions, every eBook download link is unique to the purchase and expires 24 hours after the link is first clicked. If your link has expired, please contact us.

Currently, Owning It is not available as an eBook (we think it is much more useful and impactful in print form, anyway). If and when eBooks become available for our other titles they will be listed in our online shop.


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As Nous Vous exhibit the results of their residency at House of Illustration, we talk to them – and previous participant David Lemm – about just what the job entails and how the experience is as much about looking in as looking out

London’s House of Illustration offers a unique six-month residency to an illustrator or graphic designer, during which time the artist works to create an exhibition for one of the building’s gallery spaces. Founded in 2014, the institution has to date invited illustrator Rachel Lillie and David Lemm to take on the role, which is awarded via an interview-based selection process.

Last year, I was on the panel that met with the six shortlisted applicants, all of whom were of a high standard. Nous Vous – the trio consisting of Jay Cover, Nicholas Burrows and William Luz – had already assembled an impressive body of work, but in this context it was their approach to the residency itself – and what they might do with it – which meant they became our first choice. Their exhibition Three Men in a Boat, the culmination of their six month project, went on show at House of Illustration last week.

The annual residency for graphic artists and illustrators, supported by the Barbara and Philip Denny Charitable Trust, is currently the only one of kind in the UK. In as much as it offers an illustrator the chance to create a new body of work, it also acts as a platform from which practitioners can challenge the perceptions of what illustration is and can be. But what exactly does a residency entail? And what is an illustrator likely to get out of the commitment?

I talked to Nous Vous’ Jay Cover about the thinking behind their research project and resultant exhibition that features 12 large-scale illustrations for Jerome K Jerome’s classic novel, Three Men in a Boat. Being a trio Nous Vous wanted to investigate the nature of working together – and so designed and built a ‘three-person drawing machine’ with which they created the final artworks.

One of the 12 artworks by Nous Vous that forms part of their House of Illustration show, Three Men in a Boat. Each of the pictures was created using a ‘drawing machine’ which is operated by the three of them

“For us, residencies are always a bit of a draw because we’re always making work on the side and having discussions about particular things and then not being able to find time and space to facilitate that kind of work – the more speculative work, I guess,” says Cover.

“The House of Illustration one has a focus to it and that’s a nice way of framing some of the ideas we’ve had where there’s no way you can put [them] into a commercial realm. [Then there’s] the support that you get from the space – I love everything that House of Illustration do and it’s a really great place and resource.”

In the ten years Nous Vous has been together, the demands of commercial work have meant that they now differently as a collective. “More and more, the older we’ve got, the more our practice has taken this route where clients come to us with an illustration brief [and], because of the references they’ve sent, [this] sort of indicates that ‘one’ of us should do it. I kind of felt like we were getting pushed apart by Nous Vous rather than being brought together by it.”

Cover says the House of Illustration residency offered the studio a chance to probe their working practice and also look at how they might create a single body of work from three pairs of hands. Nous Vous dedicated a day each week to the residency which initially involved research-based activities and several materials-based ‘play days’ in order to stimulate ideas.

“When we weren’t drawing, we were trying to remove our own aesthetic, our own visual language out of the equation,” says Cover. “We’d have a ‘photo-collage’ day, or a ‘drawing game’ day where we had prescribed rules, also word games that hopefully would generate new ideas to work from. We tried new ways of collaboratively making stories.

“Then we did a ‘collaborative tool-making’ day,” he says. “We got a load of wood, went to the hardware store and started making different devices. The one that really worked, all it was was a pen taped to three sticks!”

The ‘machine’ enabled them all to work at once on the creation a single artwork. “We found a nice mix between control and lack of control,” says Cover. “With the sticks [machine] we all had to talk to each other – it just facilitated this conversation and was the inception of this idea that we need a tool where we need to talk.”

An early iteration of the drawing machine was tested during a workshop where families could experiment with the equipment, with Nous Vous producing their first ‘work’ with the device, entitled ‘A Big Ship’ – an apt metaphor for their journey ahead, Cover says. Cover then developed the machine into more of a solid frame made from old shelving.

“When you draw and make things you think in pictures, you don’t think in words,” he says of Nous Vous’ first experiments with the machine. “Trying to articulate that is extremely difficult. This meant that it took quite a long time to be able to synchronise ourselves and get used to using the machine.”

‘A Big Ship’ – one of the first artworks Nous Vous created using an early version of the drawing machine

With the device at the centre of their project it was felt that the trio needed focus on something in order to produce a formalised body of work. Inspiration came from a book that Cover was planning to read – Three Men in a Boat – and its title, not to mention its tales of high-jinks, fitted neatly into both what Nous Vous were about and the project in hand. They decided to create 12 illustrations for the book.

“The way [the characters] talk about how to do things together, it’s really farcical, it turns into this haphazard, crazy jape,” says Cover. “It felt like, that’s exactly what we’re doing! We hoped that in drawing from that – three people doing something together – something [would] accidentally, inherently come through in the work.”

Instead of a show guide, Nous Vous bought several copies of the novel and added numbered tabs to the passages they had illustrated. Visitors can walk around the works and read the sections of the book that the drawings come from.

One of the 12 large-scale illustrations Nous Vous created for Three Men in a Boat

Stories also formed a key part of illustrator and designer David Lemm‘s tenure as House of Illustration’s illustrator-in-residence during 2015-16. For his project he set about ‘mapping’ the changing landscape of King’s Cross – where House of Illustration is based – “through walking and observing relationships and unfolding stories between architecture, objects, people and the emergence of a new place”.

Lemm hosted a series of interactive events and workshops, including placing ‘urban cairns’ around the area as part of an ‘interactive mapping’ project, and created “little data sets/narratives” which he illustrated using shapes and motifs to compose each map. His final show featured series of semi-abstract wood and paper collages, “where narratives can be read or created by the viewer, whilst offering a alternative mapping of the area and opportunity to re-imagine the space surrounding House of Illustration”.

David Lemm’s exhibition at House of Illustration, 2016

For Lemm, his time in King’s Cross was also a period of experimentation and exploration, a chance to really question his own approach to why and how he made illustration work – and where he might take his practice in the future. “I really felt the benefit of having dedicated time to give to research and idea development and the freedom to explore different approaches,” he says.

“My studio is still covered in post-it notes with seeds of ideas from that time that I’m just waiting to get stuck into! By focusing on physically making work and using simple materials, I’ve revived something in my practice which had been missing for a while. I had become somewhat disillusioned with relying on digital techniques so it was great to have the opportunity to address this to a certain extent.”

As with Nous Vous’ take on the residency, illustration itself was able to become the focus of some interrogation. “It was great to be able to focus on creating more conceptually led work which challenged expectations of what illustration is and can be – both personally and in a wider sense,” says Lemm.

“It felt like a rare opportunity for concentrated investigation and chance to play with illustration out-with the expectations of working on commercially focused projects. It was also an exciting opportunity to work in London and engage with the place a bit more than I had before.”

One of the 12 large-scale illustrations Nous Vous created for Three Men in a Boat © Paul Grover

For Nous Vous, the experience of the residency enabled them to look at how and why they work as a trio – and has changed how the three friends now work. “There’s a noticeable difference in the way that we’re talking each other – and how close we’ve become in a work context,” says Cover.

“The thing for us to take away is – we’ve been very skeptical about making work together because we’ve tried it so many times and it leads to a lot of arguments and uncomfortable conversations about style and aesthetic preferences, even ideas and directions and tone. But now we’ve got to know each other a little bit better and are able to make more compromises. As long as you talk to each when you work together you get to this point that you’re all happy with. Just being able to talk to each other and trust each other a bit more is good.”

House of Illustration’s residency offers artists the time and space to look at their own work – a luxury in today’s working environment – but also show visitors just what illustration means in 2017.

“Even if the stuff that comes out of the other end isn’t what you anticipated, for me that’s probably better,” says Cover of the experience. “The illustration world – especially in the commercial realm – it’s quite a lot about narrowing you as an illustrator into a particular way of working, because people start buying into a style and clients obviously like to know what they’re going to get.

“And that’s fair enough, I don’t have any quibbles with that. But as an artist, or someone who wants to make things, who has ideas, who wants to expand, broaden, keep myself interested in what I’m doing – being able to do this is really good.”

Full details on Nous Vous’ residency show, Three Men in a Boat, are at The exhibition runs until June 11. For more of the group’s work, visit; David Lemm’s site is

Adding a new ‘pen’ to the drawing machine

Bedford, Bedfordshire


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The “Poverty” of Homosexual Orientation

In my last post I made the case that sexual “orientation” as defined by secular culture today is conceptually far removed from the dignity of the human person and is an abstract and generic form of data collection that does not even accurately describe one’s total experience of sexual attraction once we have found “the one”—our spouse—in marriage.

With this as prelude, now we can ask what all this means for homosexual “orientation.” Three terms are important to our discussion:

1. Sexual attraction: My experience of being attracted to specific sexual values.

2. Gender identity: Who am “I” as a sexual being?

3. Sexual orientation: The generic “blueprint” of collected data based on my experience of sexual attraction.

Previously I posed the question “If we can have fifty-something flavors of gender identity [as on Facebook], why not more than the three categories describing sexual orientation?”

The answer is simple, yet disturbing: secular culture has inverted the truth about both gender identity and sexual orientation. How so? First, by taking that which is, by nature and according to God’s plan, “binary” (my identity as male or female) and distortedly expanding it beyond recognition. Second, by taking that which is, by nature and according to God’s plan, something specifically unique to every human person (so-called “orientation” toward specific sexual values) and reducing it to a depersonalized and effectively meaningless category (men, women, both).

Put another way, “identity” is no longer male or female—it can be anything you claim. But “orientation” has to remain almost binary—the only thing important about sexual attraction is whether I’m attracted to men, women, or both. Why does society favor this inversion of God’s plan for sexuality?

I believe it is for one crucial reason: it is one way to elevate the experience of disordered sexual attraction to a category considered in parallel with ordered sexual attraction. If people are viewed solely as being attracted only to men, women, or both, this enhances the “standing” of homosexuality alongside heterosexuality. Indeed, the only reason to really make reference to heterosexuality is when one is considering those disordered attractions that exist apart from male-female complementarity.

Therefore, the relatively recent creation of sexual “orientation” favors the standing of homosexuality (“gay” as a mere alternative to “straight”) and thus relativizes the true meaning and purpose of sexual attraction. Similarly, pluralizing “gender identity” relativizes and weakens the truth of our being created “male and female.” The end result is that both sexual identity disorders and sexual attraction disorders are being culturally “normalized.”

“Test-Driving” Homosexual Attraction
Picking up the analogy I employed before, wherein sexual attraction is likened to being whisked away magically to the driver’s seat of a car, already running, ready for me to “test-drive” or not,  the “poverty” of homosexual orientation is not only found in the data-collection “blueprint” of the various cars I am attracted to, but the real impoverishment is the car itself. That is, “orientation” itself is a reductive concept objectifying a person’s sexual values, but in the case of homosexual attraction, the very “vehicle” itself—the car attracting me to “test-drive”—is compromised, because the very sexual values I am being attracted to are not, in fact, complementary to my own.

Think of it like this: with same-sex attraction, the car that I’m sitting in to test-drive actually has square wheels. A car with square wheels is really not intended for driving. But that doesn’t mean that some folks may not go ahead and willingly put it in “drive” and try to go somewhere with it.

Again, sexual attraction is the “urge” or “drive” that is not willed, nor is it “love” itself. It comes unbidden upon us, and thus every time requires us to respond somehow to it. With same-sex attraction, the test-drive analogy makes it clear—not only is a square-wheeled car not meant for driving, it also can never be the vehicle in which we reach the intended destination of “the one”—the beloved spouse to whom all our experiences of sexual attraction are ultimately intended to lead us.

Homosexuality and “The One”
So, where has the precarious inversion of exploding gender identities and restricted “orientation” to “man-woman-both” ultimately led us? Or: What happens when a bunch of people unite in thinking that test-driving square-wheeled cars is not only possible but also gets them somewhere?

Enter so-called “same-sex marriage.”

Experience will demonstrate that sexual attraction is often severed from its intended spousal goal of union with “the one.” In doing so, such attractions are clearly disordered (think pornography, masturbation, fornication, adultery, sexual abuse, etc.). But what happens when a disordered sexual attraction like same-sex attraction continues to pursue “the one” despite the square-wheeled car?

You end up with the real havoc that arises from an unreal goal: trying to “marry” someone who cannot really “complete” me. You cannot give what you don’t already have, and you cannot receive that which you already are. It’s that simple. The illusion here is that my homosexual-orientation “blueprint” data collected after test-driving all these square-wheeled cars is justification for my claiming “the one” must exist among those persons whose sexual values I’m attracted to.

Or, surprise! Something else might happen that both shatters the concept of sexual “orientation” and makes clear its poverty and unreality: It is just barely possible, that, in the midst of all these test-driven square-wheelers, I could still find myself magically whisked away and sitting in the driver’s seat of a round-wheeled car after all, ready to put in gear! Even one such experience of “opposite-sex” attraction might well lead me genuinely to “the one” despite the overwhelming number of occasions my sexual attractions have been directed to the sexual values of someone of the same sex. And if that does happen, that means that sexual attraction really did do its job on that occasion after all, even if I still experience later impulses of same-sex attraction.

Illustrating this are the clear examples of people with same-sex attraction who still manage to experience sexual attraction to a person of the other sex, whom they go on to marry. Such examples are hard for secular culture to make sense of, based on its inverted definitions of identity and attraction. But these examples do make sense if we understand God’s real plan for sexual attraction and jettison the cultural falsehoods about it.

Furthermore, we can abandon the entire issue of “orientation change” as defined by culture. I don’t have to worry about whether the healing I seek for same-sex attraction enables me to predominantly experience attraction to the other sex, or not. Rather, I merely have to prepare at least for the possibility that I may really—concretely—encounter “the one” person of the other sex with whom spousal union is possible even in the midst of my experience of same-sex attraction.

Granted, this may be neither common nor possible for everyone experiencing same-sex attractions. Jesus Himself reminds us that not all are called to marriage in this life, and that’s quite alright. We must remind ourselves that finding “the one” in this life, as beautiful as it is, is not our ultimate and universal calling. The ultimate, universal, and eternal calling is to union not with “the one” but with “The One”—God Himself–Who beckons to us even more “spousally” than any human lover ever could. Who would not be willing to exchange the human poverty of sexual “orientation” for the eternal human-Divine complementarity we are called to experience with our Creator?

In this way, we all share the same eternal “orientation.” My (and your) ultimate orientation is “The One” Who bears the Name above all Names—Jesus Christ.

Jim Russell

Jim Russell lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He writes on a variety of topics related to the Catholic faith, including natural law, liturgy, theology of the body, and sexuality. He can be reached at:


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The Awful Truth: Divorce, McCarey Style

His father, Thomas McCarey, was a well-known Hollywood boxing promoter, his mother a Frenchwoman, Leona, after whom he was named. He tried prizefighting himself—as a middleweight—but, at the urging of his upwardly mobile father, went to law school. In his own bid for greater respectability, Thomas sold his sports arena and opened a liquor store: both were frequented by movie people. The son, handsome and dark-haired, and a good student, practiced briefly after graduating from University of Southern California Law School, but it wasn’t for him. After falling down the shaft of an elevator, he sued, won five thousand dollars in damages, and invested the windfall in a copper mine—that went bust. A talented pianist, he wanted to be a professional songwriter and wrote hundreds of songs. We should count ourselves lucky that we’ve never heard of any of them, because if Leo McCarey had succeeded as a composer, he may not have become the filmmaking genius who brought these odd and often contradictory gifts and experiences to the cinema. Pugilism and passion, savoir faire and down-home bluntness, earthy humor and religious transcendence, custard pies and jealous wives. And music everywhere, characters singing and playing the piano, or the drums, dancing, time speeding up and slowing down.

As a director, McCarey would become a master of improvisation, and his scripts read like his early CV—they are full of holes and hard to pin down, chaotic and spontaneous, quicksilver and intuitive. Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, to whom he was compared, had more sustained careers—Capra more good films, Lubitsch more great ones. But at his best, McCarey was better than Capra and equal to Lubitsch. His claims to greatness, reaching far back into silent film, include Laurel and Hardy two-reelers; the Marx Brothers comedy Duck Soup (1933); a beloved melodrama that, astonishingly, he wrote and directed twice—as Love Affair in 1939 and, in 1957, as An Affair to Remember; and two surprise blockbusters, Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), gentle Catholic comedies starring Bing Crosby that reflect McCarey’s own devout Catholicism and feeling for the workings of divine providence.

At a young age (given as twenty in some reports, twenty-two in others), McCarey married (for life) his childhood sweetheart; around the same time, seeking fun but also stability, he followed up contacts in the movie industry and was hooked on the spot. With a job as a third assistant to Tod Browning at Universal, he hung out on sets, took on chores, even called himself a “script girl.” Adept as a gag writer, he soon left and went to Hal Roach Studios, where he worked from 1923 to ’29, becoming a full-time writer and director of shorts. There, his most significant contribution (for which he got credit only much later in life) was the pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and he made some of their best films and worked uncredited on others. They were stars of the studio (Harold Lloyd had just left), which competed with Mack Sennett in a golden age that also featured such clowns as W. C. Fields, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton.

With his range of experience, McCarey moved easily into sound, directing a variety of talkies for Pathé, Paramount, Fox, and United Artists, but soon found himself pigeonholed in pure comedy, his gifts exploited in the service of personae already established, like Fields and Mae West. McCarey wanted creative autonomy, which is why he wasn’t eager to work with the Marx Brothers, though Duck Soup would be their best film. Even so, it’s not until the deliriously antic Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) that you finally see him get the chance to bring the free-form exuberance of silent film into the sound era and also reach for something deeper.

“Replace custard pies with words—words as projectiles, soaring, tumbling, overlapping—and you have The Awful Truth, right up to the Sennett-style chase that ushers in the ending.”

Most accounts date the swelling of the director’s ambition to do something more serious to after the death of his father, whom he adored, in 1936—a loss amplified by his inability to attend the funeral. (He’d been stricken ill by contaminated milk that cast and crew had drunk on the set of—of all things—a Lloyd picture called The Milky Way.) Hints of longing and dislocation are apparent in some of McCarey’s earlier work, but the theme of loss comes explicitly to the fore in his twin masterpieces of 1937: Make Way for Tomorrow, that marvel of empathy about a couple cut adrift in old age, and its comic counterpoint, the one that won McCarey his first of two directing Oscars, The Awful Truth. Though Cary Grant as the philandering husband (that Florida tan!) and Irene Dunne as the possibly adulterous wife keep a light tone throughout, the comedy mirrors the more somber film in showing lovers finding their way back to each other through shared memories of the past. Capra may have made the film that came to be considered the first screwball comedy, that offhand little 1934 farce called It Happened One Night (Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century coming in a close second, later the same year), but it was McCarey who brought the balletic physicality and pratfall humor of silent film to the talky genre with The Awful Truth, the greatest screwball of them all. His long apprenticeship in two-reelers allowed him to develop his sense of timing and specific bits that would run through all of his films.

Custard pies wouldn’t make it into sound, but hats would: gentlemen’s hats, bowlers, homburgs, boaters, fedoras, top hats—symbols of male decorum, crushed, swapped, run over, totaled, vanquished by animals. The wire fox terrier Mr. Smith (the venerable Skippy, who also played Asta in the Thin Man series) is the hat snatcher in The Awful Truth, suggesting the nakedness and vulnerability of the men so shorn, men thereby reduced to farcical archetype of cuckold or gigolo. (In The Bells of St. Mary’s, Bing Crosby’s priest is greeting the nuns of his new diocese, and they begin to titter uncontrollably; unbeknownst to the father, a cat on the mantelpiece behind him frolics with his hat.) A henpecked lawyer tries to talk Dunne’s character out of divorce as his wife nags noisily in the background. Authority figures have only a gossamer hold on their dignity; adults are such in name only.

There was a direct line from vaudeville and music hall to the slapstick outrages and irrationality of early sound film. The talkies were hungry for actors and comedians of all kinds, and the studios were freewheeling laboratories of experimentation, with few rules. This was especially true of Paramount, where McCarey directed Duck Soup. That film’s blend of hilarity, nonsense, and lyricism is pure McCarey. The mirror scene with no mirror, in which three brothers in identical nightshirts take turns reflecting one another, did not originate with McCarey. As Gerald Weales points out in Canned Goods as Caviar: American Film Comedy of the 1930s, both Chaplin and Max Linder had performed a variant of the idea. But neither was anywhere near as intricate or as moving as the one in Duck Soup.

There were connections, noted by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, between the antirealist art of Dada and surrealism and the glorious non sequiturs of Fields and the Marx Brothers. The Hollywood practitioners wouldn’t describe it in such high-flown terms, but Groucho himself once acknowledged the family resemblance in nonsense writing from Lewis Carroll to Morrie Ryskind. Even those slapstick two-reelers that seem thrown together on the set by men who would never have called themselves artists were intuitively finding their way to a form. James Agee argues the case when he describes a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler directed by McCarey that was devoted almost entirely to pie-throwing: “The first pies were thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophically. Then innocent bystanders began to get caught into the vortex. At full pitch it was Armageddon. But everything was calculated so nicely that until late in the picture, when havoc took over, every pie made its special kind of point and piled on its special kind of laugh.” Replace custard pies with words—words as projectiles, soaring, tumbling, overlapping, collapsing—and you have The Awful Truth, right up to the Sennett-style chase that ushers in the ending of the film with a pileup of chaos and pure motion.

Endings are always difficult in screwball comedy (Hawks’s were almost invariably weak), because of the anarchic natures of the lovers, who don’t fit the pattern of romantic comedy and its denouements as practiced from the Greeks and the Romans through Shakespeare and beyond. The reestablishment of order, that moment of collective celebration when the couple is reintegrated into society, seems anathema to screwball, wherein couples stake out turf in opposition to convention, a private world of their own making with its own language and in-jokes. Society as such exists more to be ridiculed than embraced. There are no children, no money worries.

Lucy and Jerry Warriner inhabit a not-quite-real perch alongside society but askew, at an ironic distance. They may belong to the right clubs, know the right people, and appear on the society pages, but they are not quite upper-crust, not the cultural arbiters or rich blue bloods who have to be careful of their position. They are scapegraces, his gentlemanliness no less in question than her virtue, orphans in each other’s care. One of the breathtaking qualities of The Awful Truth is the way we feel these two people, on the verge of divorce, rediscovering each other and their love as they go along, bound together by a matching sense of humor. There’s a whole subset of screwball comedy dubbed the comedy of remarriage by Stanley Cavell, but the rediscovery theme runs through McCarey’s other films too. Make Way for Tomorrow features two old people (played by Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore) going back to a place in their marriage where they can feel love all over again, better and deeper for the trials it has had to overcome. In Love Affair, Charles Boyer and Dunne fall in love, fail to meet as planned at the Empire State Building, and are finally reconciled after a prolonged and painful but perhaps necessary separation, as if they were not ready for each other the first time around.

Yes, this is a constant motif of romantic comedy: a couple at cross-purposes at the beginning, who have to endure a trial by fire and, given a second chance, are reborn into a greater sense of themselves, a strength from compromise. But in McCarey the transformations have religious undertones—the two have to prove themselves worthy not only of each other but of love itself.

McCarey’s gifts as an auteur are the hardest to describe, or to assess in terms of a visual “signature,” because his brilliance was in timing, in the structure and rhythm of his films, in the flow whereby a dismal situation could turn on a dime into a humorous or even a sublime moment, an aria could break up into giggles during a crescendo and convey ecstatic surrender. (See Dunne at the piano when Grant clatters to the floor along with his chair.) Everyone knows of Jean Renoir’s tribute, that McCarey “understands people better than anyone in Hollywood,” and you see it over and over again, empathy for all God’s creatures great and small, animal and human, geezers and toddlers. A baby Jesus born during a children’s Nativity show; a six-year-old Joseph in the same play fumbling and persevering and ad-libbing as he knocks at the innkeeper’s door; an old couple falling back in love. He had an uncanny gift for eliciting natural behavior and then taking it up a notch, and his empathy flows with the ease of a man who doesn’t see species and ages as fixed categories (the boy playing Joseph in The Bells of St. Mary’s is more mature than the supposedly adult Warriners), who instinctively mixes the beautiful and the clownish, the sublime and the ridiculous, the physical and the spiritual.

For McCarey, gender was fluid before the term was invented. If he is not as consistently drawn to role reversal as, say, Hawks, still, a certain thread of this mutability runs through his films. There’s the image early in Ruggles of Red Gap in which a pickled Charles Laughton, a valet on his way to liberation from servitude in the American West, is draped around a horse on a merry-go-round in Paris. Throughout the film, Laughton, robust of body, delicate of speech, walks trippingly, as if his feet had a lisp. Or Oliver Hardy, in We Faw Down (1928), wearing a lampshade as a tutu, dancing coquettishly around his living room. Earlier in the same film, there’s a moment during a boys’ night out when one of their party-girl dates is pinching Stan Laurel playfully. Giggle, giggle. Then a little more aggressively. Tweaking his nose, hitting him, hitting him harder. He sits passively, trying to get into the spirit but baffled and humiliated.

McCarey’s twists on gender norms are less explicit than those in other screwball comedies. They involve going against expectation and performance and humiliation, comic self-flagellation: Jerry crashing to the floor, Lucy impersonating the tacky Dixie Belle Lee, the idea that Lucy may have committed an amorous indiscretion by custom permitted only to men. Or her protracted comic mortification on the dance floor with her aw-shucks suitor Dan Leeson—a type played to perfection, here and elsewhere, by Ralph Bellamy—a steer-wrestling duet that, like a Laurel and Hardy scene, involves a slow build, three different attitudes, and milking the gag longer than you expect.

Ultimately, McCarey’s films elude both verbal description and visual analysis, because they are more like music; the originality and intensity come from the changing expressions on the characters’ faces, irony, self-mockery, love, despair crisscrossing like jazz notes. There’s the breathtaking balancing act of wit and ardor at the end of Love Affair when Boyer second-guesses Dunne while recounting why he didn’t make it to the top of the Empire State Building, both circling around the agonizing truth while entering into the pretense that it was he, not she, who failed to show up. Or the end of Make Way for Tomorrow, when Bondi and Moore, on the eve of losing each other, possibly forever, recapture the spirit of their marriage. Against all expectations, the city conspires to lift them up, not just from the squabbling selfishness of their children but from the trials their own love has undergone through years of struggle, family tensions, the pressure to hang on to middle-class respectability. They’re being treated like royalty at the hotel where they honeymooned, and in the ballroom they dance to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” as light as two feathers. It’s that airiness that is McCarey’s touch, a blend of the physical and the mystical. He creates a sacred aura, the way he sacramentalizes the union of the man and woman in an island chapel in Love Affair and again in An Affair to Remember: they kneel before Christ in “true” marriage, before they even know they’re in love.

Which brings us back to Grant and Dunne, the greatest of all screwball couples, who became comic divinities thanks to the magic in McCarey’s madness.

Grant tried desperately to get out of the movie. He didn’t like the loose script, and thought it stretched credulity that a man would cheat on anyone as beautiful as Dunne. So unnerved was he by McCarey’s free-form style, he even offered money to get out of his contract. At this point, he was not an unknown quantity. He’d appeared as a lead with Mae West in 1933’s She Done Him Wrong, and with Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), and he’d come to represent light fun in a number of now-forgotten comedies. He hadn’t expressed a personality of his own, however, and if anything, his slick, slightly vacuous handsomeness worked against him. Some have argued that Paramount dropped the ball when it let him go in 1936, failing to recognize his potential, but how could anyone have suspected the anarchic goofball spirit that McCarey would uncover (or, for that matter, the sinister undertones that Alfred Hitchcock would mine and that are just barely suggested in The Awful Truth)? A leading man who could rough himself up—it took McCarey to entice this creature into being.

Bellamy has described the Awful Truth set as chaotic, with little script to begin with and daily rewrites as McCarey banged away at the piano, cast and crew assembled, waiting for inspiration to strike. Reportedly, even Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell worked on the screenplay. The woman credited, Viña Delmar, deserves a sidenote. Generally treated as a hack during her career in Hollywood, she also worked on Make Way for Tomorrow and had a slightly screwball backstory of her own. Brooklyn-born of vaudeville parents, she wrote a best seller called Bad Girl about unwed mothers, worked as a chorus girl, changed her name more than once. Yet surely there is some of her—whether by her pen or her biography—in the movie. One thinks of Dixie in the nightclub scene, telling of changing her name so her whole family wouldn’t have to change theirs. Viña, who worked in Hollywood with her husband, Eugene Delmar, a writer and fellow name changer, and continued to write stories to declining fortunes, once gained notoriety when, as a gag, she placed an ad in a paper to rent out her husband for five thousand dollars a year.

One can imagine Dunne doing something similar, and Grant—the Grant unleashed by McCarey—jubilantly playing along, and somehow going one better. Andrew Sarris pinpoints the exact moment when Grant becomes Grant. The scene is near the beginning of the film, after Jerry has acquired his two-weeks-in-Florida suntan at the athletic club and comes home with friends, expecting a warm greeting from his wife. Instead of Lucy, it is Mr. Smith who greets him warmly. There’s a little unease in the air, especially when kind friends point to a stack of unopened mail for Lucy. As they chat and mark time, standing or sitting in conventional drawing-room style, Grant alights on a sofa back and crosses his legs at an odd angle, disrupting the perpendicular lines of the right-thinking and upstanding society friends gathered to witness the scandal about to unfold.

Grant never gave McCarey the credit the director deserved for his role in the actor’s stardom, and maybe that’s understandable. For one thing, it was McCarey himself—dashing, dark-haired, a fast-talker and con man—who supplied certain gestures and mannerisms that we see attaching themselves to Grant. Jerry bangs away at the piano, pops up here and there like a jack-in-the-box, and yet manages to preserve his drop-dead allure. And is it too much of a stretch to see another McCarey collaborator—Charley Chase—as an influence? The actor-writer, whom McCarey always credited as an inspiration, was hugely popular in silent film, and as a protagonist distinguished himself from the comics around him by playing it semistraight—that is, never wearing costumes, generally playing a hapless hero, a ladies’ man, but one who performs athletic stunts as well. In other words, that improbable combination of leading man and goofball—and the missing link between the silent clowns (Chaplin, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy) and Grant.

Even more remarkable in some ways was McCarey’s unleashing of Dunne. She’d played strong, even feminist, heroines (in Cimarron, in 1931, Ann Vickers in 1933). She wasn’t exactly prim—she’d made Theodora Goes Wild the year before The Awful Truth, in which a proper daughter of Connecticut blue bloods is revealed to be the author of scandalous romance novels. But like so many before and since, Dunne didn’t take comedy seriously, preferring melodrama, and she was sufficiently committed to her singing career to stipulate that she sing in every film. Bellamy described (to writer Charles Higham) the scene in which he and Dunne play the raucous duet of “Home on the Range” on the piano. They were horsing around and harmonizing when she suddenly became mortified at her own off-pitch silliness and stopped cold. “Cut!” yelled McCarey, and printed one of the most brilliant scenes in the movie. Ultimately, Dunne became great friends with McCarey over the course of the shoot, and that trust allowed her to go wilder than Theodora, and suggest a good deal more.

The source of the movie, a 1922 play by Arthur Richman, was made into two other films before McCarey catapulted it into an Oscar-winning home run. When you consider the context, you can understand its appeal: In 1922, women had recently won the vote, flappers and freethinkers were in the air, with their notions of women having their own lives and appetites. Even divorce was less taboo, provided it was done the right way (with a suit against the philandering husband).

Aside from a fatal absence of star charisma, the play and earlier film versions seem to have focused, more conventionally, on the ambiguous outing of the heroine as unfaithful and the rescuing of her tattered reputation. In this movie, it’s Dan’s mother who arrives with the gossip about Lucy, in a scene straight out of McCarey’s life—the divorcing couple are going over papers with Dan concerning their busted coal mine. It’s hard to imagine any other actress drawling like Dunne: “The lady’s name needs clearin’, pardner.” And could anyone have prolonged the clarification as mischievously as Grant? Fingers crossed behind his back, Jerry bemoans his own unworthiness and extols Lucy’s virtue. Probably the most significant difference is that, in the play and its faithful iterations, the lady is exculpated clearly and unequivocally. Not so in the McCarey.

The review of The Awful Truth in the New York Times of November 5, 1937, by B. R. Crisler found the movie to be a lot of fun, praising its “pure poetry of motion.” He astutely grasped the way “maturity exists only to be deflated into abject juvenility.” Yet rather strangely—such were the notions of progress at the time—he also finds the film reactionary, if boldly so, a daring throwback to the physical comedy of the silents just when the talkies had introduced progress in the form of “spoken wit and adultness.” Actually, from the vantage point of 2018, the dialogue seems pretty damn adult, and daring as well, when compared with the norms of Hollywood under censorship. There’s enough innuendo to wonder why Hays Office brows were not rising, and injunctions being issued forthwith.

After Dunne’s glamorous entrance in a cloud of white fur, on the arm of voice teacher Armand (Alexander D’Arcy), an awkward confrontation is in the offing. Lucy’s aunt Patsy (Cecil Cunningham) has left, saying that “four’s a crowd,” whereupon McCarey gives us a series of two-shots, three-shots, and close-ups, emphasizing the three-way tensions. Armand is like one of those louche characters in Henry James, the Italian music master who appears as a fortune hunter and whose actions with the American lovely remain ambiguous. After Jerry has insulted Armand, the latter puffs himself up, declaring, “I am a great teacher, not a great lover,” at which Lucy quickly and unthinkingly intercedes: “That’s right, Armand, no one could ever accuse you of being a great lover”—slight emphasis on “you” and “great”—and then, realizing what she’s said, chokes and immediately detours.

Stanley Cavell has noted the absence of mothers in screwball comedy, but this goes back to the nineteenth-century novel as it charts heroines who emerge as freestanding agents, fully conscious beings, largely through the absence of mothers. In a society of increasing individualism, female protagonists are allowed to journey outside the immediate family for support. In Jane Austen, then Henry James, aunts and other surrogates move in as putative chaperones, releasing the heroine from the all-powerful strings of maternal attachment.

If ever there was a liberal chaperone, it’s Aunt Patsy, a woman who refuses to retire to the sidelines. And if ever there was a heroine capable of self-definition, it’s Dunne’s Lucy Warriner. In the guiding yet liberating hands of McCarey, the actress improvises one of the great female protagonists with a voice of her own. From songbird to Dixie impersonator, she rides the wings of invention, along with the cunningly unstoppable Grant. In a film so loose-jointed and buoyant that there is hardly a moment of letdown or ennui, they use their wits and their bodies first to separate, then to come back together, making sure everything will be the same, only different!