THIS WEEK'S SPECIAL INTERVIEW

After seeing Mark Vicente’s film "What the #$*!" I KNEW that an interview with Mark Vicente was a must for this book as he stands for all I believe is the NEW Hollywood so enjoy this amazing interview.

Mark Vicente William Arntz and Betsy Chasse are the angels of our industry that brought to our big screens "What the Bleep" to date my favorite film to help wake up, entertain and teach people about their true self, the spiritual magical higher self. Marks story about how he is doing what he does now and how he got here is an inspiration to ALL of us in the industry and like Shirley McClaine and Stephen Simon one of the great brave souls who is bringing truth on the screen so that the masses will finally (and this is my prayer) WAKE UP!!!

Combining over 25 years of filmmaking experience Mark, William and Betsy have embarked on their most important project to date: Delivering to the world through the combined mediums of film, documentary, animation and visual effects the answers to the most asked question in the universe. " What is it? Where do we fit in? And, why do we do what we do?" So my friend enjoy, learn and be inspired by Mark Vicente!

Mark Vicente: Thank you Michele

MV: Thank you for saying that.

MV: So you found all the people I paid a lot of money to say that.

MV: (laugh) Well, I was born in South Africa, and basically when I was very young, traveled all over the world as a child. I sort of lived everywhere and traveled everywhere. I saw a lot of cultures and just went to a lot of cool places. My parents traveled a lot and when I was about thirteen, I fell in love with the idea of filmmaking. I fell in love with it because I saw, as a young child, I had all these ideas in my head, and I thought, "I wish there was a way to get these ideas out to people" because I grew up in this very repressed society. South Africa at that time was very oppressed, very Calvinistic and racist, and I always felt out of place. I wanted to take the ideas in my head and to get them out to people. Of course, as a child I felt that my ideas were better than anyone else’s. As a child I was like, "I don’t understand why they hate black people." "I don’t understand why they think this way." "I don’t understand why they think that." And I said I wish I could get this message out. You know Michele, I remember as a child I had just seen the musical, "Iti Tombi," when I was very young. It was a South African musical and it inspired me!

MV: Michele, I remembered this amazing drumming in this film "Iti Tombi"… and I remember after that, … And I lived in the middle of the bush…… taking all these things and banging on them like I had heard in this musical and I was thinking to myself, "I wish there was a sound loud enough to reach across the whole valley, and to reach the whole world." I was obsessed with how I could reach everybody. Of course, that was arrogant as a child, that my thinking would somehow uplift humanity, but then again, that was being young.

MV: That is probably true and then I saw, when I was twelve or thirteen… Star Wars.

I was so blown away by the film. And then suddenly I had this realization that, Oh my God, this is the way to do what I had been dreaming of doing, by reaching all those people this way; movies.

MV: It was the thing that made me realize. You know the thing I loved about Star Wars was that for me, there were all these hidden encoded messages that had nothing to do with religion.

MV: (Laugh) Yes a lot of us do. But Star Wars really had everything to do with spirituality and I know most kids are pretty much in touch with that side of themselves. And so, I was so excited and I was excited by the response the film had with people. O.K. this is it. This is the way to do it. And then of course I think about maybe, two years later, I finally decided, this is definitely what I am going to do because I went to a TV studio one day and I saw these men behind the camera and I said, "That’s what I want to do." Right! I want to be a cameraman.

MV: So, that was kind of what launched that idea, and then, I went back to Southern Africa when I was seventeen or something, pretty young, I went to drama school because there was no real good film schools in my opinion. There was one film school, but it was, you know in Victoria, which I didn’t think much of. So I ended up going to drama school and doing everything. I learned to do absolutely everything. I was there for four years and I majored in cinematography and theater lighting design and at the same time I directed and I acted until I had done everything. You know, music, song, dance, radio, blah blah blah.

MV: Yes it helps to really understand all aspects, as they are all so interesting. And so, when I got out, and even while I was still in college, I started working in the film industry as a sound mixer, camera systems, gofer, everything I could, because I was so desperate to learn the craft. At that time, I was very fired up about the political situation as well in South Africa so I worked in a lot of sort of underground anti-government films.

MV: And I worked my way up through the ranks, and sort of my big break as a cinematographer came with the musical "Sarafina." With Whoopi Goldberg. So that was sort of my big break. And that was what got me going. Up to that point I’d done music videos and commercials and I had been a news cameraman for a while, documentaries etc. And then I got my big break shooting that musical, because I knew the director and I also became very good friends with Mbgeni Ngema, who was the creator of the musical on Broadway. And basically, I befriended him, And, I really sold myself, so I had him, as the director, on my side, and then you know, it was a question of winning over the BBC and a French company. Basically I got the gig and I was like twenty-five or so, which was very surprising. I even remember meeting at that time Quincy Jones. I had dinner with Quincy Jones.

MV: He said to me, "Who are you?" and I said, "I am the director of photography", he looked at me and said "Aren’t you a bit young?" and I said, "Oh yes, I guess I am." You know. And I was so intimidated.

MV: Yes he is, And Quincy smiled and said, "Good for you". Good for you, you know. I was truly nervous though. Meeting him was very cool. Anyway that was my, big break. And from that point I then came to Hollywood… it was always my dream to come to Hollywood.

MV: Because sometimes, in the forefront of my mind, there was this idea of wanting to affect change in the world. And then, also, I was much younger and very ambitious, you know, and also on the forefront of my idea was; I wanted to be famous and I wanted to be well known. I wanted to be powerful; I wanted to be rich; I wanted to be all these things. But my dream, of course, was to get to Hollywood. So, I then got a big studio movie and I went to Hollywood and I shot this movie with Patrick Swayze called "Fatherhood."

MV: And, when I got to Hollywood, I really felt that I had arrived.

MV: What happened was that Hollywood Pictures, which was a subsidiary of Disney, had picked up "Sarafina," and Disney was the distributor. So the director and I were offered another picture by them.

MV: We came out to do that.

MV: Obviously I was very excited; I got paid a lot of money. It was a big studio movie. I had everything I could need. All the toys to make movies and I had never had all the things before, because in South Africa, it was like guerilla warfare filming. It was me doing with what we had.

MV: So I got out there and I had every thing, it was just a dream and you know, of course, if is your first time out, Disney treats you really well. They give you this nice sports car, this nice hotel. And I remember being on Hollywood Boulevard and I was shooting this big car chase scene and I had all the streets shut down, like five blocks were shut down ….Four cameras rolling and a car chase and I was thinking that I was here, I was just like WOW!!… I looked up and I sort of noticed that we were outside a strip club and there were like prostitutes everywhere and I kind of noticed that the streets were dirty and smelly. And I was thinking, you know this is not quite what I had in mind.

MV: Me too and I realized, wow, this is not quite what I had in mind and the reality of this business sunk into me and from that moment on I kept on working and I made what I think now was a lot of crap, I mean I made a lot of crappy movies as a cinematographer.

MV: No, No, a lot of them were like cable movies and little TV movies and things that never saw the light of day.

MV: Oh yeah, I kept busy, and then it just started to wear at me because this was about surviving, I was trying to build a career yet at the same time, I was launching myself in that direction so I started to feel depression come over me because the more I tried to make a success of myself, the harder I found it to be. I would go into meetings with people who were not the sort or people I wanted to work who played THE GAME but, I would sit and listen to them and think to myself, "Wait a minute, it’s all crap. I can see through all of this. I know what they are thinking, I know what they are about" At the meetings, I would watch people play games. And I would be like, wait a minute, this is stupid. And often I would burn bridges because I had a habit of saying what was on my mind.

MV: I didn’t have the patience to kiss ass. So, I kind of got to the point where I was thinking about the year 2000 and I reached this point of absolute frustration realizing that I was chasing after projects and they were never quite what I wanted. And then there was one film that I am very proud of and that was "Uncorked" and it was directed by a wonderful man called John Huddles. The way I got that film was that I was so frustrated with the kind of work that I was doing I decided to write a mission statement, a one-page mission statement. And I gave it to my agent and it was very honest. It was very revealing of my soul and spoke about what I wanted to do. It said the people I didn’t want to work with and this is who I am and this is what I care about and I gave it to my agent. And she said to me, "You are not serious Mark. You can’t seriously expect me to send this out to people." And I said why not? And she said, "This is like… you are baring your soul." And I said, "yeah I know. That was the point."

MV: I did pretty much. (Laugh)

MV: Well, you know, my agent said, "I’ll tell you what, if it feels right, I’ll do it. But I’m not going to promise to send this out because it feels like suicide." And I said, "Yeah O.K. if it’s suicide, whatever, I still want you to send it out." So what happened was this guy, John Huddles, had this project and he wants to get a copy of my demo reel. She doesn’t have a copy but she said to him, "Mark does have a mission statement and you might want to look at it." So she sent him the mission statement and he hired me on the spot.

MV: He hadn’t even seen my demo reel Michele but then he saw my demo reel and said "Great, I knew this guy was great." And then when I meet him, he just said, "Anyone who has the balls to write in such honesty about them like that, then, you know, I want to work with that person." So we made this film that I think is wonderful, a deeply spiritual film called "Uncorked". It stars Minnie Driver and Nigel Hawthorne and Rufus Sewell. Just a fabulous little film. And that sort of re-inspired me, to realize, you know, that there are stories like this out there, And you know what, I should be writing some of these stories. I should be creating some of these stories. Because I had in my mind that I was just going to shoot them in a fine film grade, and that’s really great. You know nobody is really telling the stories that I am interested in.

MV: So it made me realize I am just going to do this on my own. I am going to have to go and find these stories and find people and start to live my dream. I want the vast amount of information in the world that is not out in popular media… that I know people have a hunger for, and I want to find a way to get it out there onto the big screen. So what happened was in about 2001, I began a project that sort of was like a rockumentary project, like a musical thirty-seven minutes long of a rockumentary. And it was a film talking about the way women are treated, abused in the name of God. What people do to each other on the name of God. It was kind of attacking organized religion. And certainly attacking the way woman have been excluded. And it was a very powerful piece for me to make. And of course when people saw it, they either loved it or hated it.

MV: "From Where Angels Fear to Tread." Then what happened was that William Arntz and I, (William was the financer and producer of "What the #$*!".) William and I met and we realized that we had the same dream and that we both loved science. And we loved it because science is not about creed, color, or race, you know, or religion or sex. We understood that the advanced sciences were pointing to something called the observer. Something that has an affect on matter. We knew that scientists were finding that the act of observing or not observing or having a particular intent seems to affect the experiment. We sort of realized that, you know, it wasn’t relegated to scientists but that everybody could do this. We are both kind of geeks in our own way and had read science our whole lives and had loved the mystery of science and spirituality and had long ago walked away from organized religion and certainly classical physics which we felt boring and narrow-minded. We loved and realized that we had the same dream. We also realized that we wanted to get this information out to people because we knew that most people don’t have access to extraordinary information because they are programmed to only watch television or only to read the paper or only do what is spoon fed to them.

MV: And we are well aware of our society where everyone is basically drugged to sleep.

MB: Yes, I call it slipping into something more comfortable like a coma (Laughs)

MV: Yes funny and scary is the opium of the media.

MV: And so we thought, you know, o.k. screw it. We are going to use that same media. We are going to create something and we are going to play it in the same places these people are getting mesmerized. We are going to play a different message in the same venues.

MV: So, we started working with this idea and then we got Betsy Chasse involved. Betsy was a producer that I had worked with in L.A. on a number of films that she had hired me on. A great producer and a great nuts and bolts girl. Who was just as tough as nails, practical and very very smart. And just knows how to get films done. So I wanted to bring her in because she knew how to help us get this film made. Will was like the big dreamer. Big dreams he had. Of course he had the finances and the love of science and certainly out of the three of us, he is the one who understands science best. Betsy, you know, very smart, very astute, very powerful and very practical. She would help Will and I sort of get down to brass tacks. When we were out there in the clouds, she would say, "Hey guys, I think it is very interesting that you are masturbating over this idea, but I don’t understand what the heck you are talking about." Hence, nobody understands.

MV: It was and I was like, more into the love of film and emotions and the way to use them, emotions and film, films that are provocative. I was more the feeling emotional version of the trio. We spent like three and a half years, working on this project to get it where it is now and you know, it took a long time because as you can see, it was a very challenging project. Some people call it either stupid or brave. It was a really, really big thing we bit off to chew.

MV: Yeah but, a lot of people told us when we started this…I can’t tell you how many people dissuaded us Michele. How many people said, "It can’t be done." And I don’t really know what they thought could or couldn’t be done and I think certainly looking at the film now they say, "You could have done this better. You could have done that better,"…It is what it is right now. And the fact is, it is affecting people deeply. It is proving that there is a massive hunger out there for information like this. I think that there are people out there who are familiar with this information, who know this information, that have never seen it put together in this way. They have never seen some of the connections we have made. They have never seen it put out in a way that they sort of feel part of a community. This has produced a tremendous joy in people. I can go to the theaters and see people sitting there who are truly touched and they look around and go, " Oh my God, I am not alone."

MV: I suppose my favorite part is the last twenty to thirty minutes of the film because I didn’t remember when we were shooting that when I was working with Marlee) on that bathtub scene when she was looking at herself in the mirror.

MV: That was a tough, tough, scene to shoot. It was draining. It was tiring. It was so many things because we had to go so deep. And to pull that off. I remember that I used to stand there sometimes when they were doing parts of the film that did not involve spoken words, or require me to talk to someone and I would listen to music while the camera was rolling, trying to get myself into a place where I could tape the film directly. When we would listen to some music sometimes that actually ended up in the film. And I’d try and figure out how long I could hold a shot, try and get myself into this mesmerized state, because I knew that the first hour of the film was over whelming.

MV: That was my job, and in the last half hour of the film, to put people into a trance like state where they were, like coming down off this wave. Everything was slowing down and I was purposely wanting to slow everything down and I was also wanting to really… not melancholy, but certainly like places of deep thought, that in that scene where she hates herself and you see those little cells being attacked and killed in slow motion it sounds like a battle. When we had originally described this to the animators, I described it, "Think of Private Ryan or Full Metal jacket." I wanted these cute little things, the contrast of these cute little cells, contrasted with the sound track of death and destruction. Because I wanted people to understand what hatred does to oneself. I want them literally to stop and think, "F&%$$! You know what? That is serious."

MV: It works because every time I am in a theater people get really quiet in that scene.

MV: Yeah it was Betsy’s idea.

MV: Yeah.

MV: Marlee wasn’t actually our first choice… we weren’t going out after her. We had gone after a few people, and Marlee’s people actually came to us.

MV: I agree and the reason they came to us was because they said, "We have an actress that can pull this off without any words." We were like, wow. And what happened before was…I remember that about a week before that, we had said we needed to be really open-minded here. Sometimes we get a little controlling about how we think things should be, perhaps we need to let go and maybe one of the reasons was we had done this wonderful interview with Ramtha and Ramtha said to us, "You know as long as you try and control you are going to have crap…. It is never to be found in the known. You only find genius in the unknown. The only way you are going to find the unknown is to surrender who you think you are, and surrender to a greater idea. Just be open to a greater idea."

MV: Yes it certainly does so whenever we started to get really opinionated on how we thought it should be, we had to reflect sometimes and think, "Am I going out after something I know already or should I let go and go after something I don’t know?" Now when the idea of Marlee came to us, we thought this is a really bizarre unknown idea. Like an idea we never would have had. So we had a meeting with her and of course she sold herself wonderfully, she is a very dynamic beautiful woman. And we were like, "You know what, why not. It is so unusual, let’s just go for it." You know, people were like, "Well you know, she is deaf, she is this, she is that, and the other." And there were times where we thought she was going to be a problem, but then we thought, it is not a story about a woman who is without a hearing problem, it is a story about a woman who is stuck. Whatever problem she has, she is really stuck. And she is stuck because of her mind not because of her hearing. So a few people have said to me, "Well, was it a conscious decision to have her be a deaf woman? because it was perfect. And I said no, it wasn’t a conscious decision. It was just how it worked out. It all worked out in the end really, really well. And she has an amazing ability to communicate ideas without speech, obviously because that is how she had to do it her whole life. She is an amazing example as well. She as a young girl had dreamed of winning an Oscar. And the chances for a person who is deaf, becoming an actress and winning an Oscar, you look at her and go, "Girl you should just give it up. It is going to hurt too much to dream that dream." And she was persistent. And of course she did it. She is a walking example of when you have intent and you have focus and you have clarity and that is what you want, you go after it like a bull, it will happen… somehow, it will happen.

MV: She had said to me, "You know, I think the science and spirituality is wonderful and great, and all that, whatever, and in my own way I understand it, but my focus is on the acting. My focus is on being a mother. But some of the science is way over my head. I understand the emotional aspect. I understand being stuck. I understand breaking through. You know what, I don’t want to get into it. I have got all these kids I need to take care of. I’ve got to leave cause I have got to take care of them and I just want to focus on the craft of acting."

MV: The blond girl?

MV: Her name was Elaine Hendrix.

MV: She was a friend of the casting director.

MV: Yeah and she has also been in the movie, "Parent Trap" The movie with the two identical twin sisters.

MV: Yeah, She was in "Parent Trap" and she was in "Inspector Gadget." And then in a quite a few other films. So she was experienced and very good.

MV: The contrast was that Elaine’s character; liked to be wild and free and open and flexible. And Marlee character was all about being controlling, and moody and of course which is why at the very end when she just left with the toothpaste in her hand was so great because she now has hit a place in her life where she is just letting go of so many things, it’s just an inconsequential thing, as she was just so focused on painting her body.

MV: Yeah.

MV: It does say a lot. Yeah, that’s true. It does.

MV: I think that my biggest influence was that I have been a student of Ramtha, and I have been for thirteen years, and I think the most profound impact on my life has been over the last thirteen years, the teaching of Ramtha. The system of study is so profound to me because what it is, is it is all about practically putting into practice ideas that were once philosophical but that have now become truth, in other words, the things that I learn are simply ideas, that are not truth, so I choose to experience them, and once I choose to experience them, I may or may not find truth, but it is up to me.

MV: Cool and the one thing I loved about it was that it wasn’t the dogma, it wasn’t the religion, it wasn’t the guru, it wasn’t the whatever, it was the teacher I respected, and yet… the amazing paradox was this sort of male presence, so to speak, in a woman’s body. It blew my mind, of course the reason I guess that he chose to do it that way was because he wanted to shake up our idea of what divinity is.

MV: Yes, we are so locked into being what is a male and what is a female. I wanted to be a paradox. I wanted you to start to move into the area of paradox and abstraction because that is where great knowledge resides that we have never had.

V: Yes I agree and the only way to be a genius is to go out there and extract knowledge and bring it back into your world; your world of experience, so that to me was profound. What was so profound to me was the amalgamation of science and spirituality and taking it out of the new age "woo-woo voodoo" whatever, and it wasn’t about, "well, I think my spirit guide was saying this…", but it was about us, and experiencing an idea and finding divinity within ones self. Sometimes a very quiet way without any fan-fare, but that’s what I loved about it. That had a profound affect on me. Earlier on, my grandfather, when I was a child, was a fairly narrow-minded man but he had a great love of nature. And he used to wake up really early in the morning and he used to go down and he used to read his Bible and get up probably around four or five. And I used to go down in the mornings and sit with him because I loved the quiet times and the contemplation and I let him read his thing. I would look out the window and I would go out and walk on the grass and then we would talk about things in the morning, and I developed this intense love for contemplations. So I would say, as a child, it was my grandfather, and his love of contemplation, because I developed that love. And then I tried many things. I became a very devout Christian, then I was into New Age, I was into all kinds of things. Eventually… I found this particular system of study… and it was not particularly about following anybody or following an idea, it was about becoming sort of a scientist. It was about taking information, some idea I find fascinating… and then saying, I want to see if this idea works, and how do I see if this idea works, and then, you know, the teacher would say, here is a way that you could be initiated into this idea or knowledge if you choose to. And then, I would go and do that. And I would have astounding experiences, and astounding realizations and I can tell you that there are things in this film that are truly great.

MV: There are things in this film that are average and things that are not great. There are things in this film that are truly great. And I think that the things that are truly great came from the three of us and from what we have learned and the immense amount of time we had set aside in our lives to go inside, to move into the interior of who we were and discover who we were and I think that the beauty of the film and the moments of brilliance and the moments of genius within the film are because of our intense sense of introspection and reflection and going in and the three of us do not have a great deal of respect for the world and its media because we think they are taking things down. We think they are collapsing people’s minds.

MV: … Because of our arrogance we’ve said screw it to the world, and that we are going to do it our way, and as you said help people wake up.

MV: (Laughs) When we finished the film, we went to get it out so people could go to see it in theaters. And they said, "You are never going to get this film distributed and there is no audience for this film." But we kept on saying, "Well, there is an audience." And basically they would say, "Well then, who are they?" and we would say, "Have you heard of who the cultural creatives are?" And they said "No." "Well there are about 50 million of them." And they would say, "Well we don’t know who they are." So we had to find very smart ways to get the film into these theaters. And theaters still did not think there was an audience. But they noticed that somebody was buying a lot of tickets.

MV: But like, "Well, we don’t know who they are and we don’t think they exist."

MV: But it was all about money, what you were saying earlier, that the nature of the beast, you know, one of the things I have realized, don’t fight the system. Figure out what it is they want…Hollywood… they are all about money and power. All right, so they want money and power…we have a film that potentially can make them a lot of money. So we decided all right, fine, we are going to show them how it is going to make money and then they are going to catch on. So what we did, was we went to a few target areas, showed the film there and played this where we knew there was an audience. Portland’s numbers were massive.

MV: We took it to the distributors, and they said, "Well that was only Portland" and we said fine.

MV: Yes I will affirm that!! Numbers have been increasing a lot, so we showed them these numbers and they suddenly realized, oh my God, there is a large group of people out there that like this and we could make money. We didn’t really care that that was their motive. We don’t care how the message gets out. You know, you want it to get out because you care about money, fine.

MV: Yes so true!

MV: You know, I am glad you said that about going out and going for the dream. I did a talk in Ashland recently and it was called "We are artists for a reason" and I did this talk, and basically, I was saying stop trying to figure out what the market wants or what Hollywood wants, screw it. Make something that impassions you. And I swear to God that there are people out there that will want to see it…because as long as we are trying to figure out what they want…and I know people that want to write TV shows and they study the TV shows because they are trying to figure it out and they need to have this element and they need to have someone killed, and someone sleeps with someone etc…

MV: Yes it is always these elements to fit this thing and of course, that’s what people are getting so tired of and then you show this thing, something that they’ve never seen before and they’re stunned. There are people that see this film that have never really thought of these ideas before and yet, except maybe as children, and they come out and I can’t tell you how many times there have been these people come up to me and say, "You know, long ago I thought these things and forgot about them and I’ve suddenly remembered that I used to think these ideas were common, nobody gave me permission to keep having these ideas and keep having these thoughts." And so people are so inspired because they suddenly feel like now they have courage to have these thoughts. They have the courage to challenge organized religion in their mind. They have the courage to challenge any idea in their mind because suddenly they see an idea they find so intoxicating; the idea that you can change the way you think, that there is a biochemical basis for changing that. That there is hope; it is something that is so sorely lacking in our world right now. They see this and they’re fired up. I mean so many people. You know your example of women who are drawing all over their bodies. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

MV: Yes that was cool! That was Will’s idea. He just loved that idea so much.

MV: That is so cool.

MV: I’m so happy and glad you said what you did Michele, because the truth is that as artists, we have to do what we do.

MV: Yes we die. We die of a broken heart. We die of the inability to express. And one of the things that I know about artists is that when an artist cannot express, they destroy themselves.

MV: Yes, we have to. It’s like if we don’t express, we implode, all that energy inside and that’s why, we know that there are artists who are truly F*&#@ up people, you know because they are not creating and doing what they have to do. I think that the solution for these artists is to just create.

MV: Yes I totally agree Michele.

MV: You got it. Yeah. Because the truth is, wouldn’t it be great if parents just said to their kids, "You just do what makes you happy."

MV: My Dad, when he knew I wanted to go into making movies, you know the entertainment industry, he said to me, "Mark you know there’s really no money in that, you know it’s really silly." And it was my Mom who said, "Whatever you want to do son.

You’re happy, Go for it." And then later on, my Dad was like, "You know, I get it now, I understand." You know and I’m so happy that, I mean he just said it that one time.

MV: No, he got it because he has such a tremendous sense of pride. Shortly before he died he saw a film I shot and he had such a tremendous sense of pride and he was so happy that I was doing what I loved to do. And that that sort of really made him happy that he saw that this is what truly, truly, satisfies my life.

MV: Oh yeah, it was really cool. I hope parents read your book. I would encourage them, to listen. I mean, I think that children when they’re born, that they have the compulsion to do something because they can do something. They need to do something and they need to be allowed to do it and they need to gain courage to do it and if it’s the wrong thing to do, and I don’t even know what the wrong thing is, I don’t even think that it exists, but let them get to the end of that journey and then they can decide if they want to take another one and another one and another one, but as long as it’s kept from them it becomes this unrequited love for that particular experience. It takes them down if they can’t have it. They have to have it. Parents don’t own their children. Parents are just taking care of them for a while.

MB: Exactly, that’s true. And as far as I’m concerned we’ve got to look even if it’s hard sometimes you have to look at your parents as the rocket ship you chose to come to this planet on.

MV: Exactly.

MV: Exactly. You know what I’m so grateful about Michele? I tell my Mom once a year every Mother’s day I say, "Thank you so much. Thank you for not getting rid of me. Thanks for having me. I really, really appreciate it."

MV: Listen, Michele what you’re doing sounds amazing. I did actually go to your Website.

MV: Great Michele I would love that thank you.

MV: And Michele, I think what you and Rock are doing is great. I’m very, very happy you’re doing it.

Mark's websites:   www.MarkVicente.com  and www.WhatTheBleep.com