IT’S THE SECOND PERIOD history class at Summerset high in Bellflower. The substitute teacher this morning, Dan Thompson, has just shown the shown the class a 30 minute segment from the ABC Civil War mini-series, "The Grey and the Blue." Now before the bell rings he is attempting to engage the dozen or so students in a discussion of the futility of war--which may be a losing battle itself. When Thompson asks the class if they liked the movie, one boy says, "Only the parts where people get blown up."

Thompson is undismayed. At 28, he's a big rugged guy, with a roughhewn cheekbones and the large knuckled hands of a professional quarterback. He's wearing a white sweat shirt, acid washed jeans and old leather sneakers. "Why do we fight wars?" he asks, sitting cross-legged on a table at the front of the classroom under a small American flag.

No one knows what to say at first. Summerset is a continuation school primarily for tough guys and pregnant girls and the origin of war is not a subject to which they've ever given any thought. Suddenly an exasperated voice from the back of the room blurts out "Disagreements, man."

This is Jason. He's a tall, dark-haired, handsomely baby- faced boy in a wool-lined denim jacket. "Like in the Middle East. Take Iraq and Iran having that war, not letting the ships go through and it's not even their water."

For Thompson, it's the first thoughtful response he's had all day. "Why are we in Nicaragua?" he asks. "If the Russians take over Nicaragua, they can put in nuclear missiles," says Jason. "Be here in five minutes instead of 30. Have us surrounded."

"Do you know how far we are from Russia?," counters Thompson, flipping open a map set to the Bering Straights. "Ninety miles."

"But why would someone want to nuc Alaska?" asks Jason. "There's nothing there to blow up."

"What about Seattle?"

"But that's a lot farther away."

"We keep nuclear subs there."

"They don't just sit there gathering dust," says Jason. "The Russians will target big cities like Los Angeles. And for that Nicaragua is a lot closer."

Besides, says Jason, "That place is no good. Just a bunch of diseased jungle. I wouldn't want that place if they gave it to me."

The bell ends any further discussion and, as the students file out, Thompson stops Jason to congratulate him on his familiarity with international issues. Jason is so pleased his face lights up like a liquor store marquee--all of which prompts Thompson to risk a little intimacy. "If you don't mind my asking, what did you do to get into trouble?" "It's really embarrassing," says Jason. "We threatened a teacher and blew up her car."


DAN THOMPSON never planned on being a schoolteacher. "I kept a journal since high school," says Thompson, "I wrote down all my goals. And one of my goals was to make a lot of money." Although he came from a working class family (his father was a carpenter from Bellflower), in high school he was, he says, a "bit of a prodigy," being class president and starting offensive lineman on the football team, earning a 3.8 GPA and acing out his SATs. Later, while in college at Whittier and Long Beach State, Thompson sold real estate for Coldwell Banker, which stood him in good stead when, after graduation in 1982, he applied for a brokerage job with Dean Whittier. "I had selling experience, which was just what they wanted." "Also," he says, "I got in at a good time. The market took off: 'Come along with me. We're going to make some money.'"

Thompson thrived on the thrill and excitement of his work, moving up quickly from Dean Witter, to Merrill Lynch and finally ending up at Kidder Peabody. But the pressure was intense. Only two of the 12 people who were hired with him lasted through the first year. Thompson worked seven days a week. He started work at 5 am. Sometimes he'd be so keyed up by the thrill and excitement he couldn't sleep the night before. He'd get out of bed, take a shower, put on a suit, drive to Century City and work all night. "I didn't drink before I was a stockbroker," says Thompson, "but now I started waking up with hang-overs and walking around the office wearing sun glasses all day."

Despite the professional image the company tried to cultivate, the brokers, says Thompson, were really just salesmen. "The company kept little graphs of the number of phone calls you made each day. And you had to generate a number of new accounts."

At other times, says Thompson, his supervisor would tell him to call up doctors or lawyers out of the blue and say, "The last time we talked, you told me to call back when I had a hot prospect. Well, I have something now I really think you'll be interested in." Of course, it was a fib. But the doctor or lawyer wouldn't know. They had people calling them all the time. They couldn't remember if they'd talked to Thompson or not. On some occasions, Thompson, "you'd be sitting in the bullpen. And a supervisor would come out, 'Hey, we have a special on XYZ stock. Let's sell it. You've got 2000 shares. We want to clean our inventories out.'" And then to make sure the brokers pushed the stock, he'd double their sales commission. Then to move the stock, says Thompson, the brokers were told to tell the clients that the stock had good "opportunities for growth. They don't come every day."

It wasn't that Thompson objected to a little salesmanship. It just seemed that there was something skewed in the system. It didn't seem to make any difference to the company if the clients made money or not. "That wasn't their big concern," says Thompson. What they really cared about were the brokers' commissions. And to spur their people to generate more of them they would post a monthly list ranking all the brokers in descending order of sales.

As for the clients, says Thompson, if they didn't spend enough, you dumped them for more wealthy ones. And this was another thing that bothered Thompson. Although you made the most money off the wealthy clients (``A trade of 100 shares takes as much time as doing 1000 shares''), the truth was, he didn't enjoy working with rich people. They were too greedy, says Thompson, and no matter what rate of return you got them, it was never good enough. In time, all the little compromises and deceptions began to wear Thompson down. His job didn't allow him to be himself. "I had to be an actor. I had to put myself on stage."

As a stock broker, Thompson was laboring right at the nerve center of capitalism and, he quickly discovered, compassion wasn't part of the job description. If the company wanted to fire someone, says Thompson, they never called you aside and said, "Look, I'm sorry, it's not working out." You'd just come back from lunch some day and your client book would be gone off your desk. "They fired one guy on his birthday. They fired another guy right before Christmas."

Not that the brokers were such innocents themselves. Thompson remembers one day in December of 1984 when T. Boone Pickins was attempting a hostile takeover of Phillips Petroleum. Thompson had put four clients into Phillips Petroleum options (short term speculative investments) a short while before. "And by Friday I was calling up my clients and telling them I've doubled their money." But then Sunday night, Thompson heard what to him was the stunningly unexpected news that Pickens had agreed to drop the hostile takeover. When the market opened Monday morning, Thompson was sitting in front of his terminal. Normally, says Thompson, you expect to see any given stock up or down an eighth of a point. But this time, Phillips opened down 10. "I turned white. My palms were sweating. I felt a wave of heat." In two minutes his four clients lost $60,000. But the worst part was the glee of the other brokers. They were so competitive. Every broker in the office came by to ask, 'Did you see what happened to Phillips," as if somehow he hadn't gotten around to checking the numbers himself.

"I was working on the 17th floor of a building at 1901 Avenue of the Stars (in Century City)." For a moment, says Thompson, he considered opening a window and stepping outside. Instead, he went in and told his manager, "I don't know what to do."

The manager's advice was succinct and unsentimental: "Get on the phone and get some new clients." Thompson considered quitting his job after that. The problem was, for someone who had grown up in a blue collar family in Bellflower, it paid an incredible amount of money--over $100,000 by the time he was 28, with the prospect in a few more years of seeing that double or quadruple. After moving over to Kidder Peabody, Thompson rented an apartment on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. "I had three cars," says Thompson, "an Alpha Romeo, Porsche Targa and Jeep Cherokee (that was for my dog)." He went shopping every day. He had crystal champagne glasses, two Rolex watches (one had a scratch so he used that for sports), 40 polo shirts and $1500 worth of Ralph Lauren sheets. "I was looking to buy a house on Balboa Island and going into partnership with someone on a boat."

His only problems were personal ones. Once when his girlfriend invited him to meet her parents, he spent the whole evening telling them about Rolex watches. On another occasion, they were riding in his Porsche when she tried to bring up the question of their relationship. Instead, he replied, "Isn't this a great car!" Then he downshifted and roared away into the night. After that, she broke off their relationship and moved to San Jose. To fill up the void she left, he bought a Springer Spaniel and named him Peabody (after Kidder Peabody).

The turning point in Thompson's life was 11 a.m., April 28th, 1986. His grandmother called him at the office to say that his father was hammering a nail at work when he suddenly kneeled over and died. Thompson was stunned and guilty. He'd been so busy making money in recent years he hadn't spent much time with his dad. At the time, he told himself it didn't matter. As soon as he got some breathing space, he'd take the whole family on vacation. Now it was too late.

Rather than give in to grief, Thompson decided to be strong. He arranged the funeral, wrote the inscription for his father's grave marker and then went back to work the next day. The following month, he made $13,000--the most money he'd ever made in a single month in his entire career. However, as Thompson discovered, when it came to matters of life and death money didn't matter anyway. "Your father separates you from eternity," he says. "When he's gone, you're right next door. All of a sudden, I felt mortal."

He started driving more cautiously, going to church every other day and developing a fear of flying. In the past when the pilot would announce that he was dropping down 10,000 feet to find smoother air, Thompson would just keep reading the magazine and not think anything of it. But now, he says, he found himself wondering whether they pilot was "just trying to make me feel comfortable my last few minutes alive."

By June, Thompson had come to a new realization. There were no guarantees in life. And whenever you put something off, you risked the possibility that you'd never get another chance. He walked into his boss's office and announced his resignation. "My boss was angry," says Thompson. "He said I was making a big mistake." Having worked seven days a week for the past six years, at first Thompson didn't know what to do with himself. He sold his Porsche and Alpha Romeo, gave up his apartment on Balboa Island and moved back home with his mother. He read "The Razor's Edge" by Summerset Maugham, joined a junior college tennis team and started writing a novel. To support himself, he got a job as a substitute teacher for $80/day. Finally, he called his old girlfriend. She was happy to see him. "Boy," she said, "you've changed."


"(In the Sixties) you were told you could have everything and you could achieve anything you want. What they didn't tell you was it wouldn't be enough to fulfill you."

IN "THE RECKONING,"David Halberstam's 1986 book on greed, incompetence and sycophancy in the American auto industry, Halberstam writes that one of the two best jobs for a young ambitious MBA at Ford Motor Company in the 60's was running the slide projector at executive meetings. This would allow him to get the latest news firsthand, meet all the top executives and make connections which could help the rest of his corporate career.

Of course, writes Halberstam, there was a downside too. "Once one of them put in a slide upside down and the fallout lasted for weeks. It was spoken of, not as a mistake, but as a potentially ruined career." Such absurdities are not peculiar only to Ford (which has since over- hauled its management style). "The real irony of the modern corporation," says behaviorist Peter Vaill of George Washington University's School of Government and Business Administration, "is that it rewards qualities that we regard as immature: materialism, superficiality, (the need for) attention, variety, excitement, a short term orientation, (a tendency to focus) on commercial as opposed to intrinsic values and to see human relationships exploitatively and people as only valuable for what you can get them to do." Everything, says Vaill, gets sacrificed to getting the job done at all costs. "You sacrifice your own body and soul to it, all your time and all your relationships. Human relationships are valuable only as they contribute to getting the job done and making you look good.

And the result is, you become very political--you become obsessed (with making sure) that people in positions of power know who you are and that you are getting the job done." Making matters worse, says psychologist Mike Driver of USC's Center For Effective Organizations, "a lot of work that people do is meaningless, especially in the legal and financial communities." People become paper warriors. They work 20 hour days preparing glossy bound reports full of tables and charts which are skim-read by perhaps 10 people and never referred to again. They graduate first in their class from high powered law schools and then spend all their time sifting boxes of dusty files or taking stultifyingly tedious depositions.

But it's not only lawyers and bankers with the meaningless jobs, says Vaill. "There are people out there making $80,000 a year for increasing the market share of Tiny Taters by 1/10th of 1% in the LA market." Furthermore, they can't imagine leaving--how would they live? "When you are trained as an economic analyst for market trends in the toy business and thinking about getting out of the rat race, it is not clear what you can do," says Vaill. "The work is extremely specialized. It's not even a craft. Your knowledge is the network of people who influence trends in the toy business. If you leave that network, you have nothing. "You can't take it to a church or Third World country. None of these skills would be of any value in the Peace Corps."

These people are artifacts of the post-industrial society. They can't leave. There's no place to go. And the result, says Vaill, "is that they become very tightly focused on the shallow short term--their perks, their salary, their job security and portfolios. "Disillusionment is the word I would use to describe these people. It is not turning out to be what they thought it would be.

Ever since WWII, we have been led to believe to believe that economic security and physical and psychological well-being would lead to serenity and happiness and what we are discovering is that they don't. It is entirely possible to be very unhappy on $500,000 a year. And the symptoms we see are sexual promiscuity, alcoholism. bankruptcy, crime, obesity, substance abuse and divorce."


"I don't want to spend my life helping someone make their catsup zestier."

ONE OF THE MOST disheartening things about the soul deadening effect of the corporate lifestyle is that no one is to blame. If that were it case, one could at least hope that something might be done about it. Instead it's a problem that is built into the heart of our economic system.

"One of the most influential forces in the market is the California State Employees Pension Fund," says UCLA professor Jack McDonough. The managers of this fund are measured quarterly or monthly. And the criteria by which they are judged is how much value they accrue to their stock portfolio. "What you have is some of the biggest money around making big bloc decisions on what to buy and what to sell on the basis of short term performance."

As a result, for CEOs of public traded corporations, "it's no longer okay just to operate in the black anymore. It's no longer okay just to show increasing rates of growth or profit over time. What you're competing on now is your ability to earn a return on every asset that you have.

"This is an incredible standard," says McDonough. "It just upped the ante. And it's put on a short term basis." If a company can't delivery increasing profits and high earnings, the mega-managers of the huge pension funds managers simply dump their stock. There is no appeal. And the only way for a manager to look good is to show results, what they call "deliverables."

"Even little differences in earnings can make huge differences in the value of the stock," says McDonough. "Talk to those guys in the bars and on the trains. Listen to them talk about the oppression that comes from having to meet the numbers. That is the (new) rallying cry of Corporate America--meet your numbers.

The consequence, says McDonough, is "a generation of people who are only willing to commit to those values and those activities that can be easily and visibly traced to their input." In the process, "any ability to derive meaning from relationships gets squashed. People become very materialistic. Everyone wants to get into big jobs, big money, Wall street, clothes and cars. All value is derived externally. People don't have a lot of lasting relationships. A job is nothing more than a contracted commitment. It's a free agent cult with no loyalty and no commitment."


"I really only enjoy my work one day out of eight."

MANY CAUSES HAVE BEEN IDENTIFED for the erosion of this country's traditional values, including the loss of religious faith, the ubiquitousness of television advertising, secular humanism, rampant capitalism and the cyclical nature of human history. But USC's Mike Driver blames it on something a lot less profound--corporate and governmental incompetence.

In the early seventies, he says, "a tremendous disillusionment" set in. "People became frightened. People began to worry about surviving, about making it." What was so startling was that the experience of this generation was so drastically different from that of their parents who in most instances had been born in the depression and grown up in WWII. It was literally a shell-shocked generation. But then to their astonished surprise, as one newspaper reporter recently put it, "their low expectations were gloriously overfulfilled by the great postwar prosperity."

On the other hand, for the tail end baby boomers, the people who are now in their late 20s to mid 30s, the situation is exactly the reverse. Growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, they had been conditioned to expect constantly rising living standards and permanently low unemployment. But in the early seventies, just when they were ready to go to work, everything fell apart: we lost our first war; a president resigned in disgrace; a nation which had an enduring love affair with the automobile (and often in the automobile) suddenly discovered it couldn't even afford to buy gas for automobiles anymore. Unemployment reached double digits, interest rates went soaring (and by the end of the decade would reach as high as as high as 18%). There were shortages of everything from plastic pipe to fertilizer.

For this generation, the post-war promise of an every-rising standard of living suddenly came to a screeching halt. According to a recent Congressional study, the average income of two child families doubled between 1949 and 1978 from $14,000 to $28,000. But since that time, says the study, the average income when adjusted for inflation has actually fallen to $26,400.

Whereas in the booming post WWII years, young workers could expect to see their real income more than double over a decade, in the last 10 years the real income of this generation's workers has gone up a mere 16%.

This in turn has had a sobering effect on the attitudes of college students. When UCLA professor of higher education, Alexander Astin, first began surveying college students in the late sixties (he's done 7 million over the last 22 years), their primary concern, says Austin, was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life--``Why am I here. What is my purpose in life. What am I in college for? What's it all about, Alphie?"

Nowadays, says Austin, by overwhelming majorities they simply want to be "rich and famous."

"These kids are extremely competitive," says UCLA's Jack McDonough. At recruiting time, some of the new MBAs will keep interviewing until they have 15 job offers--just as an ego trip. "After five you don't need any more for leverage. But it's like a fix. Money becomes the over-riding object." Or else they walk into an employer's office and ask, "How long will it take me to make CEO?"

"What they don't realize," says UCLA sociologist William Roy, "is that there is a price to materialism. In the long run, material things don't give you any ultimate meaning." Only relationships do that.

The problem is, says Peter Vaill, there are "millions of Americans whose only friends are those you have on the job. Then when you change jobs you leave those people behind."

But it's not just the lack of relationships. Ever since college, says Vaill, these people have been "working at 150% efficiency under conditions of extreme competitiveness. They have to pay so much attention their image they can't be offstage even for a minute." And when they do, they "they discover they are living someone else's life." The fact of the matter is, says Vaill, the fast track young professionals have "sacrificed honesty and personal development" for BWMs and high-fi VCRs. "As to whether or not that gets to you," says Vaill, "depends on how sensitive and thoughtful and psychologically mature you are."



"MY LIFE IS VERY LOW STRESS," Judy Rooney is saying as she stands in the galley of a 130 foot yacht ladeling out pea soup to the other members of ship's permanent crew. "All I own, are one pair of slacks, two jeans and these shorts" As she talks, overhead a dozen or so metal workers are hammering and welding as they remodel the superstructure and install a jaccuzzi on the flying bridge. Over the sink is a large picture window through which she can look out at the other yachts in San Diego's Mission Bay. And on the counter is a small color TV with built-in VCR for watching cooking class at sea. All this is quite a change for someone who, three years ago, was spending her entire salary on clothes.

At the time, Rooney was program director for an adult day care health clinic at Fresno's St. Agnes Hospital. "St. Agnes had a reputation for this polished professional look," says Rooney. "I wore designer clothes and high heels. I carried myself with authority and self-confidence. I thought people would respect me more. In truth, I was constantly broke. I was working so I could afford to buy clothes so I could continue to work."

What was worse, she didn't even like her work--running a physical education and socialization program for 40 elderly day patients who couldn't walk or hear or were senile. The problem, she says, was that they were trying to do too much with too little money and not enough staff. "We had resources to handle 25 patients." But since the clinic was required to pay it's own way, they had to care for 40 patients a day. The work was both physically and psychologically deadening. "Before I took this job I had only gone to one funeral my entire life. At St. Agnes, I went to 20. There was tremendous turnover, lots of burnout, an avalanche of paper work. It was a constant battle to meet deadlines."

Just to fill out a Medi-Cal form and get it approved took seven people, including a doctor. And even with that it was only good for three months. "We only had one bathroom, which was awful since half the people needed assistance. The whole time I worked there I didn't have an office. I put my desk in the corner of the room and learned to tune out interruptions."

Despite the demands of her job, Rooney never considered quitting. "I was doing what I thought people were supposed to do. During the week, I worked 10 to 12 hours a day. Then on weekends I went to health fairs to let people know we existed so they would use us as a resource. I was on the board of directors of the YWCA, I worked on campaigns of people running for Supervisor and District Attorney. I didn't even enjoy volunteering. It just seemed the thing to do."

In fact, says Rooney, she was so used to living up to other people's expectations she didn't always ask herself what made her happy, what would give meaning to her life? In those days, Rooney lived in a large house in Fresno with two other single young professionals. "When everyone was home," she says, "we had a Mercedes, Corvette and BMW parked in the driveway." "I used to admire people who had BWMs. I thought that I could get a BMW I wouldn't have any limits. I could set my sights on anything."

And in fact, she says, it seemed to be working. "I knew the right people. I wore the right clothes. I worked at the right hospital. I gave money to public radio. I bought tickets to the symphony and went to other people's fund-raisers so they would come to ours."

The problem, says Rooney, was that most of the time she was absolutely miserable. "Sunday afternoon, I used to get nervous. My mind would be racing. All my life I've suffered from insomnia. When I went to work I had a sense of fatigue. I couldn't remember when I wasn't tired. I had a constant pain in my stomach." The only thing she liked about her job was the fact that at 7:30 am, half hour before work, she would stop in a little cafe to get her morning cappuccino. "It was the most rewarding part of the day," says Rooney. Four or five other working women came every day. "We shared ideas and feelings. The communion I had with those people every day held a lot more meaning than my job."

Furthermore, they all felt the same way--``they wanted to escape. But what were the alternatives?"

In 1983 her own mother died of lung cancer. At the time, Rooney was finishing up a master's degree in organizational development and human resources at the Fresno branch of San Francisco State. She knew her mother was ill but Rooney was too busy with her thesis to take off time to visit. Her death really "took the starch out of me," says Rooney. "I didn't expect to miss her as much as I did." And what made it all the sadder to Rooney was the knowledge that her mother had never led her own life. She was too "acquiescent." Although she always wanted to live in California, where her family was, she lived in Seattle instead. The lessons of her mother's life made Rooney begin to rethink her own. And she came to some sobering realizations. "Life is a terrible trap. You have a beginning and an end and that's all we have. You have all this sensation and at the end is a brick wall."

A year later in the fall of 1984, Rooney was washing herself in the shower one morning, she says, and all of a sudden she had the oddest feeling. "I found myself wondering, 'Who is doing this?' It was so automatic. I felt like a automaton." That was it, Rooney decided. She definitely needed a change. She would take some time off, fly to Paris and try to get some perspective on her life. In order to finance the trip, she gave up her house and rented a single room from a postal clerk. "Towards the end," he says, "I didn't want any distractions. I didn't date. I got rid of most of my possessions. I slept on a mattress on the floor. I had a small TV. I read three novels a week. I sold my car and rode a bike to work." She set aside five changes of clothes and gave everything else to the WMCA. "It was embarrassing how many clothes I took in," she says, but it "felt wonderful. I enjoyed giving them away as much as I did buying them."

In Paris Rooney made her way to the Arab quarter where she rented a room in the Hotel Atlas, a rickety but friendly little pie-shaped hotel with odd- shaped rooms and the shower down the hall. "The other guests were Algerians and people from North Africa. The owner had been in the French Foreign Legion. Communication on any deep level was impossible." For the first time in her life, says Rooney, she made her own decision on how to use her time. "Up till then my routines had always been made by other people. I felt really disconnected and alone. It was very intense. I felt totally distanced from everything familiar. I kept a journal about the things I thought about. Even then I found it difficult to be honest. It was if I was writing for other people to read. I found I was glossing things over, making things better. Finally, I began to realize I had glossed over a lot of things in my life."

Traveling through the Italian Riviera on a train, Rooney met another American, a hospital administrator, as it turned out. "We began talking about hospitals," says Rooney. "And I got a pain in my side all over again." For Rooney, the train ride was a real revelation. Looking out at the countryside, she realized, filled her up, unlike her job, which only took something out of her. "Once I was distanced from my old life, I began to see what kind of things really appealed to me." And what she realized, she says, is that what she really wanted was a much more simple life."

But what really drove it home was her first day back at St. Agnes. "I went to work full of life." For the first time, she realized how tired and cynical the other people at the clinic were. "I realized that if I didn't take action right then, everything I had gained would recede and I'd be the same old person." That afternoon she told her boss, "I already know I won't be staying." Eight months later, Rooney retired from the hospital for good and moved to San Diego. One weekend her brother took her wind surfing in Palm Springs where she met a woman ship captain. "Her boyfriend was a shipwright," says Rooney. "They were the happiest, self-satisfied people I never met." At the time, says Rooney, the ship captain's boat was in overhaul. "She need a cook to cook lunch for the crew they wouldn't go off and drink beer and waste the rest of the day." Rooney loved working as a ship's cook. "That part of the day was so much fun and enlivening." Later, she got another position on another boat and fell in love with the captain. "He seemed like the nicest person I'd ever met-- playful and humorous. We've been together 24 hours a day for 2 years."

Now says, Rooney she can't imagine how she could be happier. "I like the simplicity." The other three crew members seem like family to her. They don't see the yacht owner for months on end. And in any case, she says, "the wealth and eccentricities of people who own yachts doesn't seem to filter down." Rooney doesn't worry about owning things any more. Instead of a yellow BMW, she now has a yellow mountain bike. "I save my entire salary. My only expenses are toothpaste, shampoo and an occasional dinner out. Everything else provided. The only bills I get are the remainder of a small student loan for my masters degree and $260 a year for car insurance."

She loves being at sea. "We forget about the problems of the world--we let them go their own way and we go ours." The best part, she says, is falling asleep to the sound of the engines. When she lived in a house she didn't like cleaning up and otherwise taking care of the place. "But it isn't a chore to take care of the mothership. I do it with a certain joy." "People tell me they couldn't do what I do because they need to have roots," says Rooney. "But the concept that a house and a mortgage gives you roots is an illusion. We live on the earth. Those are our roots."