Morning everyone. My name is Jay Stennet and I'm an alcoholic. And God's doing for me what I couldn't do for myself because it's 10:30 on a Sunday morning and I haven't had anything to drink yet, which for an alcoholic of my variety is a really amazing occurrence because, see, I'm a morning drinker. I love to drink in the morning. I'd like to thank my friend Chuck and the committee for being so kind to my family. I got to bring my fabulous wife, Adele, with me, and it's always great to get the wife in another area code. So, thanks for the excuse.

And then also my AA family, to be able to be here with Bill and Will and Phil. We're all ill. [laughter] But to have the opportunity to reflect and write and pray and meditate over the thing that I think is the most wonderful topic there is, which is sponsorship. Now, for those of you who are new with us, my purpose here this morning is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. [laughter] And it's my most fervent prayer that something I say will either excite you or offend you so much that you will go out and have a cup of coffee and have a real discussion about this thing that we call Alcoholics Anonymous.

In our book—this is the fourth edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous—and if you don't have a copy, I'd suggest that you get it. One of the things that was really important to me when I got sober was that there were men and women who were referring to this literature. I got sober on the second day of May in 1979, and although I found it necessary on a lot of occasions, I haven't taken the front drink, sniffed any glue, or done any of those other things that I found to be so consoling.

At that time, the third edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous had only been out for about two and a half years. And there wasn't anybody talking to me about the stories being better in their big book or referring to pagination that wasn't in the book that was given to me—the third edition. So if you don't have this book, get it.

Is there anybody here who is fortunate enough to sleep with another person in a twelve-step program? Yeah. If you want to have some real fun, take the new stories in here and try reading them aloud to each other at night. It's a nice way to build an AA home.

There is a solution. It says here: Each individual in the personal stories describes in his own language and from his own point of view the way he established his relationship with God. That's my purpose this morning. The way that I got that relationship with the power greater than myself was through sponsorship.

Have you ever had this happen to you? They look at you and they say, "No drinking at work." Okay. Now, I don't know about you, but I hate to pay retail, so I like to tend preferably during the day so I'm available for the evening's activities. And so when they say that to me, I say, "Okay, I won't have anything to drink."

And this particular story happened. Anybody know the J&M in Pioneer Square? Yeah. I was one of the four people that helped start Fat Tuesday. If I helped any of you get here quicker, I'd like to say you're welcome. Anyway, I was working at the Germ, and they said no drinking at work and don't have anything to drink before you come to work. So I got off work at 6:00 and go have a few pops with the guys. Then you get home early. Everybody in this room knows what getting home early is, right? If I'm through the door at 1:30 a.m., I'm home early. If I'm through the door before last call, it's early.

And so I go and I lay my head down and sleep for a little while and wake up about 3:30 in the morning because the depressing alcohol has washed through my body enough that I pop up. But fortunately, in those days, I had good sponsorship. Somebody told me, "You know, if you've actually got a bed, it's good to keep a cold one next to it so that when you pop up, you can just crack the beer, drink it down, settle down enough so you can get another two or three hours of rest in the body." No problem.

And then I wake up about 5:30 and I start to get ready to get to work at 10:00. Now, the way that you do that is right—you have a couple of beers because as you guys all know, beer is not drinking, right? It's a food. [laughter] You know, people who tell you that drinking beer is drinking, they're the same people who will try to tell you that smoking marijuana is doing drugs. It's what you do in between doing drugs, right?

So anyway, I get myself prepared for work. And I got to get on the bus, right? And you guys all know why I'm a big fan of public transportation in those days because I can't afford to drive because of all the driving under the influences I've gotten—the high insurance. So I got to go downtown because the only kind of bar that's going to hire me is downtown. And I go sliding down into Pioneer Square. Then I stop and I have another couple of beers on the way in.

And they look at me. I come into work and my tongue is just a little thick. And they look at you and they go, "What the hell is wrong with you? Didn't we just talk about this yesterday? Yesterday you said that you weren't going to have anything to drink before you came to work." And I look him dead in the eye and I say, "I haven't been drinking because I hadn't. I just had a few beers."

My alcoholic life is the only one that I knew. I lived in complete and total fantasy. And I had no idea that that's what the reality of my life was. I didn't know that I'm an alcoholic. And the best description I've ever heard is the Chinese proverb: The man takes a drink and then the drink takes a drink and then the drink takes the man. One's too many and a thousand's not enough.

I was born in El Segundo, California, which if you need a reason to drink is as good as any. It's kind of like a Baja Tacoma. On one side of the town is the Los Angeles International Airport. On the other side is the Northrop Defense Contractor. On another side is the Chevron Oil Refinery, once the town got its name. And then on the little patch of beach between the town of El Segundo and the Pacific Ocean is the waste treatment plant for the entire county of Los Angeles. So toxicity is just a way of life. You want to get right with your environment.

And I was born into this household to a father that looked good and moved fast, and a mother who needed a drink really badly and never took it. So it got really quick around there, you know? And you know, alcoholism doesn't run in my family—it gallops. [laughter] I had no idea. I had no idea.

So that's how I qualify for Alcoholics Anonymous. I want to spend this time talking about sponsorship. We've—if you're in this room, you know that if I'm lame enough to be dressed up like this at this hour of the morning on a Sunday, I probably had a few drinks.

And I'll tell you one more little thing. If you're wondering whether you're alcoholic or not—whether you have this physical allergy, this obsession of the mind, and this spiritual malady—take what it is that you do for recreation and then match it what happens with 90% of the population, the non-alcoholics.

Example: By the time I'm 16 years old, my idea of a good time is to take a rack of reds—three high-powered sedative-hypnotics, Seconal—and to wash it down with a quart of Spinada wine. Okay? In 90% of the population, the part that is not alcoholic, these people that don't have this physical allergy that I have, when they do that, what happens is called synergistic effect. The sedative-hypnotic mixed with the alcohol starts to get the brain so loaded that many times people forget how to breathe and they throw up and then they choke on their vomit. Jimi Hendrix died that way. A bunch of different—they call it Hollywood death. Okay? With me, when I do that, I'm looking for car keys and to make short-term romantic commitments. [laughter]

If you ever woke up with a life form with which you were unfamiliar before you left the house that morning, you might want to try Alcoholics Anonymous.

So on the second day of May, I was living in my Pinto. [laughter] I wasn't homeless. It was just my outdoorsman phase. [laughter] And I'd reached the point where I drank away my soul. You know how you're like an alcoholic's like a cat. If it gets sick, just kind of goes away and hides. And I was just driving from place to place and stealing gasoline and drinking. And I got arrested one more time and my father was kind enough to bail me out.

And we were sitting in a Marriott in Santa Clara, California having a couple vodka rocks, and he said to me, "Do you think you have the disease?" And the still small voice inside of me said, "Pay really close attention. He might pay for the lawyer." And so I said, "I don't know." And he said, "Well, you can go down to my mother's house. She lived in El Segundo. And you can stay there and I want you to call this friend of mine."

So I didn't have any other plans. He gave me some money. He said, "Don't have anything to drink." So I bought a couple tall six-packs of Coors for the drive. And it took me about four years sober to be able to use both hands when I drove because I always had to have something, you know?

But anyway, I went down to my grandmother's house and I gave this guy a call and he said, "Meet me at the Howard Johnson's in Culver City, 7:30 in the morning. Don't have anything to drink. How did he know?

So I went and I talked to this guy. Actually, I sat at the table and he started talking about himself and talking about himself and talking about himself. And after about, you know, he had some problems in his life. He met Alcoholics Anonymous and things got all better and he's talking about himself and talking about himself. And I need a drink really badly and I can barely light a cigarette.

So I figure out, well, I'll prompt him. I say, "Do I need psychiatric treatment? How about religion? Do I require hospitalization?" And he looked at me and he said, "Well, Trick, if you a hospital program will cost about three grand. If you can get your hands on three grand, go out and drink that money up and when you're done, call Alcoholics Anonymous. They do it for fun and for free."

Now, I don't know about you, but I'd had a lot of helpers in my life trying to move me in the proper direction, but I'd never run across anybody that said out loud what you do: if you can get your hands on three grand, of course you go out and drink it up and then you plan your next move, right?

And he said, "You'll find it in the white pages of the phone book. Call them up. See you later."

And I went back to my grandmother's. I was so profoundly affected by this conversation that I poured myself a water glass full of Davis County Old-Fashioned Kentucky bourbon with three ice cubes. And as I was drinking it down, I called Alcoholics Anonymous.

And this woman answered the phone. She said, "Alcoholics Anonymous. May we help you?" She said, "Uh, don't go anywhere. I'll have somebody call you in 20 minutes."

The guy called me. He said, "Hi, my name's Larry and I'm an alcoholic. Are you willing to go to any lengths to stop drinking?"

Well, I'd finished most of my drink, so I was in a fairly agreeable mood. And he said, "Do you have a car?" I said, "Yeah." I didn't tell him I'd been living in it. And he told me where the Alano Club was. I went down to the Alano Club and I walked in the door. The woman behind the bar, Eunyce, said, "You upstairs." And I walked up these twelve steps into this room of Alcoholics Anonymous and everybody started talking at me.

I couldn't figure out why they were talking at me. But when my hair is long, I kind of look like the Sphinx. [laughter] And I hadn't had quite enough to drink. So I'm starting to get the zips ups. And this guy—Butcher Joe—was the third guy who shared. "They're all talking at me." And you can always tell Butcher Joe, right?

And Joe looked right at me and he talked about when the family left, how he cried the big crocodile tears. And inside he's going, "Yes, now we can drink and nobody will mess with us." And I understood that. And he knew just how much to cut himself at work so that he could get away, go get a stitch or two, and that he could drink.

And he told me that I never had to feel the same way that I felt about myself at that moment ever again if I was willing to do the things that he'd done. And I was willing. I was willing. I drank away my soul. I hit it up in Alcoholics Anonymous, the lamest place in the world. And I figured I got a moment of grace and I figured that I'd just do this thing.

Now, on my third day, I almost drank and I went back to the Alano Club and Larry was working the hinge. And he got me a copy of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous. I'd been too cool to get it the first couple of days. I was busy. Didn't want to look like an obvious rookie. Lacking on my little book, you know? Are you going to book study down at the beach?

And he got me the book and I went home and I wasn't sleeping in those days. And they told me at that first meeting that this was the last time that I ever had to withdraw from alcohol. I couldn't believe it. But yet it was so ridiculous. I said, "What the heck?"

And so I'm walking and sweating and smoking and reading this book. And I was reading through the Doctor's Opinion where Silk Work talks about the sense of ease and comfort that comes from taking a few drinks. I understood that and I kept reading. And you know, I was really fascinated with the stock market crash and the first world war. I mean, give me something contemporary. Give me something disco. [laughter]

Can you imagine how awful it was getting sober wearing those clothes? That gear's enough to make anybody drink. There were meetings—in fact, Clara may have even been secretary one—where you needed three gold chains just to get in the door, right? [laughter] Oh man, that was a funny time.

Anyway, so I kept reading this book. And I got to that point in "We Agnostics" where it tells a story about this preacher's son and about how he got down on his knees and how he had this profound experience. And in there there's a line and it says, "Who are you to say that there is no God?" In religious terms, I was convicted. [laughter] Because I may not espouse that. Well, I did espouse it a lot actually. And I certainly lived that way.

So I did what this guy did. I got down on my knees and I said my prayer. My prayer was: I don't know from Jesus or Buddha, the Talmud, the Upanishads—just get me on top. And I said, I will do whatever these dried-up old geeks say to do. Just please help me not to drink.

And I believe at that moment I'd done the first three steps. I said it with all the sincerity of my heart. And that prayer was perfect. I'm here with you this morning not drinking.

So I went to the club the next morning. Believe it or not, God had not created morning meetings yet. So you had to wait outside the door of the Alano Club at 9:00 for them to open for the noon meeting. It was kind of a zombie walk. And I went up into the room to wait for the meeting and there was this woman sitting there and she had on a black dress and her hair in a bun and correct shoes on.

She said, "Oh, young man, you're new, aren't you? How can you tell?" [laughter] She said, "I can tell you the secret of Alcoholics Anonymous in four words. What are they?" [laughter]

"Find God or die?"

No, not that. No.

And 26 years later, I can tell you the secret of Alcoholics Anonymous in four words: Find God or die.

But the great thing is that we're Alcoholics Anonymous. And we will never suppose to tell you what kind of God it is that you have to find. But you have to find one. You can use the group. Works really, really well. Worked really well for me in the beginning. You can use your sponsor or you can use your friends. But at some point you're going to have to find your own.

And how do you do that? Well, what we have is we have a set of spiritual exercises which when done actually produce a relationship with a power that will solve your problem. Now, if you only agree with it, I'm not sure about that—you'd not drink, but you don't get this regeneration that happened with me.

And how is this transferred? How is this knowledge transferred one person to another?

So I'm sitting in this meeting. When I came to AA, my entire wardrobe was I had a good t-shirt, a bad t-shirt, a pair of Levis, and some bowling shoes. I'm the reason you have to give them in order to get them. You know, I said, "Size eight and a half, please." And I boogied with the shoes. And I stuck to the Naugahyde. Why is it they have Naugahyde in the Alano Club? You're just stuck to it. And this guy got up and he took a birthday cake for four years. So I asked him to be my sponsor.

And I will never ever be able to repay the kindness of that man and his Alanon wife and what it is that they did for me because I was a real alcoholic and I was baffled about how to get through a day without drinking. I was obsessed with drinking. Every third thought was: I got to get a drink. No, we're not drinking right now. Oh, no. Okay.

And I'd just show up on the porch and he'd still be at work and Bonnie'd let me in and make some coffee and talk to me while I smoked cigarettes. And you know, that kindness—when I was 22 days sober—when I was reading in the big book and it said that if you don't do your inventory you're going to drink, I ran to my sponsor. I said, "I got to do my inventory. I don't want to drink." He said, "Fine."

And he and a buddy of his who had a long time sat there and told me silly stories about, you know, mammals and non-mammals and things that they'd stolen and things that they wanted to steal and things that they were afraid of.

And my sponsor said, "Okay, here's the fourth-step prayer. What you do is go get really jacked up on coffee. Sit down at the kitchen table and look at the door. Here's the prayer. Write it down: God, I don't know what I'm doing. Help me, please."

And then he said, "I want you to think of every place that you lived and every job that you had and every group that you ran with. And if as people from these different phases of your life walk through the door, if your stomach goes like that, write their name down. And then you get three sentences on why nobody's life is that interesting."

And I did that. And then he said, "Write the sexual weirdness. Write who you hate and who you're afraid of." And he said, "And then we'll talk tomorrow."

It took me about four hours. It was fairly long—maybe five pages legal. And I write big because I shake a lot. And I got it done.

Was it a fearless and thorough moral inventory using all four columns? No. It was the greatest hits. [laughter] You know, it was the stuff that when my head goes down on the pillow, it always popped up. And I got it out of my head and onto the paper.

And my sponsor came and we sat down. We read the stuff and I said the stupid prayers and then we burned it.

And I'm 23 days sober and I'm a fully vested member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've done some stuff. I'm not just sitting in a chair agreeing with it.

Now, this is the program of recovery that in those days was what we were doing. There wasn't a lot of books. There wasn't a lot of book studying going on because the telephone was ringing at the Alano Club, you know? And I had a car and they'd say, "Don't talk to him. Go pick him up and bring him back. We'll take care of it from there, you know?"

And I got out and I started making my amends. And I went to my grandmother Alice, who used to have the Oxbow in down on East Marginal there next to Boeing Field. And she taught me how to tend bar. I owed her just a little money. And I said, "Grandmother, I've stolen this money from you and I'm sorry. God and AA are keeping me sober. Please forgive me. Here's some of the money."

And she said, "What'd you say?" I said, "God and AA are keeping me sober. Here's some money." And she goes, "Thanks." And then she got her purse and her hat and she starts moving for the door.

"Where are you going?" She said, "Um, about five years ago, you and I had a conversation where you said you didn't believe in God anymore. So I went down and I put your name on a list down at the church and me and the girls have been praying for you. And I get to go down and report that my grandson has been restored."

Spiritual terrorism. [laughter] It works really, really well.

In 1985, my then wife Jacqueline got sober and it was a wonderful occurrence in my life. And we picked three people: her best childhood friend, our friend Jeanie, who was working as a cocktail waitress at a saloon that we were working in, and then my sister Regina, who was missing in action with her self-employed Colombian boyfriend. And we prayed for him at every meeting we went to in the moment of meditation afterwards.

Within a year and a half, all three of them got sober. All three of them picked up birthday cakes. And after that, one of them—the girl who got sober in the treatment center—decided that she'd made a mistake. She'd made too much of this. But Jeanie and my sister Regina have not had a drink since Alcoholics Anonymous. It works. It really, really works.

I'll give you Spiritual Terrorism 101. Because you all know somebody who's really bad. Like you may be in here just getting the heat off, being good for a little while, but you know somebody's got a real problem. You know the one you're always looking down at. If I ever get that bad, and then a year later he's worse. [laughter] So you got a ways to go still.

When you walk into a meeting place and you see an empty chair, just walk up and tap the chair and say their name. I believe that person may be sent to the meeting. That may be somebody that I work with that saves my life.

So Michael and I, you know, in those days, we were just running around grabbing drunks, going to coffee. It was a whole different society. The downsizing hadn't happened. The treatment centers hadn't funneled a lot of people in. We were busy. Phone was ringing off the hook.

And you know, that's the way we became members of Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, Clara described it so well yesterday that it was in the seeing ourselves in the suffering of another that we got a clue of who we were.

And then this is an opinion: But then when this treatment center started sending lots of people in, what happened is that the activity got different and we had lots of people who were coming into Alcoholics Anonymous with information that they'd gotten from well-meaning professional people. And one of the great things that happened is that Alcoholics Anonymous stayed Alcoholics Anonymous because there were some really, really well-meaning, well-intentioned, brilliant people that wanted us to be all things to all people. And what happened is that those of us who were here went back to the literature and we got in this process of working with people reading out of the book.

Now, most folks in those days, that was not going on. It was not part of the culture in Los Angeles that I know of. And most of the people that were sober in those days, they were not reading the book one-on-one with people. And I didn't know about that. I didn't know how I started doing that.

The way I started doing that was I had this sponsor by the name of Fred. Mike had left town and I had the sponsor Fred Ellison. Fred was one of the great members of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was a tremendous man. In fact, what I did is I thought about it for a while and I just went and I asked the man that I admired most in Alcoholics Anonymous to be my sponsor. And he was a busy guy. And he said, "You may not be able to get me whenever you want me, but he said, "If you ever need me, you will always be able to get me."

And anyway, so I'm going along working with Fred. And you know, it's all about, you know, guys like you don't sign up any speaker lists because he knew who I was. See, I didn't get to do this kind of thing until I didn't have anything to say.

And anyway, one day—this was the mid-80s—my then wife had gotten sober. So I'm back to going to seven meetings a week and I'm secretary of the speaker meeting. You know, the people that are the best sponsors in the world are the ones between three and eight years sober because they know everything and they're willing to tell you for hours on end. You know, get a sponsor who still smokes. You know, they really know the truth. [laughter]

Anyway, so I had a job, a traveling sales job, and I'm busy. I'm busy. And during that time, there were a few guys that came to me and asked me to sponsor them. And there was this one guy that came up and he was shuffling like this and his glasses hadn't been cleaned in about seven weeks and he'd just gotten out of the Twin Towers—the county jail down in Los Angeles. And he was just really unsettled on his pins. And he asked me to be his sponsor and I took one look at him and I said, "You know, I'm really busy in AA and why don't we get together tomorrow and we'll go to the Hermosa Beach men's stag Monday night and I'll introduce you to some guys who can save your life."

And I was not used to standing up for myself. I wasn't used to giving myself care. So I called to report to my sponsor about how much I'd evolved spiritually, [laughter] the insights that I'd had about myself, my quest to find balance in my life.

And he said, "You did what?" He said, "You go and you find that man and you ask him if you can please have the honor of sharing with him what has been so freely given to you."

Did I say no to you? Click. Fred had been a Marine and he'd been a numbers runner for the mob in Los Angeles while suffering from blackouts. [laughter] He didn't want him mad.

And so I went and I found Kevin. And Kevin had left school in fifth grade and Kevin couldn't read. And so that's where I started reading aloud with guys because every time Kevin came over and we read together I got a lot out of what was going on. [laughter]

You know, before that I'd had guys reading and then just: Are you reading the big book? Oh yeah, I'm reading the big book. Ready to do the third step? Oh, well, you know, are you working on your inventory? Yeah, I'm working on me.

Now I started formatting a little bit. And then what I did is because I wanted to grow in effectiveness, I started sponsoring people when I had like 29 days sober. A guy walked up to me and asked me to sponsor him. I went to my sponsor. I said, "What should I do?" He said, "If they're sick enough to ask you, you have to say yes." [laughter] Hopefully, you're the lower rung on the ladder. [laughter] Help him up.

Okay. And but what had happened? See, I'm an alcoholic and I'm afraid that I'm not going to drink and I'm obsessed with alcohol when I'm new. And every time my sponsor would say to me that he thought he might be someplace, I was there. I never missed an appointment with him. I never missed having Friday dinner with him and his wife where we'd sit around and talk about sobriety and they'd all laugh at me. She and her Alanon friends.

And Bonnie Bergman died of cancer a long time ago.

And anyway, so I took out great men—Jack Pross, Ken O'Brien, Fred Ellis, Vern Stamps—and I asked each of these men what their sponsors did with them. And I took a pad and a piece of paper and I said, "Then what do you do with the guys that they sponsor?" And they were, you know, when you ask people you admire what they do, they love to talk about themselves, especially if you're buying lunch. Buy people you admire lunch.

If you're secretary of a speaker meeting, you want to make AA a wonderful place to be. Ask the speakers if they'd like to come and join you for dinner before the meeting. You know, because they all need to get a bite to eat. But what happens is that's how I got close to Clara, you know. It was, you know, that's what I was taught in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I know all these wonderful people just because somebody said, "Hey, I didn't know how to answer the telephone until I was 35 years old. I'm sober 11 years."

And I called Dr. Paul up and I said, "Hey." I call Paul up and he picks the phone up and he says, "Hi, this is Paul. How may I help you?" Any conversation that I get to have with a person, I try and remember always to say, "Is there something I can do for you?" It's amazing what people will tell you. Just paying attention.

So I got this stuff and I started working. I mixed some stuff around and I came up with a format that kind of worked for me. And it changes over time because this thing about passing the information on is a wonderful thing. But this one-on-one working the steps with people is a great thing. It's a great, great thing.

Fred died of cancer in 1987. What am I going to do? I've had one of the great men. And so when he'd been diagnosed again, I came up with the sponsor prayer. Here's the find-the-sponsor prayer: God, if there be a God—if you want that, you can put that part in—um, help me to recognize the person when they come through the door.

And I was sitting at a meeting and there was this guy who got up and he started spouting this hardline big book stuff. And I thought Fred wasn't dead yet and I thought, "Oh, I should talk to that guy." And then of course I forgot about it. But a few months after Fred passed, I kept saying that prayer. And this man was at the meeting and I went, "Oh."

And then I went and asked him to lunch and I sat down to kind of interview him a little bit and found out that in every area of my life there was something that he had experience in. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing.

It's a wonderful thing to have an AA home. The most important job in the world, aside, of course, from the GSR. The most important job in Alcoholics Anonymous is actually the sponsor's wife. [laughter] She's a counter-intelligence agent and a great source of information.

When I was courting my wife, I said to her, "I need your help." When I was courting Adele, I said, "I need your help. Will you help my friends who have no skills at all? Will you help them to get into nice, wonderful, loving relationships?" And she said, "Yes."

And our home is a source of nurturing for men and women that are on the path, learning to share, wanting to share their lives with another human being. And it's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Newcomers come first in our house. It doesn't matter when the phone rings. It's no big deal. It's just God on the phone. Anyway, that's one of the things Fred told me.

Well, I'm sponsoring a lot of people. He said, "No, you're not." He said, "Never count the number of people you sponsor. Don't know. You're just sponsoring the next person that's on the telephone." So I got no responsibility. I just answer the phone.

So this household that we have is a wonderful thing. You know, there's these disparaging remarks about, "Oh, I'm not going to date a woman in the program" or "AA men are all a bunch of pigs." Okay. [laughter]

But you know, see, if Alcoholics Anonymous is the first thing in my life, how the if I'm out shopping for a mate, why am I not going to get somebody that is on this path? They don't have to be AA, but Alanon or OA. I had an old-timer tell me one time, look me dead in the eye and say, "Women who are in the program, in recovery, in the program of Overeaters Anonymous are the greatest lovers in the world because they have to work the program harder than anyone because they walk the tiger every day."

And I got one. I got mine. And you know, I mean, what is the line about dating in Alcoholics Anonymous? The odds are good, but the goods are odd. [laughter]

But can you imagine a guy like me trying to represent that I don't have any problems to anyone? [laughter] I mean, if a woman finds me attractive