Nick Roses.
Has there ever been a more perfect name for a Hollywood talent manager? It’s so perfect that one might wonder whether the guy had turned his lemon of a real name into lemonade, as per Hollywood tradition—the way Irving Lazar became Swifty Lazar and Sam Goldfish became Samuel Goldwyn. But damned if his birth certificate doesn’t read “Nicholas Tomas Roses.” The name of his hometown in Florida? Hollywood. Some guys are just naturals.
Last year, Roses started his own company, Total Talent Management, where he handles the careers of 50-odd actors. It’s a manager’s job to arrange auditions, shape a client’s career path, and generally do whatever he can to get the clients jobs. If you fail to see a distinction between a manager and an agent, that’s because there barely is one.
Roses’s business is a bit more specialized, in that most of his clients are between the ages of 6 and 17. He is among the subset of managers who focus on what Hollywood calls “young performers” and everyone else calls “kids.” The child-rep business, once largely ignored by the biggest agencies and management companies, is booming like never before. The onslaught of kid-friendly cable TV networks (Nickelodeon, Disney Channel), coupled with the rise of TV talent competitions, puts every child just one audition away from becoming the next Miley Cyrus or Zac Efron. This makes for a motivated client base.
Roses has been in the management game since 2002. Which isn’t all that noteworthy until you discover he was born in 1989. Which means Roses was younger than some of his clients. And he looks the part. At work, he favors cuffed gray jeans and a formfitting T-shirt, and he tends to tug and flip his shaggy blond hair. To visit him in his office in Burbank is to find a flaxen-haired cherub surrounded by big gym balls (for exercise) and little squeak-toys (for the office dog). But he talks the talk, albeit in the voice of his generation. He says, “What I think is funny is that a lot of people are like, ‘Here’s this kid who hasn’t paid his dues.’ Like, ‘Who does he think he is?’ But I’ve been doing this since I’m 12 years old!” He tugs his hair in mock frustration. “You know what I mean? I have 110 percent worked the mailroom bullshit. I’ve done all that. I might not have done it at William Morris. But I did it. And I did it way earlier.”
Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses “Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.” Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional youthful indiscretion or a shark-eyed huckster with the face of a Mouseketeer. Or both.
Roses’s status as a communal lightning rod began in April, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged him with seven counts of, in essence, criminal Hollywood skulduggery. Parents of children that Roses represented complained that he, among other things, baited them into moving to Los Angeles and becoming clients at a poorly run management company which bilked them out of money. In July, the case was settled when he pleaded no contest to violating a new law prohibiting managers from charging fees to clients for the promise of work or auditions. Such fees are deemed red flags by the Hollywood Establishment; mainstream talent managers work on a commission basis—they don’t make a penny until the client does.
But that was only part of the problem for Roses, who already had a reputation for generally outrageous behavior in Hollywood. “There is one reason for this case being on everyone’s lips,” wrote the ubiquitous Internet publication Deadline Hollywood, which quoted a rival talent manager as saying, “I can’t think of anyone else of that age who is more hated. He’s wronged a lot of people.”
And now Nick Roses is the industry’s whipping boy. “They used me as a scapegoat,” he says of his detractors. “They used a person who was 21, and who had had so much success—I mean, not to gloat or anything, but who at 21 can say they ran a department at a top management firm? You can’t. And they all look at me and they’re intimidated by me.” He adds, in a tone somewhere between bemused and amused, “I read this Deadline Hollywood article saying I’m the most hated 21-year-old person in this business. Well, I’m the only fucking person that’s 21! So it’s hard to be loved or liked here, you know? Whatever.”
That Roses was born to it has never been in dispute. By age six, he had already eschewed the sandbox for talent shows, commercial auditions, and pretty much anything involving microphones and cameras.
And why not? He was, as they say, the total package. Orlando, Florida, at the time, was the boy-band capital of the world, home to the Backstreet Boys, ’NSync, and various other assembly-line vocal groups. Roses’s songbird voice, coupled with his naughty-boy face and labor-intensive blond hair, made “Lil’ Nicky Roses” look rather like Lil’ Justin Bieber. A local talent manager named Julie Abrams signed Roses to her company, Inner Focus Talent, located near Fort Lauderdale.
While Roses ran the usual gauntlet of auditions and callbacks for local commercials, a sort of kismet developed. Inner Focus became, in many ways, his second family. The first one remained split, his parents Tom and Christine Roses having divorced when he was a toddler. But his parents lived only minutes apart and continued to raise him jointly.
Soon Roses was putting on a suit and tie and biking to Abrams’s office, and he spent most of his free time at her elbow, learning the craft. Tracy Britton, an acting coach and director, recalls arriving one day to make arrangements for a business trip: “I get to the front door and here’s this cute little chubby-cheeked boy with a clipboard going, ‘Hello, Ms. Britton! I have a couple questions for you! What’s your frequent-flier number? Do you have a hotel frequent-flier? What would you like for breakfast? What do you like at Starbucks?’ And the next morning, my toasted onion bagel was there. My frozen macchiato was there. He’d arranged a right window seat for me. It was just unbelievable. He was so intent, so businesslike. Like a laser.”
The laser beam pointed due west. In 2002 he persuaded his parents to let him spend part of his summer vacation working with Abrams at her company’s Los Angeles office. “He was a very take-charge type of child,” his mother says. “When he wanted something, he would go after it. It was difficult, because he wasn’t the normal child. You’d see other kids playing sports, and Nick with his little briefcase, trying to make deals happen.” “He was always aggressive and ambitious,” Abrams recalls. “Sometimes overly so.”
“He had a knack for making relationships with the people that mattered,” his father, Tom Roses, recalls. “And he did tend to get into confrontations with people who didn’t. They didn’t like the fact that he had a relationship with the principal or a certain counselor or whatever. He kind of figured out the dynamics and knew how to get himself covered if there were issues.”
For the next couple of years, Roses shadowed Abrams, occasionally in Los Angeles but mostly in Florida. By 2005 he had caught the eye of an executive at MTV. The network was producing a program called The Reality Show, in which contestants competed to become the next reality-TV star. Roses’s MTV bio read accordingly:
In many ways, Nick Roses is a typical 16-year-old. He lives with his parents, goes to school and meets up with his friends for pizza. But he’s also the Ft. Lauderdale area’s youngest talent manager. No matter where he is, he’s always wheeling and dealing, managing clients and barking into his ever-present cell phone. He makes deals from his parents’ dining room table And he does it all under the umbrella of his own company, RBS Management, with the help of his loyal colleague, Kim. But is everything coming up “Roses” for this underage overachiever? Find out in “Nick Roses: 10% Teen.”
By this time Roses had already dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles for good. Since certain executives might devalue a manager who retained his eligibility for the Mickey Mouse Club, Roses avoided the standard face-time rituals of Hollywood—the doing of lunch, the taking of meetings—and conducted all business by phone. “Who’s going to go to drinks with someone who’s 14?” he asks, eyes twinkling.
“So I’m on the phone with him,” Howard Meltzer recalls. “Then I hear this sound, and he says, ‘Hold on, Howard.’ The phone gets all muffled, and I hear him tell someone, ‘I’m on the fucking phone!’ Then he comes back and says, ‘So, Howard, where were we?’ I said, ‘Who were you talking to?’ He said, ‘My mother.’ I’m like, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘In my room.’ I said, ‘How old are you?’ He said, ‘Fifteen.’ ”
Roses cut his teeth at a series of small- to medium-size management companies. Within two years, his professional biography was making claims about his executive positions at the Impact Talent Group (as part of a team that represented the music superstars Usher, Master P, and Lil’ Romeo) and the CESD Talent Agency (working with the group that represented a murderer’s row of teenster idols, including Miley Cyrus, AnnaSophia Robb, Hayden Panettiere, Jesse McCartney, and Madison Pettis). Subsequently, his bio claimed, he had represented the Grammy-winning pop sensation Joss Stone, serving as her liaison for television, film, and special projects.
That Roses never stayed in one place for long only made sense for a guy who now called himself “the Shark.” By which he means that he openly tries to poach clients represented by other managers. And to explain, Roses employs one of his favorite phrases: “I’m not putting a gun to anyone’s head.” He’s got a point. Talent representatives tend to decry poaching the way baseball players decry spitballs. “At the end of the day, everyone just wants to make money,” Roses says. “You’re pissed off because you’re not going to make that money. That’s all you care about. Do you really care about the client?”
Roses’s track record was so impressive that in 2010, at the age of 20, he landed his biggest job yet, as director of youth development at Luber Roklin Entertainment, a respected management firm that represents many established film and TV actors, such as Paul Walker and Billy Zane. “I saw Nick as a survivor,” says Lena Roklin, one of the agency’s co-founders. “He was almost like an orphan to me. I’d tell him, ‘Slow down. Don’t try to go so fast. Don’t try to impress.’ But that’s who he was: an orphan trying to make his way.”
In late 2009, shortly before Roses signed on at Luber Roklin, a news flash rang out across Ohio:
“Heyman Talent is excited to announce a huge and exclusive opportunity to our Talent!” read the mass e-mail. “don’t miss this great opportunity!”
For a mere $250, the agency said, your child could attend an exclusive eight-hour workshop run by Hollywood’s one-and-only Nick Roses. The invitation listed all the TV credits Roses’s clients had amassed, among them Lost, CSI, Entourage, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Good Wife. But the headliners were the shows produced by the Coke and Pepsi of the Kid-TV universe: Nickelodeon (iCarly, Victorious) and the Disney Channel (The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Wizards of Waverly Place). The kicker was a written testimonial from casting director Meltzer, who was in the employ of Hannah Montana, the Disney mega-hit that launched Miley Cyrus. Calling Roses “smart, aggressive and good to work with,” Meltzer added, “I always see his clients.”
Among the children who saw stars were two pre-teen girls who would later figure prominently in Roses’s legal mess. We will refer to the girls as “Lizzy” and “Paula,” in part because they are minors whose identities were shielded by the City Attorney’s Office and in part because their parents say the scandal generally and Roses specifically have undermined the girls’ careers.
Lizzy and Paula, who didn’t know each other at the time, attended separate workshops in Cincinnati—Roses, over the years, has held about 30 of them in Ohio. He would sweep into a hotel conference room filled with several dozen kids and parents. He’d watch kids read scenes, then offer savvy critiques, inspirational advice, and lessons of a career spent working with so many teen idols. Then, at the end of the workshop, he’d reveal a board featuring photographs of the kids he wanted to manage.
“Nick’s telling everybody about how great it is to move to L.A.,” Lizzy’s mother recalls. “He asked, ‘If I said I want your kid in L.A., how quick could you be there?’ ” Roses, she says, claimed he wanted his handful of new clients in L.A. for “pilot season”—the period when many TV networks cast and produce the first episodes of prospective new shows.
Paula’s mother recalls, “There was constant pressure on parents about how great their kid was and they needed to come to L.A. today, right now—don’t wait!”
This was a daunting prospect to two families from the Midwest. Paula and her sister lived with their mother, who worked a retail job in Columbus. Lizzy’s family lived in Indianapolis. Her parents—he worked in real estate; she was a homemaker—did a background check on Roses; it turned up nothing but plaudits. Roses figured prominently on IMDB, the popular Internet database that functions as Hollywood’s own little White Pages/Wikipedia hybrid. According to his entry he’d been a “Gerber Baby”! He’d recorded music with Randy Jackson of American Idol fame! And he’d won three major talent competitions: NBC’s America’s Most Talented Kids, HBO’s Take It to the Ring, and CBS’s Star Search!
“We’ll go to L.A. in the summer and we’ll see what happens,” Lizzy’s parents concluded. “We’ll have an adventure.”
The girls arrived in California, accompanied only by their mothers. (Husbands and siblings remained back home, working and attending school.) At Roses’s suggestion, both mothers rented apartments at Archstone Studio City, a complex that housed several other of his clients, not to mention Roses himself. He shared a place with his boyfriend, a singer-dancer of boy-band pedigree. The logistics allowed the families easy access to (a) the major studios and (b) Roses, who was a constant presence, holding impromptu meetings in the complex or taking everyone out to expensive sushi dinners. Usually, the mothers say, he paid tabs by peeling hundreds off a thick wad of bills.
Lizzy hit the ground running. Roses quickly hooked her up with an agent at the Coast to Coast Talent Group, an agency known for its work with child performers. Managers are not permitted to negotiate deals and contracts on behalf of their clients. This responsibility falls to agents, who are licensed and regulated in a way that managers are not. In theory, a manager handles a client’s big-picture concerns—career planning and development—while the agent hunts down jobs and cash. In truth, if one or the other is working full bore, the client doesn’t need both. The tag team, in many cases, amounts to a leech enterprise that costs clients up to 25 percent of their pay. (Agents take 10 percent commissions; managers, 10 or 15 percent.) Still and all, many actors go with both, because they’re made to feel lacking if they don’t.
That being said, Roses was simply doing what managers do, landing his clients a steady stream of auditions for TV shows and commercials. Everything was fine, more or less, until it came time to prepare for “Bootcamp 2010!” The event promised to be a steroidal version of the workshops Roses had sponsored back in the Midwest. Now clients would receive eight full days of coaching, training, and advice from a raft of top Hollywood acting instructors, voice coaches, agents, and casting directors. The boot camp would culminate, on the ninth day, at the swank Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
Nick Roses of LRE presents …
one night only
At the event, known as a “showcase,” Roses’s clients would perform in front of even more and bigger Hollywood movers and shakers. This sounded ideal to Lizzy’s and Paula’s parents, except for one thing. The boot camp cost $3,000 per client. When the parents balked, they say, Roses warned them the girls would be missing out on access to casting executives from Disney and Nickelodeon.
Eventually, Roses began offering discounts to parents who paid early or in cash. Paula struck a deal for $2,000. But by the time the boot camp rolled around, in August, both mothers were at a slow boil. They describe the boot camp as a chaotic mess in which Roses was endlessly changing schedules, locations, and instructors. Kids, they say, weren’t provided snacks, water, or sufficient breaks. And one night, when parents dropped their kids off at class, students found the room locked and empty.
One theater space was a musty old place that reeked of marijuana. Worse, the parents say, the conditions made some of the kids ill. Paula developed chest congestion and broke out into hives and rashes. Roses, according to the parents, expressed little in the way of contrition—an approach he still takes today. “If you had hives, it’s not because I gave them to you,” he says. “You had an allergic reaction to something. Go see a doctor.” He asks, with rhetorical outrage, “Do summer camps feed the kids?”
Actually, yes. But anyway. By now, Lizzy’s and Paula’s parents were regularly comparing notes with the mother of a third child represented by Roses. “It was easy from there,” says Lizzy’s mother. “The worst move Nick ever made was to have us all live in the same building.”
The parents decided that Roses was a liar and a cheat who had repeatedly squeezed them in ways that went far beyond the boot camp. For starters, they point out, Archstone gave Roses a $200 referral fee for every new rental he brought in. Worse, says Paula’s mother, “he called my daughter and asked if we had any cash because [he and his boyfriend] needed to go out and they didn’t have any. He said they had lost their money.” Lizzy’s mother says she was among several parents from whom Roses borrowed cash, credit cards, or cars. When asked about these claims Roses says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He says he never solicited or gained anything of substantial value. Nor, he says, would he ever make anyone do anything, adding, “That’s just comical to me.”
He likewise rejects any suggestion that he would deceive or betray his clients. “I love my clients,” he says. “I fight for them.”
But the parents say he repeatedly strung the kids along with false promises. At one point, says Lizzy’s mother, Roses walked into a workshop class and falsely told his assembled clients that Lizzy had booked a national commercial for Hershey’s. (Roses says he does not recall this.) And Paula’s mother says that, once they arrived in Los Angeles, Roses landed Paula precisely zero auditions. Every time the mother called to discuss the matter, she says, Roses ducked her call. He stiff-armed the other two families as well, telling them he was in meetings.
All three families were reluctant to fire Roses. “He would say, ‘If you leave me, you’ll never work again,’ ” Paula’s mother says. But they pulled the trigger anyway. Almost immediately, the girls’ agents dropped them as clients. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles,” Roses says. “It wasn’t like I picked up the phone [and said], ‘You have to fire this client.’ ”
The more scrutiny the mothers applied to Roses, the more they began to question his entire history. To wit: at their separate workshops, they say, Roses had strongly implied that he represented Taylor Lautner, the Twilight heartthrob, a charge Roses disputes.
They didn’t know the half of it.
Hollywood, being a community of inveterate lily gilders, tolerates degrees of factual dexterity; you aren’t anyone until you’ve bullshitted your way out of the mailroom, shaved five years off your age, and parlayed a rejection letter from Brad Pitt’s secretary into “I’m developing a project with Brad.”
But to vet Roses’s professional biography is to confront transcendent levels of résumé ornamentation. A call to the CESD Talent Agency reveals that he did indeed work there, but not with the team that represented Miley Cyrus et al. “He’s saying that to glorify himself,” says one of the agency’s partners, Paul Doherty. “He was a receptionist. He lasted for approximately a month.” Doherty says they parted ways because Roses was “very inefficient.”
Michael McConnell, the pop star Joss Stone’s agent, was surprised to hear of Roses’s claim that he’d served as Stone’s “liaison” for TV and movies. “Not true,” he says. “At one brief interval, they were friendly. That’s all.”
Roses never represented Master P or Usher (although, he says, he did represent Lindsay Lohan’s sister, Ali, and David Hasselhoff’s daughter Hayley). Never recorded music with Randy Jackson. Never won Star Search or America’s Most Talented Kids (and HBO has never aired a show called Take It to the Ring).
Then there’s Roses’s association with the Rock of Love Foundation, a Florida-based organization devoted to raising money for children with life-threatening illnesses. It was started by Roses’s aunt Linda Accetta, owner of a salon in Boca Raton called Personal Hair Replacement. In 2007, while Roses was briefly in between jobs in Los Angeles, she hired him to do some work at the salon. Soon enough, Roses was also pitching in at the Rock of Love Foundation. At one point, he followed up with a popular Miami Beach dance school that was considering doing some work with the foundation. “He said, ‘I’m doing a video with Christina Aguilera,’ ” says Peaches Jarvis, head of Peaches School of Dance and Music. “He said, ‘I don’t want my aunt to know about it, but I want all the kids to audition.’ ”
He auditioned some 60 dancers in all. After offering to donate $5,000 to the school, Jarvis says, Roses invited everyone to a lavish dinner-and-dance party at a beachside hotel. “He finagled one of the mothers into lending him money,” Jarvis adds. “He said he lost his wallet in the limo on the way to the hotel.” Later, she says, he talked a different mother into footing the bill for the party. Roses says he repaid the mother for the party.
“He was so charming,” Jarvis says. “He sucked everybody in.” By the time Jarvis complained to Accetta, the latter needed no persuading. Roses, she says, had been using her foundation to promote his own ambitions. In 2008, he was charged with fraud and theft after Accetta presented police with evidence that he had used the salon’s credit-card machine to credit his personal card. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges without explanation. But shortly before the case went away, Accetta says, Roses’s attorney paid her restitution.
Roses declined to get into the details of the case, saying only that it was “a silly misunderstanding.”
He says much the same thing about his professional biography. “Could it be misleading? Absolutely,” he says. “Did I write it? No,” he adds. He lays the blame on IMDB, saying it published details he never provided. There are just two problems with his claim. First, he has used some of the same falsehoods in his own promotional materials. Second, the byline at the bottom of his IMDB entry used to say “Tatiana Hechavarria,” which happens to be the name of his assistant. Now it’s listed as “anonymous.”
When confronted with the Joss Stone situation, he says he’ll have Stone e-mail a clarification. But no e-mail ever came. “He created a narrative of himself,” says Lena Roklin. “With people like that, sometimes it’s not the narrative of reality.”
Roses likewise downplays the charges brought against him in Los Angeles. The case began when the parents of Roses’s aforementioned ex-clients contacted Mark Lambert, a deputy city attorney who has made it his business to rein in predatory talent managers. (Otherwise, they are regulated by nobody and nothing.) Lambert prosecuted Roses thanks to a labor law he helped enact, along with a city councilman named Paul Krekorian. The Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act of 2009 prohibits talent representatives and casting directors, among others, from seeking fees in exchange for the promise of securing work or auditions. “It should be obvious in any job that you can’t charge a job applicant to apply for a job,” he says. “But for some reason, in the magic talent business, we have no problem with it. They call it a ‘workshop.’ They pretend it’s for learning. But every actor knows what they’re really doing is auditioning for casting directors.”
Lest anyone view the Roses case as just another Hollywood tempest in a teapot, Lambert emphasizes the degree to which unregulated managers can exploit and ravage unsuspecting victims. “I’ll give you an example of the type of phone call I get,” says Zino Macaluso, senior counsel at the Screen Actors Guild. “It’s usually someone from Kansas City or Cincinnati. They say, ‘This guy came into town and set himself up in a hotel for three days. He ran advertisements on local radio and said, ‘Do you want to be in the next Disney movie?’ So the kids and the parents hear this and they buy into the whole American Idol-ization of fame.” Next thing they know, he says, they’ve forked over thousands of dollars—for headshots, acting lessons, etc.—only to discover that the manager has left them broke and crushed.
The Internet has proven especially fruitful in this regard. In 2007, an enterprise calling itself the Best New Talent Awards issued a cattle call in Miami. “Our talent executive will be in town one week only!” read the invitation. “only 300 people will be auditioned with hopes to find america’s next star!!” In a separate Web posting, interested parties were asked to call “Nick Marlo” at a given phone number—one that happened to coincide with a cell phone belonging to Nick Roses.
Roses, for his part, pleaded no contest to one count of operating an advance-fee talent service, plus one count of failing to post a $50,000 bond as required by law. Instead of 90 days in jail, he was ordered to serve 45 days of community labor, placed on probation, and required to pay restitution to the three families.
But he is unrepentant: “People said I told them that if they came to L.A. and took my boot camp I’d sign them as a client,” he says. “That was never a prerequisite. It was never mandatory.” He adds, “People were like, ‘Oh, the point of the boot camp was so he could make money.’ No! Usually I lost money.” Many of the kids, he says, were given “discounts” or “scholarships.” He claims “the whole point was to educate my kids because I wanted to have the best damn kids in Hollywood. I have had kids out of my boot camps book series regulars multiple times. One of the three girls whose parents complained booked a recurring role on Parenthood.”
True.
Again and again, Roses insists that the case against him was born of embittered stage parents. Meltzer says, “Everyone expects that kind of stardom. And that’s not being realistic with your goals. I believe Nick was being blamed for their disappointment with the industry.”
Meantime, though, Roses grudgingly offers this: “To be completely honest, am I proud of some of the things that I’ve done? No. I admit that I’ve done some really stupid things throughout the course of my life. But at the same time, I was a kid who made mistakes. And I’ve learned from those mistakes. Being realistic, I’ll probably make mistakes in the future—I’m human. I have changed. I’ve moved on. I’ve learned from everything I’ve experienced in my life. And it’s a new chapter. And it’s a new day.”
Some doubters remain. “The connection to Howard Meltzer is the [one] thing that gave Nick Roses any credibility at all,” says Anne Henry, co-founder of the BizParentz Foundation, which advocates on behalf of child performers. “I’m not impressed that he’s a Disney casting director. There are lots of Disney casting directors.” That’s because most studios no longer employ large in-house casting staffs. In order to keep overhead down, they hire independent contractors, who supplement their incomes by traveling around to workshops and boot camps run by guys like Roses. The selling point is the Disney connection.
And Roses? Although the Krekorian violations cost him his job at Luber Roklin, he says most of his clients followed him to his new venture, Total Talent Management, which occupies a small office on the top floor of a building in Burbank. He’s the only manager there. But he can see the film studios on clear days. And he’s making bookings, if not riches. In recent weeks, he says, his clients Krys Meyer and Camille Spirlin landed roles on General Hospital and a cable pilot, respectively.
One of Roses’s clients, Kyle Jones, calls him “very professional, diligent, and good at what he does,” and says Roses gets him a steady stream of auditions and callbacks. “I can’t say anything bad about Nick,” says Vallerie Tabit, whose 25-year-old daughter, Alyssa, is represented by Roses. “He’s just a driven, hardworking young guy who’s been good to my daughter.”
Still, the scandal took its toll on Roses: “I wouldn’t leave my house. I was afraid people were going to see me. Like, paparazzi. Crazy shit. And I was like, ‘Who am I? I’m a nobody.’ Like if I was Lindsay Lohan or somebody like that, I’d understand. But, like, you’re talking about little ol’ Nick Roses. Who am I? Seriously.”
