Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : Format field in mime message

Hi. I have successfully sent html emails using the LS NotesMimeEntity class in an agent. Now the user wants the email to begin with a greeting, i.e. "Dear John-" and then have a message follow. This will come from a field called FirstName. I am able to do this but the problem I have is that I can't format the text of the field to match the text of the message. Every way I tried to format the field (html attributes, html tags) resulted in the field text being plain. And trying to format it as the static text in the script gives me "Dear doc.FirstName(0)". I'm not very experienced with LS and hope that I'm missing something very simple.

Here is an example of a text message that comes through exactly how it should. Is there any way to create a child entity with the fieldname and format it as the static text?

Call stream.WriteText("<font face=Verdana color=#000099 size=2>Thank you for your recent commitment to American University. Our records indicate that we have not yet received your pledge payment for:</font>")
Set child = body.CreateChildEntity
Call child.SetContentFromText(stream, _
"text/html", ENC_NONE)
Call stream.Truncate

Thank you for your help.
Lori