Theming the first list item when using Views2

Views2 theming is giving me so many fits. I'm finding it really hard to do simple things. It could also be my newbness with Views2, so please bare with me.

I've got all the template files figured out and have seen all the documentation, but still can't see how to simply style the first item from the view result set differently from the rest of the items. Is this even possible? Is there any type of state passed? I can not even find a basic 0..n item count for rows.

any hints??