 At Mr. Samuel French. On Monday, because of identity week, we're switching from Mr. Samuel French to just Samuel French and LIC. One final thing, especially for you guys in the front, if you want to do live tweeting you should use the Wi-Fi. So get your phones out if you want to do it. It's BT2 is the network and Vineyard All Lowercase is the password. And with that, I don't think I have anything else to say because you guys want to hear them speak. Christian Parker is our wonderful moderator. He's the chair of the MFA Theater Program at Columbia. He's a director, a dramaturg, and we actually work at the Atlantic Theater Company together, so we're thrilled to be back with him. So I'm going to hand it over to you guys. Thank you so much for being here and have a blast. Thank you, Courtney. I'm really happy to be here today moderating this panel. I do a lot of things like this, and I have to say I was kind of especially daunted by the range of accomplishments of this group of people, most of whom I had not met before but have admired for a long time. And I think I was actually, as I was walking over here, I was trying to tally it up and I thought, oh, yeah, no, actually I have taught all of your work, or in fact with Ann. I have taught with Ann, but I have taught all of your work in some way in my classes, not to mention having admired it for so long. It's really amazing for me to also be able to talk to all of you today. Obviously, the theme of this week is called Identity Week, and this panel, when presented to me, when Courtney and Ryan came to me and asked me to moderate, they said, well, this is a pioneer panel. These are all pioneers in the field, and so that's sort of the unifying idea of this particular evening. And I thought, well, what an interesting moniker to be saddled with as an artist, actually, because I'm not sure what, my first question, I think, to the panel and to myself when I heard that, would be, what does it mean to be saddled with a moniker pioneer? When you think about any of your careers and you look back, and someone tells you you're a pioneer, you're on a pioneer panel, what did you pioneer, when you think over your own work, what would you like to think of as having pioneered or not? What does that mean to you, that term? Any of you have something spring to mind? Larry, you're the biggest pioneer. Come on, I don't think so. I don't think that way. What are you writing about? What's meaningful to you? How do you get it out there, day at a time? It's all hard, and I think, I don't know, I never thought of myself as a pioneer. I don't think, in many ways, I don't think I've succeeded because the things I fought for are still such a fucking mess. So that's what happens when you get old and you look back and you say, okay, what did you accomplish? You know, I met you tonight for the first time and I've admired you for so many years, but your reputation is being ornery. And I think that maybe you are a pioneer of the ornery. I think everybody says, you know, you bristle at everything. I'm angry, I don't know about ornery. I think anger is a very healthy emotion. It's never taught that way, but I think it's a very valuable emotion to have, to nurture and to learn how to express. And fortunately, we all have here have the ability to take words and pictures and images and channel our whatever, my case, anger into actuality. Something other people cross. That's sort of why I raised the question. I don't think we think of ourselves as pioneers. I think Larry was right when he says, you write what you write and you do what you do day by day and you put it out there the best you can. And that's what I have to say. You know, I was on a panel once with Molly Smith and Tina, not Tina how, Tina, Shakespeare and Company. Tina Packer. And I realized that all three of us had actually come to the front door through the back door. In other words, Tina Packer had been working with the RSC, but it was a boys club. So she went to Western Massachusetts and started a very successful company. Molly studied in D.C. directing and then went to Juneau, Alaska where there was no theater and walked the streets and said who wants to start a theater and created a fantastic theater company that was actually about Alaskans. My own way was that I couldn't possibly see a way into the field through the front door. In my mind it was like the corporate ladder for boys. And so I also went through the back door and made theater on the streets and in shop windows and it was the, we would call that back door downtown. And in a way, all three of us on that particular panel I was on have good lives doing things that we actually believe in in the theater because we didn't go the front way. And that seems a little bit pioneering. Like what is a pioneer? Somebody goes across the country and there's a lot of bears and lions and things like that. It is dangerous. Maybe that's helpful. Quite often the front door is not available to many of us. So I think then you take the really beautiful elixir of anger and use it to create and to move forward because good feelings doesn't give you the particular energy or fuel that you need but quite often anger and doing your work no matter what in a kind of, in a way that says fuck you to everybody else. We're just going to actually do what we need to do and that's not usually accepted right away. One of the things I think is crucial is a lot of times people saying no to you, people saying no to you culturally or racially or identity wise puts you on a journey where you say yes to yourself and saying yes to yourself is the work you create. So you get all these nos, you get personal nos, you get structural nos, you get institutional nos. Just a lot of people tell you no and you can either let those nos define you or you can figure out another way to empower yourself. And I think telling stories or telling your stories is how you empower yourself which is another way of saying through the back door. It's like, you know, come. I didn't write a play for one year after Clive Barnes and the New York Times panned my first play and closed on opening night. He had that much power over me and it took me a long time to get over it. What a waste of a year. But you gave him that power. You gave him that power. We all give people the power and if we get over it and we go, to hell with that, that's boring. I've suffered enough. I've suffered enough. And then when you reclaim your power, that's when you tell your stories and you did. But George, I remember the first time I ever met you was at the public and you were doing the Colored Museum. And I remember having a conversation with you. I don't know if you remember it. And it was something about anger too. Anger is my most evolved emotion. But it was something about you slid in. But I don't remember what were the circumstances because something was happening then. I have no idea. But on a very simple idiotic level, the first six years of my life, I grew up in a segregated town. So there was a whole structure that said no. And I went to this black grade school where I was empowered and told that I was magical and smart and amazing. So on one level, as everybody was there. So on one level, people were telling me I'm magical and then there are these structures that tell me no. And somehow the tension between those two things, I think, helps to create, it's why you create the stories, I think. I don't know. Joy, we were talking earlier just a little bit about how your job differs a little bit from all these guys. And one of the things that you have to tackle relative to this question about pioneering and what that could possibly mean to an individual is that you are responsible for not only preserving the integrity of the estate of someone who has been labeled a pioneer, but also curating how that body of work is actually received and contextualized and defined and redefined in the world now for somebody whose point of view on her own work differs often from the way that people tend to define it. Can you talk a little bit about sort of your role in that? Yeah, I'll try to harness it a little bit. I can talk to a lot of those pieces. Yeah, so I'm the literary executor of the estate of Lorraine Hansberry. And I have to say a little bit about how I came to have that job. My father, Robert Nemeroff, was married to Lorraine Hansberry and was named her literary executor when she died. And so he married my mother when I was a child and I came to live in Lorraine's home in Croadland Hudson, New York. And it was a house that was filled with her spirit and her work and her file cabinets and everything that she was working on. But mostly it was filled with her spirit. And I remember she was my muse. She still is. And I was very deeply influenced by her. I am very deeply influenced by her visitation on me. But I was also deeply influenced by my father who was a master curator. And I had all kinds of skills as a kid. I have all kinds of skills as an adult. But I wanted to do what he does. Never thinking, never choosing to do it. It sort of happened to me. That's another story, how I came to do what I'm doing now. But anyway, taking on that responsibility was and is an act of love and commitment. And so it's also an act of stewardship and protecting in a maternal, in a female sense. So, to me, it's something that I think about all the time as something that you have to be very careful of how you go about doing that and the responsibility. But I wanted to come back to something that Jackie said before because I think, especially with Lorraine, Lorraine's thought of, she's not usually thought of as a pioneer, but she's thought of as kind of a matriarch. She's the mother. So, that's always been very strange to me. It's very strange and awkward for me because to me she's sort of like the eternal kid. She was youthful. She'll always be youthful. Her voice was about being in her 20s, being on the verge of her life, taking off sort of being a radical, being a runaway, being on fire. And that's how I think of her. And I think that's really what her plays are about. But part of what we were talking about, which is something I talk about all the time with people, is the stories that I love to tell that I find that are most fascinating about Lorraine's relationship to this albatross around her neck, which is a raisin in the sun, which was a play that was sort of an assignment for her. It was the first place that she wrote. It was the first play. You all know what it came to be. But she thought the play was flawed. She thought it was sort of her first try. And she was sort of in this impossible situation where it had all this attention, it had all this claim, it had all this investment, and I don't just mean the financial, I mean the psychological, I mean the psychic, I mean the racial, everything. It had to be all of these things. And she was the first person to get online to critique that, to talk about that, to kind of interrogate it, take it apart. So I think a big part of what I take on because that speaks to me. It speaks to me as an artist. It speaks to me as a culture maker. That there's something very important about that critical role of art and of artists, to interrogate themselves and their work and their aspirations and to see our work as attempts. Not as masterpieces or commodities or products, but as sketches, which is what I love about visual artists. That whole idea of like, I'm gonna paint this today. I'm gonna try it today. I'm gonna see how, and I'm gonna have the courage and the nerve to hate it tomorrow or tear it up. I wonder what happens when you sort of add that energy to I think the context that we are in right now, which is a very angry time to pick up on your idea about your thoughts about anger and what you were saying, and like we're in what I would describe as a very angry moment in our cultural history. And it exists in different pockets of the population in different ways. Let's talk about why the theater isn't really attending to it. Well, and that was my question, which is where does that leave you guys as artists and where does that leave the theater as a possible way to filter, speak to that? What are your thoughts on that, Larry? I don't like most of the things that I see or read about now. I think I'm not talking about white writers. I'm not talking about people of color who seem to be having a good moment to be more front and center than they have been. But I think that everything that most of us are asked to see is what I call small. And there's no Bert Law, the famous comedian who was asked to describe what he thought theater was. And he said, astonish me. And I don't see that. I just see a lot of small plays about people in unhappy situations with their husbands, with their wives, with whatever. And I don't come away with it. Having learned anything I didn't know or challenged in any way. It's a terrible place, the world. You know, where are our Greek tragedy writers? I don't see them and I don't hear them. I go to see the things that people say I'm supposed to see and I've actually stopped that. And they, you know, they win the pollisters or they win the whatever, the Tonys. I don't know what hope the theater has for changing the world the way that maybe it did for the Greeks. I don't know. I think the theater is probably the most important art form right now that possibly exists. And I'll tell you why. Because the subject of the theater and what distinguishes it from any other art form is it always asks the question how are we getting along and how can we get along better. And if you think of any play, and I think the reason why plays are about you and me in our apartment and our problems has to do with the political movement between 1948 and 1952 called the McCarthy era. That's a whole other subject. And I think it's coming out of there. I think there are plays that are actually dealing with bigger subjects. And I think that it's no coincidence that abstract expressionism was born at the same time as the McCarthy era. Like what does that mean? Abstract expressionism means it's abstracted. But I do think there is a movement towards theater that addresses bigger issues. But going back to the issue of how are we getting along, every, I think we see plays in two ways. One, you see a play and you see it in the prefrontal cortex of your brain where you go, oh, it's a story about, let's pick up the Greeks, it's a story about a man who sleeps with his mother and kills his father and the whole thieves is really screwed up and it's a story of a group, a community that's trying to come to a state of balance from a state of imbalance and a crime. So that's great. And so that's about that social system. But there's a whole other play that's going on in the theater at the same time and it's not happening in film. It's happening in the theater where the audience gets it on a bolder part of the brain where you're actually seeing how these people on stage are getting along. Like if you've ever gone to a play and like somebody, an actor drops, you know, a glass and it breaks and everybody doesn't know what to do. But if I don't care about what they're care about, I don't care about the kid alone. That on a subconscious level or a different place, the audience goes away taking in who these people are on stage and how they're getting along. But not only that, how's the audience getting along? How are the actors getting along with the audience? That every question is about that. You know, when I saw Shuffle Along, I think George is tired of me telling him how much I love Shuffle Along. But one of the reasons was that it dealt with history. It dealt with stories of particular people and their problems and their issues. But also the community on the stage was mind blowing. Like how those people were together made me want to actually live differently with other people I live with. So I think our job is to propose new social systems. So right now we're living in a dark period which is guided by fear and paranoia that's being encouraged by, we won't go there. You know where it's coming from. But the theater's job is to propose alternate social systems that might, that translate the break, and then I'll shut up, I promise, this is a short panel, that translate the breakthroughs in science, in the arts, in technology, and proposes ways that human beings can actually behave vis-a-vis these changes. And that's done by the playwrights who describe systems of being that's different and it's done by companies who actually perform differently. I'll shut up. But I just think it's so important right now. I'll break up on what you just said and what you just said. And right before this began I was talking to Dr. Sange and learned that she had just started a new play for the first time in a really long time. So it's something you're choosing actively to do which is really exciting for the rest of us. But you made a very specific choice to do that at this moment. Yes. Can you talk about that? Yes. I hadn't written a play in a very long time because I decided that I liked working by myself better than working with a lot of people. Hearing all their ideas. When I had an idea of my own that I wanted to do and I didn't want any comments about it. And so in order to do that I didn't write plays because that would demand that I interact with people. And so I hadn't written one. And I just finished a new volume of poetry that will be out hopefully next year. And I finished a book of essays and I worked on a choreo poem that's like ready to go into production and I worked on that all last year and I directed it once because it was in it both times. So I was being an actor sound director and I this year when I got ready to write again I started writing with poems because I haven't been able to use my hands for five years. So I was a writer or less writer and when I started able to use my hands again I started writing poems and they just came to me naturally and I was writing these poems and then it occurred to me that in the revamping of a photograph which is a play that is 30 years old that was the first play that I ever tried to write that was severely flawed because I didn't know how to write plays I didn't know how to write poems and so I took a photograph and I revamped it and I rewrote it and in the process of rewriting it my sister, the writer, she taught me this is your only dialogue driven play that you've got and I said really it's the only one and she said yes everything else has poems in it and I said well mother current and she said you didn't write mother current and so this time around after I finished the poem for the new book I was sitting up and I said my god maybe I can think of characters like I do for a novel I can think of it for the stage and I can think of a plot like I think of for the novel and condense it so it'll fit into two hours and maybe I can make them talk in a way that exposes all their flaws and desires and angers and wants and maybe if I can do that I'll have a play that's dialogue driven and so I started trying to do that and I've got two scenes done now and initially I had a play with seven characters and I was told by theater people that nowadays producers only want a play for five actors and they prefer a two character play to a seven actor play so I should be mindful of how many characters I need and couldn't I condense a couple of those characters into one person and all of this so that was another time eating point because in a novel I can have as many characters as I want but I didn't I wrote five because I want it produced still the theater is two character plays and monologues so boring monologues are not boring when there are only two people on the stage and you know there are only two actors in the play and I know no one else is coming on I've lost interest I see what you mean other things that I wonder about to sort of expand on this a little bit in addition to a context of sort of anger I feel like one of the things that's happening in the culture right now is that we have a blurring of the lines between truth and fact and truth and fiction in our daily lives and I think people are confused about what's true and what's real and what they can believe in the media in particular and from politicians in a way that is different from any time that I remember in my life and I wonder if you think that that's true first of all and I wonder if you think that being an artist in the theater which traffics in fiction for the most part or versions of reality does that marginalize the theater further that we're in this moment where now we don't even really know that the theater might reveal certain truths does that resonate? You're getting too highfalutin Well, I mean I'm trying to locate it in why you would choose to do what you do You keep working, all of you Because you care about something I get nervous when I hear this word art and I don't think of myself as an artist I think of myself as a writer I don't know what art is all the things you mentioned about what's wrong with the world and what's true and not true Great plays are written like that about people like that and theater isn't any different than it's been in terms of the themes that are available to them But I think one of the things that makes theater or poetry valuable or visual art valuable is that something that Ann was talking about about the lower parts of the brain because if we can make characters whose reality is so tangible and pronged that it becomes close and dear to the audience then I think we've done our job To me, that's the big major thing I want to do, I want to open a person a character up so much that the audience feels as though they're walking in that person's life or in that person's shoes and that's what's real to me It's also about so much of what so much of what you're talking about is about stripping away people's sense of power and so I think the reason why people create I think that what it's about is creating work that will give people come into the theater and they're coming in with varying degrees of I know who I am or I don't know what I have or I don't know what I'm coding onto or I don't know what I believe and I don't know what's going on and everybody's walking around like that and to me, I think one of the core responsibilities even if it's stripping down a human being is about empowering an audience so it's restoring inside of an audience the sense that they have within them an invincible power to change the world We know that changing the world is a monstrously hard close to impossible thing to do but I think it's deeply crucially important that we all believe that we can and I think that's one of the things that theater can do that the intimacy of the event the intimacy to me what's fascinating is when you are watching a film and it has tremendous power you lean back in your seat when you are watching a play and it has tremendous power you lean forward in your seat because it's proportionally the same size as you and you're looking in to see how you can get these secrets of how these people are succeeding or failing or believing or not believing and that's what I think it's about and that's why you know that's why I agree with you that theater continues to be important I agree with you that a lot of times it's hard to figure out what the stakes are but ultimately I think the core stake is about empowering people because so much that is happening in the world is about kicking away their power so I think that's where I am that's where I am right now is I'm interested in stories I'm interested in stories that empower not necessarily rah rah rah empowerment but it can be fuck that empowerment or I agree empowerment or you're completely wrong empowerment it's just instilling inside of people the ability to keep charging forward no matter what well certainly Shuffle Along is a really interesting example of that especially because it is actually a piece from an earlier period in our history that was forgot so that the act of doing it in and of itself was what you described but that the piece itself was also this thing that in its moment was incredibly forward thinking and yet somehow it didn't occur in a cultural moment in which that could get attraction it did and it didn't it did you know and that's that's attraction exactly that's what happens you've all I mean to sort of just to return to the overarching subject of the week before we move on we should move on soon to questions you've all of your work has touched on issues of American identity in touching on different groups but the overarching questions what it means to be American in our time what our responsibilities are we have a I feel like one of the things that's happening right now in our society is that people are really interrogating the question of whether not what our shared values are but actually whether we even have them and I just wonder as you guys are thinking about doing your own work now how has your orientation as an artist towards as a writer, a director towards the question of American identity or your own identity changed you know Gordy Dahl who calls us the United States of Amnesia and in a way he's right and yet we have one of the most extraordinary histories in this country and we have amazing people who've come who are now dead and who didn't have didn't finish their sentences they had more to say also why I love Shuffle Along and that sometimes I think that if the theater were a verb it would be to remember in the sense of to remember to put the parts back together again and that our job is not so much to invent something new but is to inhabit those who didn't quite finish saying what they have to say and there are extraordinary examples of those extraordinary Americans who need to be heard right now and that's a large part of what I personally do as an artist is listen to those people other thoughts on that or I will happily answer is quite comprehensive maybe what we should do is open up to the audience we've got a few more minutes for questions that you might have please speak up if you have a question we can all hear you scared him into silence I also can't see you very well so yes Helen Shaw wrote an article I don't know if any of you have read it in the American Theater Magazine this week last week called The State of the Play in which no offense to our academicians on the panel that perhaps MFA programs and academic institutions have come to displace have become to watch what's the phrase? to watch the gatekeepers of American theater and that it's impossible that somebody like Elvis Wilson or somebody suffering from a mental health issue or someone who's on the outskirts of power would find any way in or that their work would be recognized and that the only way to make it in order to find one's way in is by becoming more like the academic work that's being done to develop one's aesthetic in that matter and that power sort of works on people, artists individually and I'd like to I'd say it was an interesting article that raised a lot of big questions about so what's your question? and one of the big questions is how do we voice disagreement about things that are going on in the American theater itself and talk about it when we're stuck in a place where we're also having to be extremely professional in our art and the artist becomes somewhat commercial and we find that that's a lot of questions I raised my hand because I'm going to summarize your question well he was contextualizing his question about an article that was in American theater this month which suggests I have not read it yet but which suggests that there's a barrier to entry to the profession to anybody who doesn't conform to a kind of work that's being established in MFA programs whether or not they necessarily go to one it's hard to enter the profession if you are in some way an outsider and how do we talk about as artists and makers what the problems of our own industry in terms of access might be when our industry has become so commercialized or professionalized is that fair? well I had qualms about teaching in the creative writing graduate program at the University of Houston because I didn't understand why a poet just couldn't write some poems and go to a reading and read them and have the people respond to them and see how their work was being taken in or if it wasn't being taken in the way they wanted what could they change to fix it because you find out what's wrong with your work when you do it in front of people and when I was in teaching these people this MFA program and they were trying to go ahead and get PhDs in poetry I was like a guest and I couldn't understand what I was doing teaching these people because I didn't think that they could be taught what we're trying to do is maybe give you some technical points but you can't teach somebody how to write a poem and writing a play is not an exercise that you do in four months and turn it in I wrote it because I had to write it it should be a passion in you that drives the coming of the art I'm sorry Larry the coming of the art should come from a you it can't be an assignment and that's what I think the MFA programs do to people they make the art so that it is so dry and perfect that there's no room in it for sweat and there's no room in it for tears or a laughter any other questions yeah at this stage in your career emerging are some of your or some of your mentees and how did those relationships develop the question was up to the poll panel about how they interact with younger artists are they mentor people and are there any examples of mentees that they have that they want specifically to mention the question was about mentorship and about any younger artist that you find yourself in a position to mentor a young artist and I purposely said emerging not younger emerging yes so it would be emerging at 60 sure yeah that's a good modifier sorry about that yes you mentor a lot I agree with Entezaki that you can't teach I would say I teach directing but you can't teach it what you can do is give an opportunity for for emerging artists to put work in front of an audience and sometimes the audience and you have to have an audience right unless you it's not theoretical you put it in front of an audience and then you're embarrassed by what you see and then you make adjustments from that embarrassment right but I think it's true that MFA issue is an issue and I know because I work in an MFA program so I'm one of the guilty people but I always think when I'm taking I'm looking at students I thought I would never get into my program anyway that was is actually true I look at their applications and I think I could never get into the program that I'm running but and maybe 10 years ago I used to always say don't go to MFA programs just go do your work but there is truly an advantage and perhaps an unfair advantage I think but going back to the mentor question you can give an opportunity to make work and then you can be truthful about what you experience and that's called critique this is what I saw why didn't you think of this but that's about it I can use myself as a barometer I actually in other words my body gets excited when I'm watching your work that's a good thing I got really bored that's the bad thing I think that astonish me is truly the art of what we're trying to do is is to create work that changes the heartbeat so I can just be present for emerging artists and respond because I've practiced for many years well I have I spoke to one of my mentees today and she's at the stage where she feels like she needs an agent and I have feeling uneasy about introducing her to an agent because I don't think she's ready yet and I don't quite know how to tell her that she has to write some more and expose herself some more in little magazines and small magazines and small newspapers she has to put herself out there so that it can be seen so that somebody who is an agent will be taken with it be smitten by it and want her and um it's almost like the NFA question because at a certain stage in our careers you do need an agent but I have always felt like they had to come looking for me because I didn't feel like I was ready yet if they weren't looking for me and so I'm going to tell this young woman that tomorrow but her name is Nari Fosa Fernandez I also work with a young woman, goes by the name of Bruha who's a performing poet, they're both performing poets and I work with a young woman who's a performing poet and singer who has started her first play and she's just getting started on so I'm being very gentle with her and letting her go wherever she goes it's sort of wandering right now that might be the shape of the play so we'll just have to wait and see we have time for just one or two more yes I felt early in the program I heard the instruction, use your anger as sort of a guiding principle for young artists, what instructions would you leave upcoming generations of artists with as speaking for them, what are the successful ones? What instructions would you offer folks? What instructions would you offer to I think there's only one and I certainly didn't make it up there's only one which is be courageous that's it and also one of the things I think is most important is that when you encounter failure don't run away from it but walk through the failure so you can figure out what you did to contribute to the phenomenon so it doesn't happen again you know and that was one of the first play I did in New York got hate reviews and then the second went oh my god where has he been all our lives and I am so glad that it happened in that order because I learned so much stuff about what I did how I was stupid, how I surrendered authority, how I did a bunch of crap that contributed to it not working so that by the time I did the next play my next play I was like every single antenna on me was so sharpened and so refined no I'm not doing that no that's not right no we're not doing that whereas the first play around I went okay sure why not so I think when you encounter failure failure isn't a punishment I think failure is an extraordinary opportunity to learn and get smarter and get better the other thing I think is important is to read I think I find that a lot of people who approach me and want to become writers don't read they don't have any context for what they want to do themselves they don't know what can influence them or feed them or anger them or make them cry and if they don't know who can do that to them how do they know how to let somebody else and it also increases your vocabulary it gives you more of an idea of place it gives you a sense of history I would just beg all the young artists and emerging artists to read as much as you can of whatever it is read science books read history books read biographies read autobiographies but read because there's so much of the world locked up and you have access to it did you want to add anything to the laundry list of advice to young artists if you believe enough in your work keep going it's not easy but keep going I'd also like to add in addition to reading to experience your discomfort to notice what that discomfort brings up because I think as you read as you expand as you grow you're going to be asked to come out of your comfort level which for us culturally is the same thing as saying you're going to have to deal with things that are unfamiliar and I think we really suffer we're in peril now as a society because we're too addicted to comfort so it's really important to be able to not only be uncomfortable which kind of sounds ridiculous but to notice the purpose of discomfort so it comes back to what George was just saying what does discomfort teach you try not to be afraid I'm a late bloomer because like so many people who want to write they're afraid to actually get down to do it and then when they actually have something they're afraid to show it to anybody else everybody goes through that so you have to get past all of that put that over there on the other side look at it and then put it over there I think that's a really good place for us to end actually I want to thank all of you so much for doing that