 So this was Robbie's suggestion, this phrase, the question of beauty, and I'm very, very excited because I've had a little bird's-eye view into the email exchanges around it from Carl Hancock-Rugs and Daniel Alexander-Jones, and then the responses I've just started to introduce so you could make your entrance. Oh, yes! Yes to that! That's right! Oh my god, now I'm scared again. You know! This is like a picture. You know! So our last star has arrived, and we will come to you all on the question of beauty. So hello everybody, I'm Daniel Alexander-Jones, a performance artist living in New York City, and we're going to do the following. I'm going to give a little brief introduction to the concept, and then everybody's going to introduce themselves. And then Carl will open with a statement, and then we're going to have a conversation. So Robbie invited us to think of the question of beauty. And when I saw that, you know, I got all excited because I'm like, what does she mean? And I'm like, what kind of beauty? But at the core, I had a brief conversation with Robbie and she said, you know, I'm very much interested in how we are able to keep doing what we do. So what an interesting contrast to the thought of the question of beauty. How did those two ideas go together? And that became the groundwork. And Carl and I talked a bit, and we invited everyone to think of a brief response rooted in these ideas. And this idea of like beauty, I said Robbie and you. So this is going to be, when we do start our conversation, we've asked everybody to think of a very brief statement of initial response. But even now, before we begin, may I invite you to think of this question of beauty and its relationship to an idea of continuance or practice, resilience, resurgence, even. So maybe can we just go down the line, introduce ourselves, and then we'll hear from you. I'm Kim Moore. I'm a director and an educator. I teach at Brown, and I have a small company called Anti-Gravity Theater Project. And so I'm thrilled to be here and try to answer the question. I'm not making statements. It's just who I am. I'm not making the statement. You are. You're always making the statement. Always trying to get it right. I'm Karolga Brooks, a multidisciplinary artist. I'm a writer, a performer. I think that's about as multidisciplinary as you can get. And all that needs to be said, I'm going down the list. I'm Nikki Paraiso. I'm an actor, performer, writer. For the last 16 years, I've been also a curator and programmer at La Mama Experimental Theater in New York. And helping younger artists fulfill their dreams. Which is another question. My name is Pamela Snead. I am a poet. I'm known as a poet, but I am an interdisciplinary artist. So I work in theater and I work in performance. I'm a professor. At School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I don't live in Chicago. I'm laughing at my own jokes. Yeah, and that's what I do. I finished a book and it's called Aname for me, Tina Turner, and all Black women survivors. And it's being shot. And then I have a chat book coming out with Bella Donna in June. And it's called Sweet Dreams. So, of course, the charge came to investigate the notion of beauty, which was a challenge in so many ways. But not a challenge in that way that I think... Well, it was a challenge. It was an absolute challenge. And at the same time, it became so freeing for me personally. Because the minute that I knew that Robbie wanted beauty to be part of this panel, I was sending some exchanges back and forth with Daniel, actually. Trying to get clarity about what that meant or what needed to be said. And then suddenly it wasn't a question anymore. It became clear from me, I guess, that we would have a discussion about beauty right now, beauty as a practice, beauty as a concept. But I just wanted to share some things that directly, for me, came up. And which connects me also, I think, to my relationship to even the very first time that I saw Robbie and Collie's work on stage some years ago. Well, it wasn't the first time. I'm sorry, that's not true. But one of the most impactful moments that I saw Robbie perform at the kitchen when she did Salish Ray. And how it was absolutely, and it's not left me since that moment, because it was absolutely a moment of beauty. A very clear moment of beauty. So let me just read this very quickly. One of the things I'd written to Daniel was that I wanted us to think about beauty as a Socratic practice. And it made me think about Diotima. There's that moment in the dialogues where this mysterious woman comes up, that we know little to nothing about. And her name is Diotima. And Socrates says this, telling the story continues his discussion of love by restating an account given to him by a woman named Diotima. And he claims that he once held the opinions expressed by Agaton and that Diotima convinced him. He was mistaken through a series of questions similar to those of Socrates. And the conversation was about beauty and about love. And having been convinced that love is not beautiful or good, Socrates asks Diotima if that means that love is actually ugly or can love be bad. And Diotima, this woman argues that not everything must be either one thing or its opposite. For an instance, having unjustified true opinions is neither wisdom nor ignorance. Wisdom consists in justified true opinions of woman hardly called a true opinion ignorant. And she points out, in spite of himself, that Socrates has denied that love is good altogether. In fact, that Socrates has denied that love itself is a God. And they have concluded that love is not good and beautiful because he is in need of good and beautiful things. And no one would deny that a God is both happy and beautiful and yet love seems to be neither happy or beautiful. Which absolutely connects me to the moment that I saw Sally's rape, which is a very clear correlation for me. In this moment of beauty, this Diotima, this mysterious woman, the body of Robbie Macaulay on stage 26 years ago, beautiful, nude, gorgeously beautiful. In this moment that was reflective of an ugliness and a painfulness which had to deal with history and American slavery and the female body. And what happened for me at that moment. And I'm very clear about, and I wanted to say this a little earlier when we talked about who we are now. And almost in a way in response to what Nikki said a little bit about being the boy in the room. Without disagreeing, but almost saying that, Nikki please excuse me for saying this, but I guess what I became clear is that in that moment that that work happened to me 26 years ago when I experienced it. I began the process of no longer being the boy in the room. In fact, I let go, it was the beginning of letting go of that gender cell that constricted me to a masculine, you know, patriarchal place that defined what I had to say, how I had to say it, you know what needed to be birthed out of me. And it made me connect to something else very clear. I mean the idea of creation, beauty as creation, beauty as something that you give birth to. And there's just a little bit, something else I want to read to you because this is very clear. So I guess it exposed for me what Robbie did in that moment. Robbie McCauley with Lori Carlos with those people did for me in that moment was, it was, it became very plain and very clear to me that this beauty that I was being surrounded with that was neither, you know, happy, nor good, but could also be beautiful yet could expose ugliness. Yet was coming from female bodies and was reaching out to me led me toward understanding something else. And there's a, there's a writer that I'm in love with, there are many writers that I'm in love with, but there's a specific writer that I'm in love with, Helene Sisu. Some of you may know her, yes. Okay. And of course I'd come to her by way of Julie Krusteva, yes, a Belgian scholar, they both Belgian, but I wanted to read some things that she says about the female body and she says, and I think this deals with the topic and all of you can respond to her if you will. She says, Helene says, we should write as we dream. We should even try and write. We should all do it for ourselves. It's very healthy because it's the only place where we never lie. At night we don't lie. Now we think that our whole lives are built online. They are strange builders. We should try and write as our dreams teach us shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very, every human being. Sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals. We kill and we kill with a lot of enjoyment, but we are also the happiest people on earth and we make love as we never make love in life. Sense of the body and use sense of breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself because your body must be heard. We must kill the false woman who's preventing the life, the live woman from breathing. I too overflowed. My desires have invented my new desires. My body knows unheard of songs. Time and again I too have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst, burst with forms much more beautiful than those which were put up in frames and sold for a fortune. And I too said nothing, showed nothing. I did not open my mouth. I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid. And I swallowed my shame and my fear. And I said to myself, you are mad. What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the abominant, infinite woman who has not been ashamed of her strength? Who, who, who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives? For she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a divine composure, has not accused herself of being a monster. Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short to bring out something new, has not thought that she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble. Why don't you write? Writing is for you. You are for you. Your body is yours. Take it. And then this last note that she says, which is, again, above you. It's a question, and she says, wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst in truth? That women aren't castrated. That they have only to stop listening to the sirens. For the sirens were men. For history to change its meaning. You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. She's not deadly. She's beautiful. And she's laugh. So this became very clear to me that this moment of discussing beauty, of Socrates having this chance discussion with a woman who begins to define what helps him define what beauty is, its ugliness, its painfulness, its shit, its history, is a giving birth process that actually stops him from, or I believe, removes him, maybe in a better way said it, and maybe it's said better, transmogrifies his masculine body to come to something much more feminine, which is a fullness of understanding, a fullness of creation, a fullness of knowing, a fullness of acceptance, a fullness of what is good and painful and joyous. The male body, as we all know, is so limited in its experience of pain and joy. The female body is so complicated, almost from birth to death, right, in the fullness of its physiological experience of pain and joy. So I think that beauty strips us of gender assignment in a way, or maybe it moves us toward a femaleness. I know that at the moment that I saw Robbie on that stage, nude, 26 years ago, it stripped me of a certain kind of gender assignment and a way of seeing myself toward understanding something beautiful. That was ugly, that was also ugly and painful and gave birth to an intertextuality and a way of being in the world that I now have. And I think that's why I would like everybody to speak to me. I have two moments, so the saddest thing in the world has got to be when you love someone unable to provide the love and support you need. And staying with them would be a form of suicide. It took all I had to leave her emotionally. She still has a part of me. A year of therapy to resolve something, an honest conversation I've solved. Now I'm stuck with everything I didn't say and she's not here to say it to. I tried to pretend it didn't hurt as much as it did. I searched all over this earth for a safe place and I can't walk up to somebody and ask that. To give me back to myself, just keep searching inside open to find an answer. Maybe she's my mother. Maybe she's my father. Maybe she embodies all the insecurity I ever felt and that's why I keep coming back here. Over and over I ask myself, is it love? But it isn't desire that drives me back towards the fact she has a piece of me I want. So anyway, that's an excerpt from Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery. I did it here at the Theatre Offensive and Robbie was my director advisor. I guess that was more than 20 years ago. I remember her saying to me, just do it real still. You don't need anything. Just do it real still. Then I was also in my fear and all kinds of stuff was going on. She said, what part of you wants to be here? Focus on that part of you that wants to be here. She directed me more than 20 years ago in that piece and those are the things that stand out to me. That's the beginning of your influence on me. I had this idea and so anyway, it's been in my mind forever that I wanted to do a research paper. I wanted to add it to the canon of black women in theater because I believe it needs to be there. I wanted to start with Sadiah Hartman's scenes of subjection and her thesis about slavery and the plantation as scenes of terror and resistance. I wanted to talk about the two most seminal theater pieces in my life. One was witnessing Danitra Vance standing on an auction block at the public theater showing off her mastectomy scars and Sally's Rape by Robbie Macaulay at the kitchen, which depicted the rape of her great-great-grandmother on the plantation. I remember Robbie standing on top of an auction block in the theater after instructing the audience to chant, bit them in, bit them out, bit them in, bit them out. She was then standing there naked with a piece of white cloth covering her and there was an absolute stillness when she said in the words of Sally, I didn't want anybody doing it to me down on the ground. That moment in theater impacted me for the rest of my life. Basically, as a teacher, as a professor, I say, if you want to know what you can do in theater, then you must view Sally's Rape by Robbie Macaulay. I wanted to talk about black women in the use of the auction block. That's something that Sidia Hartman talks about. Danitra Vance, again, I saw her, I don't know, it was 30 years ago. It was one of the first pieces of theater that I've ever seen. She took off all of her clothes and she was standing on top of a black box and she was showing her mastectomy scars. Then, flash forward and then I see Robbie, Sally's Rape. Then, I guess about 10 years ago, I made a theater piece called Calm. At the end, I'm sort of talking about who was at the Rwandan Massacre and they found the guy who orchestrated the Rwandan Massacre and he was dead in a ditch. I remember I was naked and I said, I'm glad, I'm really glad he's dead. I was referencing Robbie and Danitra. Some of that history hasn't been told but I wanted to, again, take the auction block and to show black women's aesthetics in theater. Anyway, I hope to one day do that paper. I couldn't be a theater practitioner without those pieces, without your piece. It has stayed with me. I didn't even do any research. That was in my mind. I didn't want anybody doing it to me down on the ground. I never recovered, really. That's my moment of beauty and thank you. Since we're modern in the Rwandan Massacre, I have to say this one thing. I'm going to give myself permission to respond to what you just said a little bit, which is that I don't know if you remember it. I was sitting in the Rwandan Massacre. You have to meet your show. I don't remember that. I was sitting right behind you. To have seen that night, the way that Danitra Vance orchestrated it, again, back to this notion of beauty and ugliness, was she was in this moment where she was orchestrating the feminist triptes. She had been leading up to that all along, saying that the show was called Danitra Vance and the Mellow White Boys. She had these white boys in the band. She kept telling them to shut up. Every time they played during the show, she would tell them to be quiet, because she hadn't given them permission to play yet. Only when she gave them permission to play was the moment when she finally decided to string. We're laughing and laughing and laughing. She's wearing this military garb, remember? She starts to do this thing. The burlesque kind of music or whatever. I remember that moment so clearly, because I think it impacted all of us. Not just that night, but everybody saw it. The audience was, you know, we were caught in laughter. She's doing this triptes. The way that she conducted the moment was that she would ascend to this auction docket of this high place to remove the final piece of clothing and throw her hands up so that, and at that moment, all the lights in the public theater came up, including out in the audience, like every light. It was no longer the separation between audience and performer. And there she stood with her one breast and where she had her mastectomy scar, she had two huge white pieces of tape, not huge, but made as an X over that. And she died only maybe a few months after that. And our hands were up like this. And we choked back on our laughter. It was absolutely one of the most profound moments of theater that I've ever seen, that I continue to teach and talk about. But you almost can't talk about it without wishing the people that have been there, or bringing people back to that moment, because it was so impactful, and it was so clear what she was doing with her body, how she was creating beauty and uglyness and music. Right, and Robbie... Yeah, and Robbie doing Sally Shrave, it's like the hand of Black women's use of the auction block is just stunning and historical. Absolutely. And, you know, and resistant, but also terrifying and profound. And it, you know, completely changed the pan in the theater. Right, absolutely. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, when I got the message, you know, we were talking about beauty, different ways of making beauty, just in the Socratic sense. And immediately I thought about the primary lesson I got from Robbie, which was that vulnerability was a strength. This was something that I grew up in a pretty strict West Indian household where vulnerability was seen as, you know, not the way to be in the world. And I remember seeing Robbie up at Dartmouth when there was this big, I don't know, something about Black theater, and obviously something like that, a big symposium. And the big takeaway from that whole event, I hardly remember who was there, was that Robbie walked up to a podium, and so she's at the podium and she says to the audience, I'm a solo artist, but I don't perform alone. And then she moved away from the podium and came and stood next to the podium and said, I'm a solo artist, but I don't perform alone. And she said it several times, and I started weeping in the audience. And I thought, oh my God, look at this person allowing themselves to be seen. Now, I'm an acting teacher, and I'm always telling the actors, you know, if you want to be an actor, you need to accept that the audience is going to look at you, like you were there to be seen, right? Because you know these actors who come on and they're like, don't look at me, but they're on stage. And so, you know, I just kept repeating it, and I thought, oh, this is the permission that I was talking about, that I was someone who was quite empathic, quite easily who, you know, felt for other people. And I thought, oh, that's an actual strength. That's an actual thing you can be in this world. And Robbie gave me that permission. That's one of the key permissions. And it is vulnerability, you know, when I heard you, Jesse, I thought about my own kid who's not here, but also called me at six this morning to move his equipment from my basement because it might flood. That's another story. Vulnerability is a beauty that I think we don't cop to or afraid of. And what I appreciate, another thing I appreciate deeply about Robbie is that she not only allows herself to be seen, but she sees us, right? And that's, I mean, everyone, people have said this, but it's the looking back. Even if she's on a podium, there are a million people out here, if she looks here, you go, oh, she saw me. And we want, when you're seen, you belong, right? We feel connected. And I found that incredibly powerful. So, you know, that was the thing I wanted to offer, but I have been reading this incredible book that I keep at my bedside and I grabbed it on my way up here this morning. And so I'm just going to read a little bit. Maybe I'll get through the whole poem without, you know, breaking. But it's David White's book called Consolations. Yes, honey, you need to own it. It's great. And it's Consolation of the Solid Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. And when I think of this book, I think of you, Mourabi. It's quite powerful. So, of course, I was like, of course this guy's written something about vulnerability, but I hadn't gotten that far in the book. And then I found it. And so I'm just going to share this with you, because I think it says it all. Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing in disposition, or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present, and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the health needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential title and conversational foundations of our identity. To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances is a lovely, illusionary privilege. And perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human, and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with the same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers, powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully or conversely as misers and complainers reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. I thank you. Yes, I was thinking of this question of beauty and what I came up with is kind of like a snapshot or a moment. Maybe I think the Socratic metaphor is apt here because there's something very special and ineffable in the relationship between teacher and student and that it's true that Robby has that gift for seeing the person in front of her and it's true, again, that when having been a solo artist we bring those spirits into the room with us. So we are not alone even though the physical body is alone on stage. There are many spirits in the room guiding and whispering. So this is what came to me when I was thought about Robby and the question of beauty. When I first met Robby McCauley, she was a young teacher and I was completely as yet unformed to a certain extent as a young, closeted gay man of 22 years of age. It was 1974. Sound effect, yeah. We were 10. President Richard Nixon, it bears repeating, had resigned his presidency on August 9, 1974. That's when my class was beginning at NYU. The American presidency, quote, was the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office, unquote. The parallels to this time are disturbing and cautionary. A time of great turmoil in the mid-70s and uncertainty in this country and also in the lives of many who opposed the Vietnam War and were questioning their next move. So there was a movement, I think because we were so out there protesting against the war and now we were in the mid-70s, there was a movement towards an internal research, a more private investigation of self. And may I say that Robby at that time became one of the enablers, if I may say that in a positive way, of enabling this private investigation of self. The East Village was the most dangerous spot on earth on many levels. A performance renaissance was about to begin. I stood face to face with this beautiful, serious, gifted artist actor, intelligent, pensive, searching eyes. And then having written this, I'm speaking about myself as well. Pensive, searching eyes, trained and concentrated on mine. In that moment, I felt my whole being and desire to be an actor was in question, in a good way. Profound, profoundly deep and good. And there was born trust. A voice tutorial where I barely remember making a sound. Although what I do remember is my own abject terror and discomfort. The fierce determination and concentration of this beautiful young woman trying to get my locked jaw to open. There was beauty there, hovering and trembling, hovering in expectation and uncertainty. I was there for the taking. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale of breath. The body is a vessel, a vehicle, an infinite receptacle of breath and sound. Elemental, although to be expressed and articulated, a phrase, a sentence to be completed and communicated. Little did I know it would take 43 years to grasp what that even meant. Inhale, exhale, and how it could become a thread, a lifeline to some understanding and even a modicum of wisdom and beauty, transformation, transformative. And then I remember the ghosts in the room as we were remembering this morning at the hotel. Omar Shapley, Nora Dunphy, Peter Cass, Laurie Carlos, Fred Holland. Beauty. They were all embodiments of beauty and their spirits are still hovering in expectation over us as we sit here today. What if beauty is made? What if beauty is found? What if beauty and grace have a very much intimate relationship? What if beauty is made? What if beauty is found? What if beauty and grace have a very much intimate relationship? So I want to tell you two stories of being trained as an actor that were extracurricular, that had to do with two of my mentors, Laurie Carlos and Rodney McCauley. I was in a reading of Aisha Rock's mom's module in the Seiso playing the young son who comes in through the window, enraged and is like tearing up the house of his parents and yelling and supposed to be like, you know, young George Jackson energy Black Panther boy. And Laurie Carlos was to come in and direct this, but she was late on the train. So we had started working and I was with Aisha and the other actors and Laurie walked into the building and stood next to Aisha and watched as this scene was unfolding. And I was in it, y'all. And Laurie said to Aisha at this volume, oh, where do they teach them this? It's awful. It's just awful. And she came up to me and she grabbed me as I was acting right here. And she said, read one story, two. I have been cast in my first professional equity show St. Paul Minnesota Penelope Theatre Company. Robbie was directing. Laurie was, I was starring alongside Laurie Carlos, Lou Bellamy, Catherine Gagnon, or at least Yerbie was choreographing. It was an extraordinary birthing into the professional world. And I was performing as a young, homeless, spoken word artist poet. And I was stepping up on the little table and serving you the melodious voice, you know, giving you the rhythm and the blah, blah, blah. I was like, you know, serving beauty, what I thought beauty was. And the scene was done and there was a silence and I was like, yes. And I heard Robbie in the dark of the theater say, Daniel. And I said, yes, ma'am. And she said, come here. And I walked to the edge of the stage and got down, bent down, and she came face to face with me this close. And I tell this to every student that I teach as a performer. And she looked at me as I'm looking at you right now. And a long time went by. And in that moment, I had this feeling of myself at that age that I'd had since I'd gone into the world, left the sanctity of my home, my community where women were in charge, where it was a black environment where I knew myself through the reflection of the world. I had a sense that she was seeing behind the mask that I had made for myself. And that people were distrustful of me because of that mask. People were distrustful of me because I was a pretty boy. Distrustful of me because I was biracial and calling myself in a black context. Distrustful of me because of my intellect that I would turn down and dumb down. All of these distrustful things that I would put up this bullbark against. And she was standing there looking at me behind the mask that I was trying to use to act with. Right? And she leaned forward and she said, what are you afraid of? And I went... Right? And I started to feel this vibration in my body. And it was a vibration that sat right behind the same place that Lauria grabbed. And I said, I... I... And I took a breath in like that. And she yelled. She said, right now, play the scene. On that breath that I had taken in and I exhaled the first line and my world changed. And I came to understand that behind the mask there was, if you will, go with me here, a trembling matrix of concurrent impulses. Many things all at once that refused to be caged, refused to be boxed. And that if I were to allow myself to breathe into them, acknowledge them, and as she taught me, and this is the quote that I always come back to, seek not to resolve your contradictions, but rather to house them. And that was beauty to me. So for me, beauty is made. It is made in the gesture of outreach that we give as a mentor, as a friend, as a collaborator, as a student. It is found in the moments of vulnerability that we allow ourselves. And there is a deep relationship between that beauty and what I think of as being grace. And I can't know myself in the world without again saying thank you because you embody grace and that you saw me. And you know, this is the thing. We're all in this room together in Trump's America. Let's call it. We don't have to set beyond the boundary of our self-hood. We don't have to offer something to somebody that would cost us something. But you did. And Jessica Hagridhorn, you did. And Lori Carlos, she did. And so y'all became my little Holy Trinity demanding that I stand in myself, right? And that to me was evidence of what I think of when I think of beauty. It's made. We don't just find it. That's beautiful. Just the hoping about being where we are in America right now, I just want to share that and beauty, and who Robbie has always been, who Jesse has always been, who Dale has always been to me as well, who Pamela has always been to me. You know, there was this moment when when Jessica and I were talking weekly or every few days or whatever, trying to coordinate, plan, Lori's, you know, whatever. We were trying to just deal with things. And it was so great because Jessica's voice was always on the phone because there'd be many conference calls. And then Jessica was always the calm voice and I was always trying to be the, I was reverting back by the way. I was reverting back to this masculine kind of like, you know, I got it. I'm like, yeah, what do you get me to do? I'll take care of it kind of thing. And Jessica was like, you know, everything was calm and beautiful and wonderful. And it was this moment when I was at home and, you know, Lori was going through chemo and high on, what was the drug? What's the... Oxygen. Oxygen, right. And she, I was, she had called me, which was really crazy because, you know, honestly, you're going through, you're in chemotherapy right now and, you know, you're high on oxygen and, you know, you pick up a phone for me. I called him. You know, there's people who call me and it was such a prescient moment because she said, you know, and I answered, and I know she was high a little bit, but she was also Lori and she'd said, you know, she was like, Carl, she was like, these people, these faces, all these people on the TV, all this stuff, all these people that they've got out there now and all the people in the faces, this isn't new. We've been here before. All of this, we have been here, all of who they're electing and we have been here. We've seen them. They're speaking the same thing. They said it in 1960. I was there when they said it in 64. I heard it in 75. I heard it in 1980. It's the same faces and the same people and all I said was yes, Lori, the whole conversation. She was like, so do your work. That was the charge. Do your work. And the last bit, which was brilliant to me and so incredible was she said, you're not going to understand this, but I'm also going to tell you you are not your work, but do your work. And she was right. I didn't understand that at that moment. I didn't understand that until after passing. And then there was this incredible thing that somebody said about someone who's not forgettable. They were being asked about he was an actor, he was on TV and he had this, he was being interviewed. In fact, it was Morgan Freeman. Thank you. Thank you, Universe. It was Morgan Freeman and someone was interviewing Morgan Freeman about his PBS special about how he's investigating God and all this stuff. I don't know if you've seen that, Morgan Freeman's then he goes around the world and he's investigating the nature of God. And so they were in different spiritual practices and someone was interviewing him about whether you're an actor. You've taken on this project of going around the world to investigate the nature of God and to make this sort of episodic documentary. And he said, and they said, would you rather be acting or is it strange for you to kind of take on this role as a documentary filmmaker now or take on this role as a narrator. And he said, I'm not defined by my vocation. I define it. I'm not defined by the work I do. This is the work I'm doing right now. And tomorrow I'll get up and I'll make a film or I'll do whatever. You know what I mean? That's it. This moment doesn't define me. It does for you but it doesn't define me. You know, I'm fluid that way. You know what I mean? And so is Lori and so is Robbie. Beautiful. And we are at time. We're at time.