 I've been working in Portland Arts organizations now for over 20 years, and I've been very lucky. I've had a lot of experiences in museums, in classical music, in the theater, and so when I knew that this position was open and I was in the market, I was interviewing at different places, it really jumped out at me. It's an interesting position because we're brand new. We're a brand new organization as a non-profit, we've only been around a couple of years, and yet we've also got all of the habits and baggage of anyone who's been around 10 years. So I joke that it's just the best of both worlds some days in a challenge where you get to break bad habits and forge new things and that's one of the challenges that we're in right now is growing and defining who we are and crafting that vision for the future while honoring and respecting everything that we've built in the past. We have a historic building here. It's not a landmark, but it's been around a long time and it is completely limited in its space. There's not a lot of room to grow, there's no backstage. You know, we're very, very confined within our walls, so to speak. I don't think we're going to be busting out into Longfellow Square anytime soon and moving Henry's statue and expanding, which means we need to live within the realities of our space. What is truly amazing about our performance space and the audience space is that most auditoriums are more long and narrow and you're all focused in on this small narrow point in the front. Ours is more wide and open. The stage can be a little larger or a little smaller depending on what's needed. But the effect is that it feels more like you're in someone's living room. Any seat in the house, you're never more than 40, 50 feet away from the performer and the balcony gives you this tremendously close intimate view and it creates an interesting dynamic. The acoustics are really very good considering it wasn't designed, you know, by a world-famous acoustist and it still has a nice resonance and it's a beautiful room for seeing folks. What it gives you is a chance to have that one-on-one experience with an artist. You know, I'm up on that stage most nights that we're open and I see the faces. You can literally recognize every face in the crowd and I know the artists feel it too. You hear them talking to people, there's a real rapport that doesn't always happen in a 200-seat house. You know, even though it's 200 seats, it's a whole different feel to it. Focusing on the audience to me is the most important thing because if we're not responsive to the community, then we're not really doing our job. If ticket sales aren't covering a significant portion of what we do, then we're not listening to the marketplace. So there's a challenge. At one hand we want to make sure that we're doing shows, we're bringing in artists who sell themselves and Junior Brown does. You know, people love Junior Brown. He's such a character in the country music world and he doesn't tour very often. He hasn't been in Maine in years. So that's a perfect example of all we had to do was send out a newsletter that said, Junior Brown is coming. We sold out in about six weeks time. Very good. But there are other shows that we need to educate our audience. We need to bring them along. We need to let them know you may not know who Lake Street Dive are, but you're going to. And lo and behold, you know, the audience builds after show after show. And what happened this fall is they came for the third time and suddenly it was a sold out show, unexpectedly. We produce ourselves about 160 performances a year and then also partner with people on additional performances and are available for rentals. Some of those are actually bands that rent out our space and sell their own tickets or we sell them for them but give them the money for it. So we tend to be full about 250 nights a year. It's important too that we keep a diversity of music styles. We don't just have one type of music. And actually the board behind me is just a couple months. It gives you the idea of that incredible chaos that we experience every single month here. But we work very hard to make certain that there's something for different audiences. You know, so are we doing blues? Are we doing jazz? Do we have classical this month? Are there programs for children? We really try to keep that range open all the time. Our goal is that we keep our ticket prices down. We love that young people come in here. We love that senior citizens come in here and again families come in here. So we want those ticket prices to be affordable. But we also want to make sure that we're challenging our audience, bringing new artists in and testing our marketplace, seeing what people want and what they respond to. So it's really just trying to create that vibrant future that's in our potential.