 I'm delighted to turn the microphone over to our guests right now, Sara Lee Tarot from Yellow Dog Design and MK Monley, who's an art teacher at the Thatcher Brook Elementary School, both from Waterbury. And they're going to talk about their work in Waterbury after Tropical Storm Irene, and really talking with us about the role of art in healing and recovery. So thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Sara Lee. And we're going to talk about a different angle of disaster relief. And it's a project that just developed. I was asking MK kind of on the way down here, how did this start? Who thought of this? Somebody's going to ask us, and I don't even know. But like so many things that happened in Waterbury and statewide after Irene, this just happened. We didn't know what we were doing. We just found our way through it. So I'm going to talk about the Flood Gates Project after Irene, the Flood Gates Project in Waterbury. And what I did, I'll start with what I did after the morning after Irene. I was lucky enough to be self-employed as an artist. So I decided to take the next two weeks and take half of my day every day and go downtown to where people had organized at the Thatcherbrook Primary School where MK teaches and just volunteer show up and see what they led me to do. And within a few days, I had put myself in the service of a family that I knew in middle sex who had been deeply affected by the flood. And they had several children. And they had lost a son to a motorcycle accident a few years before the flood. And their primary concern for me was to clean out the office and get all the photographs of their son. And there were lots of them. And they were all wet. And they were old style photos and get them out. And luckily, the son had come out. And I was laying them out and trying to separate them. And not ruin them by pulling the film off them. And I just, at that moment, realized the importance of another kind of disaster relief that you can't see. We've been talking about all day the physical disaster relief. And here I saw a family that was hurting because they were losing a direct contact to their lost son. And I realized there are a lot of ways. And it's very hard to track the emotional impact of a disaster, whether it's a flood, whether it's a fire, whether it's the kind of things that are happening now with the mass shootings and things. The best thing you can do is ask people in a very simple way to contribute their experience. And this is what we did with the floodgates project. So what we did was we had a very generous downtown businessman who had a space that had been flooded. And it's a retail space on Elm Street, right off Main Street. And he donated that space for the time that we needed to have this exhibition, which lasted a lot longer, I think, than we originally planned. And we made kits for very simple. We had no funding, no backup. It was just maybe four artists, four people. And the kits had a Ziploc gallon bag with a six by six tile made of melamine, masonite. That's what it is. And the instructions to any age, we encourage people who didn't consider themselves artists, especially to contribute to this, all ages. And MK was able to bring this into her classroom curriculum and have the kids do all their artwork. I can talk a little bit about that. So as the art teacher at the school, I was also president of revitalizing Waterbury at the time. So I was heavily involved in the recovery effort. But I had, you know, there are 400 kids that are elementary school and probably 75 families directly impacted by their houses being flooded. So I just opened it up to everyone as an option. You didn't have to do it, but you could if you wanted to. And many of the kids who weren't directly impacted had their friends who were directly impacted. So we got quite a few tiles that way, in addition to the community outreach we did with the kits. Yeah, and what you saw on the tables upstairs were mostly children's art, which I think was some of the most gratifying to see, because their art is innocent and honest the way children's art always is. But we got over what? Over 350 submissions, which blew us away. We also said that if you want to make something else, something on a different scale, to contribute to this exhibit, feel free, do it. There are no, you can do this in words. You can do this in any medium that you want to. Anything. And we got everything. We really did. We got poetry, and we've got collage, and we had stories that just, there was one that kept coming to mind that right on Elm Street, pretty much across the street from this venue that we got a hold of to do the show, and was Jeremy Ayers is a Vermont artist. And his grandfather grew up in this house, and his grandfather had been evacuated in the 27 flood by rowboat from the second story of this house. He got evacuated in his 90s by wheelchair during Irene from the same house. And the family made sure that they contributed tiles with that story on it to this show. It was one of the many, many, many stories. Each tile was like a window into a story. You know, it was amazing. And that gentleman died shortly after the same year of Irene. So it was really great that we got his story. I'm going to interrupt with one of my own. So the chair of the select board at the time her son was in, I don't know, fourth grade maybe. And his tile was very simple, nothing really when you look at it, it said home and something about him wanting people to be happy. And we placed it on the same panel as his mom's. And her tile was like a CD from FEMA or something like that that she had been given. And when she came in to view the show, she just burst into tears because her son was near hers and she had not been home at all over the past year because she had been so busy working on the recovery effort. And I have never been a part of an art show that had such an emotional connection to the people who viewed it. It was pretty intense. Yeah, I'd say that there were two experiences for anyone involved in that show. One was making your pieces. And lots of people made multiple pieces. But the other was what MK is talking about is you didn't know what was going to happen. You had a second experience coming in and seeing your piece among all these other works. And that brought up emotions that we couldn't anticipate. And it also brought people together. And this sounds corny, but it was really true. You weren't alone anymore. You created these pieces in your personal trauma, which as I was saying, nobody knows what their reaction is going to be compared to what your neighbors or your friends or your grandmothers reaction is going to be based on their human experience and their emotional capabilities or condition or whatever. It was quite a thing to man that show and have people come in. And then to that subject, we had a little room off to the side. So it's up there now. Do you see that? So there's Michael. That's Michael Vellanti, who became involved in the project. He's since passed. But he was, how do you, Michael, he's a passion. Michael became my new best friend, who I didn't all lived in the same town for over 30 years. And I'd never met him until this. And he was amazing. He did window design in Burlington and was a master at setting up a gallery. Kind of like a theater designer who had not gotten involved in theater. Any theater would have been glad to have him. He was so excited by this project that he took things and went above and beyond. And he had a lot of time. And he took this, we called it the response. The mud room. I call it the response room or the mud room. And there was a mud line from the flood. It's halfway up there. And we accentuated that all the way around, including the window. And this picture of the chair, he painted it with the mud and he put a set of a dozen roses on the seat. And then he painted that with the mud color. And he, what else did Michael do? He did a bunch of paintings of the houses on Randall Street that had been flooded. And he decorated our window and made a big banner out front. He made this whole show so professional, even though our intent was to do anything but professional. But his was kind of a surprise addition. And I think it impacted people differently, right? So Michael lives up in Waterbury Center, where I live up in Waterbury Center. And we weren't directly impacted, but our town was. And our home, I mean, it was, I must have made a dozen different pieces of art as a catharsis for myself, right? But it was, I don't know, I don't know how else. I think that your response to other people's experience was part of what your tiles were about because we were connected to so many people. I, yeah, I think that it brought the community together. And I want to read, the Arts Council gave me a set of questions that I got to elaborate on, and then they published it, thankfully, as a blog. So, but the last part of it is looking forward. And I know that it is easy to plan for physical needs post-disaster. Disaster, it's easier to try to set up funding for that sort of thing. It isn't so easy to set up for emotional mitigation or a way to help a community come back from a disaster emotionally and spiritually. It's hard to say, hey, we need funding for this, but it hasn't happened yet. You know, that's tough stuff. But if there can be discussions ahead of time. Well, let me just read this. If a community can plan for future disasters with a certain basic infrastructure, perhaps they can do a similar thing with emotional recovery. Group efforts like the Flood Gates Project help people realize that they are not alone, that others are with them in the trenches, both physically and emotionally. This is an immense comfort. It's also a valuable tool for making a town understand the magic of working together in yet another way. This is truly a lasting legacy. All of this prior effort can be handy when the time comes to implement it. To some citizens, this may seem superfluous until we need it. That's pretty much it. Yep. Do you have anything? No, I think. It comes to mind. Any questions? Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.