 Hi, this is All Things LGBTQ, our interview show. We'd like to acknowledge that we're taping in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded indigenous land. And I'd like to welcome you to the show. If you have any suggestions about who you'd like to see interviewed here, please let us know, and we'd be glad to check it out. Thanks for coming, and I hope you enjoy the show. I'm here with Eva Weiss, photographer extraordinaire. Thank you for joining us, Eva. It's great to be here. Let's start with your illustrious biography. Eva Weiss grew up in Philadelphia and received her BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1971. Eva's work has been exhibited and published internationally since 1972. She received a Creative Arts Program Services Grant in 1976. Her creative collaboration with Split Bridges Performance Troop, and we'll talk a little more about that later, has been exhibited extensively in New York City, Amsterdam, and London. Eva's still life work has been featured in many editions of Vogue Italia, particularly between 1987 and 1991. Eva has documented creative dance and performance artists since 1970. For over 30 years, she has created a body of work that focuses on performance artists on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, David Kale, Lisa Crone, Deb Margolin. That's an impressive list. This work has appeared on four book covers. Which Fam 1995, Intimate Acts 1997, and Must See 2008. A complete body of her work on Lois Weaver, including the back and front cover, will appear in the definitive book on the artist, which is called, The Only Way Home is Through the Show. It includes images from a 35 year photographic collaboration with performance artist, writer, and director Lois Weaver. And I was able to attend this exhibit, the Museum of the City of New York, featured four of Eva's images of wild performers at the exhibit, Gay Gotham in 2017. Those are great photos. A series of Eva Weiss' photographs of lesbian feminist performers was included in the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit in Barcelona in 2019. You've been busy. Let's start, if we may, with some early photographs. I'd like to show the audience now two photographs of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. As the audience may know, they were the founders of the Bill T. Jones-Arnie Zane dance company, which was founded in 1982. And Arnie Zane died in 1988. So you see the pictures now before you. Bill T. Jones is the person with short hair and Arnie Zane is the person with curly hair. You all hailed from upstate New York when you first met. They were in Binghamton and you were in Rochester. Tell us a little about these photos, if you would. Okay, well, I photographed them just in the beginning of their relationship. And so it's very innocent and romantic and lovely. And I met both of them through Bill's sister, Rodessa Jones, who is also a fabulous performer. And we were all kind of like crazy hippies upstate New York, not very sophisticated, but we all started gravitated towards each other. And I especially had a special relationship with Arnie Zane, mostly because of our photography, we bonded over and we were always taking pictures of each other and taking pictures of our friends and just having fun with photography. And Bill was just starting to really get into dance very seriously. And so at one point, Arnie wanted me to do portraits of the two of them together. And he wanted them to be news. It was his idea, basically. And I mean, later, in late 70s, I got into doing more male nudes, but at that time those were the only ones I did. And I was a little bit, after I processed the film, I was really unsure of them. They looked like they were underexposed and I never really printed them or did anything with those negatives. And I feel bad now because Arnie never really saw them. But just recently, I've reunited with Bill T and he was like, even if you have any pictures of us together, I would really love that. And so I started like rummaging through my archives and I found these negatives and I scanned them and with the computer, you could just pull out all this detail and I was able to do that. And I got these beautiful prints and I gave them to Bill and he was so happy and I just love those pictures. So that's the story about those pictures. I should add that they were shot in 1971. Yes. And that they'll be included in a documentary. Can you bring it? Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, which is the title of a piece that Bill choreographed after a company member died of AIDS. So it should be a great film. I can't wait to see it when it comes out. Yeah, I feel really honored that I'm gonna be part of, maybe a two second flash on the screen, but nevertheless, I'm glad I'm gonna be part of it. Sure, let's step back for a minute and talk about you if we could personally. How did you become interested in photography? Well, it was my mother really. She was interested in photography as a girl and she took a couple classes and learned her way around the darkroom and she had one of those early Kodak snapshot cameras with the bellows, you know, it was a roll film camera. So one of the first roll film cameras. So the negatives were like, you know, huge and they were like postcard size. So she used to print them on a contact printer and she just had, you know, basket full of prints, little tiny black and white prints. And I was just fascinated with all these pictures. They were all from the 30s, you know, she was still hadn't married my father yet. So they were all pictures of her friends on a beach, you know, I was just fascinated and I would just rummage through all these pictures all the time and that's how I got fascinated with photography and then as a teenager she kind of showed me how to use a darkroom and I just got more and more interested in it and, you know, they got me my first camera and I was more of a artist like a draftsman and, you know, painter in high school but I was really, I really wanted to study photography. So my parents sent me to photography school which at that time there were not many schools that focused on fine art photography but RIT had a program for that. So that's where I went. So you lived seven years or so in Rochester and then you moved to New York City? Well, actually I lived in Rochester for 12 years. I stayed there after I graduated. So I was there in school for four years and then I stayed, you know, another, I don't know how many years I stayed, five years. And yeah, I just loved it up there, I loved it. I'm slow on the math too. I just loved it up there. I had really great group of friends. They're still my friends today and but I knew, you know, I just knew instinctively I had to leave Rochester. It was just like I was sort of stagnating with my photography and my visual creativity. And I felt like I just needed to come down to New York and I'm really glad that I did because then I met the people from WoW and the rest is history. Right, and that's another important chapter of your professional history begins with the WoW Cafe and Split Bridges. Let's look at some pictures from that period which is a really rich period of lesbian history if you ask me. The first very striking iconic photograph I'd like the audience to look at is Butch Femme, The Kiss. Who are the people in this photograph, Eva? Okay, it's Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw is the Butch woman and Lois Weaver with long blond hair. And then it was kind of one of those accidental photographs that just happens off the cuff for me sometimes and it turned out to be like one of my more famous pictures that people just know about and whether they know I took it or not they just know the photograph. It's iconic really. Huh, yeah. It's iconic really. Yeah, it's just so funny. It's been printed everywhere like and very little photo credit. But it's just the way it is though. They steal things off the computer and illustrate a blog, but that's just the way it is. But I just love that picture and it just sort of catches them at this moment and I just didn't plan it. It just kind of happened. We went over to Deb's house to do a photograph of Upwardly Mobile Home and just like in between shots I asked them if they would do a photograph of them kissing and that's when I got that photograph. Well, Upwardly Mobile Home is gonna come up in a moment but first I suppose I should explain for maybe for some audience members that Split Bridges was founded in New York in 1980 by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw two of the people in this photograph and also Deb Margolin whom you just mentioned. And the Wow Cafe, Shaw and Weaver founded in 1982 I believe and Wow stands for Women's One World. And if- Can I just make an addition to that because people always leave out these two women and I have to give them their props. Pamela Kham and Jordy Mark were also- Me too. Yeah, they were founders also of the Festival, what the Wow Festivals and also the beginnings of the Wow Cafe. So the festivals began and developed into the Wow Cafe, is that right? Can you, you went to the second festival? Can you tell us a little about that? Yeah, and I went, I found my peeps. This is where I belong. Oh, oh, oh, yeah. Well, the Wow now resides on East 4th Street and one of the founders said lesbian and feminism were not issues. They were givens in this theater and it was a venue for performance and spectacle and camp. And you were part of it. Yeah. How did you happen to become part of it? I became a big part of it. Yeah, I mean, I started out mostly doing photographs and it was a great collaboration because a lot of them use my photographs as promotional images for their plays. But then after a certain amount of time, you just can't be involved with Wow before they push you up onto the stage. I see pictures of you performing. Yeah, I started singing because I really love to sing and I just, that's when I started singing and it's always been really fun. I was in one of Holly Hughes's show called The Lady Dick and I think I sang about four songs in that show. And then I had like a long reprieve without doing any performing but about five years ago, I got to perform at the Wow reunion which was so much fun. I mean, I just had a blast, you know, it was so much fun for me. You know, because visual art, you know, you do this, you put a lot of effort into it, maybe you'll get a little feedback, you know, once in a while. But when you're up on the stage, it's like, it's so immediate. You know, I can see why people love being performers, you know, because it's just, it means love, you know. Speaking of performances, let's look at a picture now of upwardly mobile home, which is Lois the blonde, Peggy in the middle and Deb Margolin in the red dress. Tell us about this production, if you would. I love that show. They only put up that production once. And I've always been hoping they would bring it back. It's about three performance artists living under the Brooklyn Bridge, because they're homeless. And it's really hilarious. And Deb's character is still going to work as an office worker. So she's in, you know, a suit through most of the show. And then at a certain point in the show, she starts doing a striptease and she starts taking off the suit and underneath the suit, she has that red ball gown on. It was stuffed inside the suit. That's great. And they only performed it one time. That's why it's theater for you. Yeah, I wish they would do that show again. It was just fabulous. And Peggy's character was Mother Gojham. I love it. She was just this crazy, you know, since she's like the mother of us all, really Peggy. So, you know, she's really like the dad. She's really like the dad of everybody, but they both are like mom and dad. But, and Lois was in the green dress. She was, that was the night that her character of Tammy, why not, was born. Tammy, why not? I saw references to that. Now she's still doing Tammy, why not? That's become like a major character that she still performs. Well, let's look at another picture of Lois Weaver called Lois Weaver Rollers. And here she appears. Tell us about this photo. Now that's another photograph that was a total accident. And it just, it's such a wonderful photograph. It's become really iconic. It's been shown all over the world and it's on the cover of Lois' book. And it happens like this. I was going over to their house on East 4th Street and I was gonna shoot promo pictures for this play called Beauty and the Beast. And Lois' character wears this sort of salvation army outfit with a suit and that Superman emblem. We see the S here. Yeah, and she wears a little hat that also has a Superman thing on it and little ring-like curls. So I went over there and I like, it's the kind of place where there's like no doorbell. So you have to like yell up and they throw down the keys in a sock so you can open the door. I've been to plays like that, sure. It's just typical East Village stuff. And she leans out Lois, leans out the window and she's got those pink rollers in her hair. And I went, wait, don't take those rollers out. And I went upstairs and I was like, this is a shot. And I made it down and that's when I got that photograph. And it's just become like, along with the kiss, it's become like one of those iconic pictures. Let's look at Carmelina Tropicana now if we may. She was originally Alina Toriano. And you knew her then. She's a Cuban-American stage and film lesbian actor who started at Wow. And here she is holding a beach ball. Tell us about this picture if you would. Yeah, Alina is really a trip. She's wonderful. Still performing? Oh yeah, yeah, she performs all the time. She was not performing then. I think she was working for the city on the city council or something. And we had a, we did a lot of benefits for the cafe. And we had this one benefit. It was called Christmas at Coney Island in a snowstorm. It was like, oh, maybe, yeah, it was a huge snowstorm. And all of the benefits have like a theme and people dressed up for according to the theme. And so of course, Carmelina, you know, wore an outfit to go to the beach with. Her sister who is Ella Toriano, a wonderful filmmaker, her sister's boyfriend loved to dress Alina up in costumes. So he got that outfit together with the grass skirt and the bathing cap. And so that was the first time Alina got up on the stage and started doing the hula dance. And she got like totally enamored with being up on stage and having girls like yell at her and scream. And so I could see the appeal. That's the night that Carmelina was born. And you know, it's like, you've got to let me take pictures of you and that outfit. So she came up to Brooklyn and we did a sitting and that's how I got that picture. That's wonderful, Eva. And I really appreciate you're coming on the show and being willing to share all this rich lesbian history and a little record of your career. But I'm hoping you'll be able to come back again to talk in greater detail about it. Okay, I don't know what more I can say about it. Well, you can tell us about the exhibit in which I believe you took shots of these people in their youth and then as they aged. Okay. I mean, there's a lot we have to talk about, but I really appreciate you're giving us the first installment today. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi everybody, I'd like to introduce Sam Stockwell, who is a resident of Barry Vermont, I believe. And I would like to read a bio. So we'll know a little bit about her before we start. Some, most people may know who are already, but for those who don't, Sam Stockwell lives in Vermont. She has published in Agni, Claw Shares, and The New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals and Recital, won the National Apology Series USA and the Editors Prize at Alexa Earth. Recent poems are in Gargoyle and a literary review and are forthcoming in Plume and others. She is an MFA from Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and has taught poetry and English at the New England Young Writers Conference and Community College of Vermont. She has read her poetry in California, Massachusetts and Vermont. She and her wife live in a small community with a large and poorly behaved dog. So let me introduce everybody to Sam Stockwell. So, Sam, how long have you been writing? And, you know, when did you first start just loving poetry? Was that your first love or did you start in other places? I've always loved writing poetry from, and I've always loved writing in words from my earliest memories. I remember reading Harold and the Purple Crown when I was quite young and thinking, what a wonderful thing that someone could do that. How wonderful it is to be able to use words. I don't really know where we got Harold in the Purple Crown because my family didn't have a lot of books and they were pretty poor, but somehow that came over the doorstep and that was a great experience for me. So I've always probably more or less seriously or with great thought since I was adolescence written poetry. So did you, and you went to Goddard and how was your experience there? Was it in the heyday of Goddard or was it later? It was Goddard in the 70s, so it was a great time to be a Goddard. And that was where I came out. So it was a great place to come out. Every lesbian in the country went through Goddard at some point, it was the place to be. So that was a terrific experience. Yeah, and I also heard like a lot of people like Chris Williamson and you know, all went through Goddard at that period. So I bet it was really exciting to be there. It was pretty interesting. It was an education that you could never redo. And the master's program was terrific. I went straight from getting my BA to the master's program and that was just so much fun. I keep wanting to redo that in some way. You know, I can't really, but that was a great experience. I learned so much that, you know, I think about those times and how much I learned from it and how important it was. It was very exciting times to live through, I think. Oh yeah, 70s, wow. Everything exploded. And do you have a writing schedule? Do you like to write at certain times? I try to write in the morning because I'm freshest then and it's before the, I teach at CCV, so that, and I now teach you entirely online. So that's a lot of writing. So I try to have a little time to myself in the morning to do writing of my own before I do the other things that I'm doing. That works pretty well, I think. And then I can think about it throughout the day. You know, especially if I'm struggling with some piece of writing, if I read it in the morning or reread it and go over it, then if I have spare time during the day, I can go back with it. Oh yeah, I see what's wrong with it now. Does something, do you usually like it inspired or do you kind of force yourself to sit there until you think of something? Or I mean, how does that work for you? It's a combination. Often I just say, just practice writing. Write something, write four lines at a minimum. And other times, I'm inspired and something really is boiling over that I want to write about. That's wonderful. I love that. I like it when it comes really easy. It's the hard ones. I love the creative process, but for me, I don't really like editing. I don't know how you feel about it, but I don't find that, I find it necessary, but not an exciting part of the, you know, work. Sometimes I'm excited by editing because I discover something. I discover a connection or I look at it and say, oh, here's the piece that's missing. And that is, I do like that part, or this will make it perfect. Okay, it doesn't, but it's a nice moment to have. And you got your MFA and how did that affect you writing? Did it really change how you looked at writing or how you presented your poetry? Did you find that you really learned a lot and was it a good experience? I was really young then, so it's a hard question to answer. I went straight from having the BA to the MFA program. So I was like 23 maybe. And I'd spent my BA years also writing and I'd worked with Daughters Inc, do you know what, okay. So I'd worked with Daughters, I'd worked with various people and I'd worked with Louise Glick and Ellen Voight who were at Goddard at that point in time. So I was already had a process for writing. I don't know that the MFA changed it. It just sort of deepened my sense of how you can make something better and exposed me to writers I wouldn't have heard of otherwise. So in part of my life, I was in a lesbian community that included daughters and folks from Sagoras and the lesbian community at Goddard. And then I was in this writing community that was completely separate. Separate group of people with a separate aesthetic. So that those kept bumping up against each other and I think that was useful for me. So it was the exposure to a process of revising and to considering what was real and also just an exposure to, you know, John Berryman. I had dropped out of high school but I had been literate, you know. So I was reading poetry all along but I didn't really know what to read. I read whatever came along. But once I was in at Goddard then I was exposed to, you know, Rimbaud and Berryman and Louise Bogan and people had never heard it before. And Mary Ann Moore. So it was great. It was great to have those voices and to see the different ways they handle their material. I mean, it still is. So did you go right into teaching after that or did you kind of flow through different jobs first or? A lot of flow. I don't know if you could call it flow. It could call it more like jerkiness. You know, it came from people with very little money and if I'd been smarter I would have gotten a practical degree and done something practical, but I never did. So it's taken me a long time to have any practical skills. So I jumped from here and there. I was part of starting the blood root collective in Connecticut and. Oh, that's exciting. Oh God, running a restaurant. It's a special kind of hell but it did give me some practical skills, which I could use. And then I got another master's. You know, I was sort of bumping around. I was just so tired of being poor all the time. Something I've never completely succeeded in getting out of but I got a master's degree in special education so I could go and teach and have a steady income. And that was good. That was a good plan. So that brings us to the article. And I noticed it in some of your work as well. The article you just wrote in Digger last month, I think it was. Yes, yes. Having to do with IDD people. And so I imagine that you probably did some work with people since that's what the article seemed to be saying. And so, and I said, excuse me, I can see in some of your work how it's that experience impacted some of your work. So is that something you find or? Oh, is it? Yeah, it had a huge impact on my life. So once I had a special degree, I ended up working. I ran some group homes. I ran day programs for folks with IDD. So that was very, you know, I knew it was like to be poor. I had a very clear sense of what was likely poor and very clear sense of what it was like to be queer. I didn't have as much sense of what it was like to have a disability and what happened as a result of that. You know, the kinds of life choices people just never had. So, yeah, it was very formative. And for a while, we were going to institutions, taking people out of institutions because the institutions were being sued. So there was a, you know, there's a residential program here in Vermont and we're taking them from New Hampshire to Vermont so they could get out of the institution. And yeah, people's lives there were just incredible. They would end up in an institution because they were orphaned at a young age and there was no other place for them to go. And they'd be there for like 23 years or someone misdiagnosed them. They were deaf. They had cerebral palsy. It was amazing. Well, it sounds like, you know, it has impacted your life on many levels and that's really nice. And I love reading about it. So I think we have about five minutes left. I know time flies when you're having fun, but. And I love interviewing you. It's great to see you. Would you mind reading a poem for us? And I think we'll leave that as your final say here and I'm looking forward to it. So if you want to give us a little intro to the poem, that would be fantastic. Okay, so I was working in a school system briefly and I love teachers, but this poem does not necessarily reflect kindness towards teachers. You know, I also see children really suffering in school systems for various reasons because they're just a little different. This program is called First Period It Was In The Literary Review. Brave Mrs. Kenley turns her back on the first grade and like a grass fire from raw blade to raw blade, enmity spreads. Mr. Hawkins twists paper clips around his knuckles. Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Hall sit at their stern desk, squinting at long absent children, shuttering at the mirage of Theodore, his head clean and empty as a silver pond. No cultivated seed who would his acre, no stray fact lodged between his teeth. The void must be extracted, that was the clock for Theodore. Mrs. Thompson remembers him without even the fondness one feels for a good meal. Thank you, Sam, that was very beautiful. Thank you. I could feel it. Thank you so much for coming on and will you come on again sometime in the future? I'd be delighted to. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So, for today, COVID, it all sounds, feels so familiar. It's like we've been through this pandemic before and for those of us in the LGBTQ plus community, we lived through HIV and AIDS and it would seem as though there were things that we learned during that pandemic that we could be using now and are we truly using it? And what are the similarities? And so, when I thought about who to talk to, there was one person who came to the forefront. She is a nurse practitioner. She trained at UPM as a nurse and then went on to get her degree as a nurse practitioner. She was involved in the founding of Vermont Cares, outright Vermont, the Community Health Center which was then the People's Free Clinic in the Ongan River Co-op. This is someone whose opinion and judgment I trust to be truthful and honest. Please help me welcome dear old friend, Debra Petzko, who some people may know as Gooch. So welcome. Hello. So now it's to you. Okay, yes, dear. So, HIV and AIDS, you have spent time working at the Fenway Community Health Center in Boston which was the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Health Center. It was the first place where a person with HIV was diagnosed in Boston. You then came to Vermont. You were our first director of our AIDS program. Do you see similarities between the response that is being given to COVID and the response that was given to HIV and AIDS? Oh, absolutely. I think that this administration doesn't want to believe that this is a problem. I think the administration back then certainly didn't care that it was a problem. I think one of the differences is that nice, white, older people are dying. And so you would think nice, white, older sexual people, heterosexual people are dying. And so you would think that maybe there'd be more of a response. But the reality is that in this, as in the past pandemic, the people who are affected most are people of color, people who live on the fringes of the wealthy society that other people live in. And people who have adequate healthcare. Right. Is there a disproportionate impact of COVID on the LGBTQ plus communities? Or do we even have data? I don't think we have the data. We clearly don't have the data. I really think that this time it's so socioeconomic factors and probably factors of racism that are affecting people more than LGBT stuff. And I was gonna say in the early part of COVID, the targeted population seem to be seniors in assisted living communities. And we're invisible in those environments. Oh, absolutely. And I think that again is that one, people were not paying enough attention. And two, this is a new virus. It's a novel virus. People weren't all that sure how it was transmitted similar to when we called HIV grid. And all we knew was that it was gay disease. It takes a while to the science to catch up. And unfortunately, in this case, nobody really cares what science is saying. That sort of feeds into some of the thoughts that I've been having recently that I remember in the early days of HIV and AIDS and we were both working side by side at that point here in Vermont trying to go out and educate. And what we seem to be confronting more than anything else was a sense of fear based upon all the unknowns. And then the misinformation that came as a result of that. As a piece of COVID, you have been one of the people answering hotlines. Are you seeing that same kind of process with the questions that people were calling and asking of you? I think that's true. I think that there's a lot of disinformation out there from the top of the leadership down. I also think one of the differences is that in the beginning of HIV or what we knew about HIV, there's a lot of science going on and it was mostly well thought out and kept to the scientific method. The studies were happening and they weren't blasted all over the newspapers all the time. People waited until studies were done to say that AZT work is a medication. These days, we get all sorts of information about medications that are not gonna work. There's a new one now that clearly won't work. We get pieces of information about vaccines and then two days later, we hear that in fact that wasn't the truth. And so it's hard for people to trust when we hear things prematurely and only the little bits of the science. And I think that's probably worse now than it was then, although we were fighting people like Anthony Fauci then because we wanted more information, he was probably right not to give it to us. I was gonna say, I clearly remember there would be meetings with the CDC in Atlanta or in Washington, DC and that the AIDS forums where the advocates would be sitting in the room saying, we know you're doing this trial or we know you're doing this research, when are you going to share that information? So now you had just mentioned vaccines and that's something of real interest to me. I mean, looking at their just now thinking that they've got some interventions for HIV and we've been playing with that since the early 80s, here is this incredible fast track for COVID. Are they being able to use some of the research methodology that they had done with HIV and AIDS as a retrovirus and then employ that to help advance their COVID research faster than what has been the norm? I think the things we learned about HIV and the things we learned about T cells and immune systems have been great leaps in all science. I mean, it's taught us things about cancers, it's taught us things about all the viral illnesses. Yeah, a lot got done then, a lot of breakthroughs, a lot of understanding of things that now are common knowledge. I mean, the people know what a T cell are, T cells are. I mean, it's in the newspaper. We didn't know what they were there or we didn't know a whole lot about them. So yeah, I think that that is now knowledge that we didn't have 30 years ago. And some of us learn to discriminate on testing, learning what predicted value. Exactly, yeah. So, now I was gonna say, looking at the current conversation about COVID testing, that reminded me so much about the conversation between the Elijah and the Westerblot test for HIV and AIDS. If somebody were wanting to go have COVID testing, what should they ask for in regards to the test itself that's being done? Well, I think here in Vermont, the tests are all polymerized chain reaction, they're all PCR and they're all very well vetted tests. I think some of the stuff that's coming out now about saliva tests, about at home tests, I haven't seen the science on it yet. It makes me a little nervous. It's like the first acutest that came out for HIV and AIDS, looking at what was the ratio of false negatives and false positives. Okay, so the PCR is the nasal swab. Yeah, not a whole lot of fun, but it's accurate. Which is exactly what we want. Right. I remember in the early days of HIV and AIDS public education, there were some very simple, very direct messages that we gave to people about what it would take for them to stay safe for themselves, their partners, whoever. Is there a similar message now for COVID? Hey, clear. Wear a mask and wash your hands and stay socially distant. I think the data is very clear. That if everybody wore masks and everybody washed their hands and nobody got too close to each other, and those who were sick stayed home, we'd be done. If the date is clear, that if we all did that for three months, the virus would be minimal. But we're not. And the other piece associated with that, and for which there's been a lot of publicity, is contact tracing. And Vermont seems to be doing it right. If I am someone who is called by the Department of Health saying you have been in contact with, what is it that I can expect? So contact tracing is something that's been a public health tool since the days of syphilis. It's been around forever. And health departments are very good at it. And our health department is particularly good at it. We have people who have been doing it for years. The folks who are doing, who are running it now are the same folks who did it for syphilis and gonorrhea and HIV. So they know what they're doing. Basically someone will call and say, someone who you have been in contact with, I won't tell you who or where or when has COVID. And we'd like to know who you've been in contact with in the last two weeks in case you were infected. You'll be asked to be tested and you'll be asked to quarantine if that test is positive. Yeah, I don't know if that information that they gather about me is confidential information. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, the other thing that's being promoted right now, and this will actually be our final question, is Anthony Fauci is saying the flu season is coming up. People should get a flu vaccine. It asks someone who is deemed at risk, when should I get that flu vaccine so that it offers the greatest degree of protection possible for me? You know, in other years, I would have said wait till October because in Vermont we have flu usually into the spring and you wanna just still have some potency. This year, we probably will ask people to have a vaccine earlier. I don't know if the vaccine is ready yet, but my guess is that sort of mid September is when people are gonna wanna be vaccinated. I think, you know, the good news and the bad news is if you're wearing a mask and washing your hands and staying away from people, you're probably at less risk for flu as well, but we still want you to be vaccinated. And the only the last thing is, you know, we're in a state where we're up a portion of the population does not believe in vaccines. And so even when we get a COVID vaccine, our next job will be to get people vaccinated because if people aren't vaccinated, then the vaccine doesn't work. And with that, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you've done for LGBTQ health care over the years. Thank you for being a valued family member. Thank you for your honesty and integrity. Thank you. So that was our show for this week. Thank you for joining us and Linda. And as our weekly reminder, do not forget to resist.