 look fabulous or what? To the Sammys, my name is Austin Sarrett. I have the privilege of serving on the Jones Library Board of Trustees. It's really an honor to be here tonight and a thrill to have the opportunity to honor the cultural and literary achievements of our distinguished guests. This is the fifth annual Sammys celebration and I want to give a shout out to uh uh FDA and Matt and Claudia who really is nothing worse than premature applause. The Sammys was really the brainchild of Matt and Claudia and they've done amazingly good work with the library and in all their endeavors in town. Tonight we have the privilege of celebrating uh Madeleine Blaze and the Amherst Regional High School Theater Program under the direction of John Bechtel. The theater program is also being represented here tonight by three distinguished participants, Cecilia Deuville-Baudin, Zach Ellis, and I know I'm going to get it wrong, Louie Triggs. Through their contributions to the written word and to the nurturing of a vibrant artistic life in our educational institutions, these distinguished individuals enrich our community. You'll hear more about them in a few minutes but let me say that the Jones Library Board of Trustees and staff are absolutely delighted to publicly recognize of their extraordinary talents and commitments and let me say on behalf of the Board of Trustees a special thanks to the staff of the Jones and all of the volunteers that make the Sammys a wonderful moment to celebrate Amherst's three great libraries. The Sammys give us an opportunity once a year to come together and to reflect on the meaning of the libraries to this town and the meaning of our libraries to this town are quite profound. I've said in the past and believe that our libraries are places of hope. They're places that knit our community together and that offer opportunities for mixing of ages and classes and backgrounds that are unparalleled elsewhere in the town. The libraries bring our town together and they preserve our past and they point us towards the future and each of them is loved in its own way. The Jones as you know is one of the busiest libraries in the state of Massachusetts. The North Amherst Library and the Munson play critical roles in their communities and in their neighborhoods. But as I said we're here tonight to celebrate these libraries and to present the fifth annual Samuel Minot Jones Awards for Literary Achievement. As you know we finally call these awards the Sammys. These awards are presented annually to members of our community who make a difference in the lives of all of us who treasure the written word and who believe that Amherst is an extraordinary place to be and to live in part because it is a community that treasures the arts. There are many volunteers and donors to thank. I want especially to recognize our primary underwriter, People's Bank. All in the Samby since its inception we're extremely grateful to our main sponsors Barry Roberts and TD Bank. Our event sponsors include Amherst College, the Davis Financial Group, the Financial Development Agency, Fine Gold Alexander Architects, Greenfield Savings Bank, Hampshire College, Pascucci and Tazeira and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. We come together to celebrate but I need to introduce a sad note. Coach Ron Moyer has suffered a family tragedy. His daughter Kristen died unexpectedly on Tuesday. Please join me in a moment of silence and remembrance. Thank you. Coach Moyer, as you know, played a central role in Madeline Blaise's book. So as we celebrate Madeline's distinguished achievement, we note this absence in our midst. Okay, one other note. After we conclude the awards presentation, we hope that you will join our honorees and Mika Archer, the talented illustrator who created this year's Sammy's Art Print here on stage for a book signing. Books are available for purchase in the library. Thanks to Nat Harold and Amherst Jewels. And once you have your book signed, please enjoy coffee and a chocolate confection on the patio. Okay. In lieu of our state representative who could not make it tonight, I'm pleased to call to the stage Louis Tricks. So Solomon doesn't normally write down his speeches beforehand but he's done so for us tonight since he can't be here. And he begins with a parenthetical, which includes a quote, so, from a practical handbook for the actor. The theatre may now be the only place in society where people can go to hear the truth. School in the end is about teaching our children how to live in the world, thoughtfully, knowledgeably, and genuinely. Despite the importance of academic subjects, there are few enterprises that cut to the core of what it even means to be human, the way theatre does. I have known John Bechtold and the ARHS Theatre Company since I myself was at ARHS. I learned more about myself than I would have ever guessed I might by being in the cast of a semi-immersive, a Midsummer Night's Dream. That experience and the theatre training I did in college because of it gave me the communication skills to run for state rep. But I've also seen firsthand how the ARHS theatre program gives every student it touches similar skills and much needed confidence. In politics, as in theatre, communication is everything. But communication is crucially important for almost any route one might take through life. If ARHS alumni are to get internships and jobs, they need strong interviewing skills. To get anyone to have confidence in them, they need to have confidence in themselves. For those increasing number who seek social change, they can only get their ideas taken seriously if they project confidence in their ideas as well. Theatre also promotes team working skills, particularly in the context of ARHS's program. John gives students incredible flexibility and room for self-direction, and our students learn far more through that kind of empowerment than they ever would if given strict instruction or rote memorization. The fact that students were able to run aspects of the program during Bechtold's recent sabbatical speaks to that extra level of leadership he possesses, not only being able to bring a program to great accomplishments or to have an individual impact as a mentor, but to successfully train others to do the same. Some of the most confident, active and effective communicators I've seen at ARHS in recent years have been involved with the theatre company. That means an incredible amount for our community and for our community's impact on the world. Aside from which, ARHS actors and techies never fail to put on spectacular shows. Some directed by students, some making both actors and audience rethink the physical space of ARHS itself, some incorporating more than a hundred kids in various avenues of involvement. This isn't only useful educationally, the shows Bechtold and his students put on often have the potential to make audience community members think differently, feel inspired, increase their connection to the aspects of the world they find meaningful, and in this way the program is a gift to Amherst and the literary community. Thank you all for being here tonight to support literary endeavors such as this, and please give a huge round of applause to one of our stars, John Bechtold. First I want to thank Louis for standing in for Solomon, and I think you can see already the effects of Solomon's words on that wonderful speech there, and I wish Solomon was with us. He was a member of the theatre company as he mentioned, and I love the last fleeting image that I saw of him in the theatre company was as a fairy in a Midsummer Night's Dream that he named himself Clover, and he was prancing around the kind of middle courtyard of the school, and whenever I see him in state representative mode that's the image that flashes so thank you. It's an honor to accept an award from the biggest contributor in literary culture in our community, the Jones Library. Well tonight's program does focus on the awardees, our hosts giving this award are the reason that we are all here to begin with. We're incredibly lucky to have such wonderful people and such a wonderful place as a cultural cornerstone in Amherst. Before I introduce these three members of the theatre company that have come along with me, I wanted to share our plan up front. While we pride ourselves on the wide array of productions that we create each year at ARHS, everything we do actually comes from a pretty similar process. First we come up with an idea for a production that we get over excited about, then part way through our work we realize that we have no real idea what we're doing, then we cross our fingers and try to climb our way out of the myriad problems we've created for ourselves, and then finally we spend much of opening night wondering how it all managed to work out so damn well. In other words the model for the theatre company is essentially theatre, a place where skill and serendipity go hand in hand. So we thought we'd embrace that spirit tonight in these speeches. I brought with me three veterans of the theatre company, our student technical director, Zach Ellis, Louis Triggs, a playwright, an actor, and also a director who directed a full-scale production of Henry IV part one while I was away, and Sila Duvall-Bodwin, an accomplished musical and immersive theatre actor who also served as the dramaturg for the 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee this year's winner musical. We agreed to split up our speaking time and share our experiences with the theatre company with each of us including the following components to our speeches. Number one, we have to include an anecdote from an ARHS show. Number two, a personal realization you have had along the way. Number three, a sweeping generalization about theatre kids. And number four, and very importantly, a reference to our mascot. His name is Silas. He is a taxidermied creature that looks like a raccoon but we know it's not a raccoon but he makes his way into the set and design of every one of our plays and shows up somewhere. And finally we agreed that we would not share with each other what we were about to say nor the order in which we were going to speak. So with that skill and serendipity, let me get out of the way and introduce any one of the three students here. And a suitcase entirely without explanation. They walk up a brightly lit hallway and are met by a stern faced uniformed actor behind a desk. This officer begins to poke through the luggage and question the bullwildered audience member. First name, last name, did you pack this yourself? Was this your first time traveling outside the country? What was the nature of your trip? The audience member tries to answer, investing, inventing a destination and improvising on the spot but the TSA officer has spotted something suspicious in the luggage. I'm sorry but you're going to have to come with me. They snap and roughly escort the audience member out of the hallway and into an entirely different scene. The whole thing is done in less than three minutes. I was the TSA officer and that was my very first performance with the ARHS theatre company. The show is called Bing Bong, a piece of immersive theater in which the audience find themselves hopping from scene to scene all around the school, always thrown right into the center of the action. At one point you step into a classroom and are suddenly being treated like a daytime television host, live on air with a teleprompter. Minutes later you're being chased by a pack of hungry zombies down a dark hallway. Silas was lurking in a tunnel near the end of the show for anyone wondering. Putting on a production as logistically complex as this requires an immense amount of trust both among scene partners and the cast as a whole. The timing had to be perfect so every single actor was responsible for their own corner of the show. It was a wonderful thing to have such trust placed upon me from the very beginning and it immediately made me feel like a valued member of the company. There's this idea that theater kids are selfish divas always vying for the spotlight but my very first production showed me that this is not only untrue but impossible for the work that we do. Performances like Bing Bong simply could not happen if the people involved weren't as generous humble and community driven as they are. I'm endlessly grateful for the experiences I've had in my three years with the company and to represent such a fantastic group of artists here tonight. Thank you so much. People involved in theater are extraordinarily predisposed towards dissent and squabbling. Last autumn when I was directing Henry the Fourth, all hell broke loose in one nightmare of a rehearsal as actors grew frustrated with one another and eventually lost their tempers. I promise you it wasn't my fault. And as I was trying to reconcile the bickering actors and re-civilize the air-rich as theater company all sorts of other problems emerged from fight choreography to eyeliner and finally the prop master came in in the midst of the maelstrom and asked how we're going to fit Silas in which could have been the last straw but actually put things in perspective. The tension just drained out of me and I was in a position to carry on the rehearsal as normal. I think that Silas' soothing effect is linked to a broader culture in the theater company that I only came to recognize last year when on the Saturday night we performed Anything Goes for the fourth and final time. Beck had tightcast me as the dressing gown clad English aristocrat and similarly tightcast my good friend Doug as a hopelessly incompetent criminal who burst into my suite in a poorly constructed attempt to frame me and then wandered slightly from the script using the telephone on the dresser to demonstrate to Lord Evelyn his inability to grasp the gravity of the situation. His point made he slammed the telephone down into its cradle at which point it went ding and together on stage in front of hundreds of fairly discriminating audience members we burst out laughing and the audience applauded over us kindly accepting a moment of unprofessionalism as an opportunity for learning and an indicator of the live sincerity of the show and this was my realization that despite the high standards of quality that the theater company sets for itself there is fond memory and failure. If we approach what we do in goodwill then whether we fail or succeed we can still create something genuinely enriching for both the audience and everyone involved. For me it's this spirit that makes the ARHS theater company special not only does it enable us to innovate and experiment with dramatic art it enables us to come together and form a community that together is capable of great things and perhaps more importantly goes far beyond what happens on the stage itself thank you. Earlier this year on the last night of the musical as I walked off stage from taking my final bow as part of an ARHS musical I started crying my backstage techies who I grew to love like family gathered around me in a big group hug at that moment I was filled with a new mix of emotions including pride and joy that I did not know cannot explain and I'm like unlikely to feel again the amount of work passion blood sweat and tears that the students of ARHS put into every single production is really remarkable as tech director I'm probably back's only real competition when it comes to hours spent at the high school um there have been so many nights where it's just been me him and Silas working away um and so many nights when I've come home to mountains of homework it's so late but I really wouldn't trade any of it um the stress the musical is just so huge but it's unlike anything else um so I've learned more about myself in the past year than I thought possible from the beginning of the year when Beck was on sabbatical leaving me and a few other students to lead the spirit of the theater company in his absence to the musical when it as it is always stress inducing and a giant beast of a project Amherst theater company has given me leadership skills confidence creativity passion and drive that could come from nowhere else in the school that's what ARHS theater is it isn't just an activity it's a community it's a commitment and it's the experience of being part of something far bigger than yourself every single year we put on not one or two but six individual productions that give students from all walks of life in the school a chance to be part of this incredible community that I call home and as I along with many of the other seniors in the theater company prepare to leave we can go knowing that one we are not truly leaving it behind because one's a theater kid always a theater kid and two that we are leaving it in good hands the people at ARHS change but the spirit and community of the ARHS theater company does not so at this point you might be asking yourselves the students as articulate as this who needs the adults there's more than a grain of truth to that theater students contrary to popular cliches are not all a bunch of loud extroverted teenagers that have groups sing alongs to Hamilton in the school hallways that is some of them but it's not quite all rather at ARHS a theater kid is anyone who has managed to find their way into the auditorium and feels like they've somehow found home productions after all are ephemeral things our set builders learn early on you build with screws not nails because that thing's coming down in a few weeks that means a space like the ARHS auditorium becomes a pile up of ghosts from shows and students past their names are painted on the cinderblock walls backstage layers of paint on the stage floor conceal countless productions before them like the layers of history under an old city and the memories of students coming gone show here for decades and decades and continue to accrue with each new year as our faithful mascot Silas watching them all pass through the stage wings this weekend in fact we are producing Sarah rules melancholy play a student directed work dedicated to exploring the complex layers of that complex emotion i heard one student describe that emotion as a quote kind of happy sadness like how i felt after spelling bee this year the school musical i remember telling that student during the musical that their job in a particular scene was to find the physical version of what their character was feeling internally after they realized that the word they spelled was wrong and that they were suddenly out of the bee they then asked me well can i just use what i feel whenever it's a monday morning and the show is just closed and i come into the auditorium and see a blank stage i said yes of course knowing instinctively that what they meant by that particular feeling was very unique to anyone that has done theater for our students the acknowledgement of making a quote significantly literary contribution to the community is an incredible thing and we thank you so much for it it suggests that there is some relationship between the deeply felt experience that we've all had making work and the experience of an audience member who may or may not have any direct connection to us experience what they came and saw when they encountered the work with all of us behind it that's validating on two important levels maybe it sums up what we all hope for in the area just theater company and what it can be somewhere inspiring internally and externally a creative and emotional home base an incubator for strange and wonderful ideas and ultimately a means of being a part of a world far bigger than yourself so thank you on behalf of the hundreds and hundreds of area just students from these many years for this honor many that have preceded the four of us and the sense that what they've done carries meaning far beyond what they would expect i never thought there was anything that would make me want to go back to high school i want so much to go back now thank you so much it's my pleasure now to introduce judge michael ponzer judge ponzer will present the sammy for local literary achievement to madeline blaze judge paul ponzer was born in chicago he's a road scholar has his law degree from yale he served on the federal district bench since 1994 and he's the author of two novels the hanging judge and a novel published in 2017 the one-eyed judge he lives in amherst and he continues his judicial duties while working on his next novel please join me in welcoming i think there's an old vaudeville uh saying it never file a child to the podium uh this uh was fantastic and certainly never follow three attractive intensely magnetic and articulate young people to the podium but i will try to do the best i can i feel like a rye crisp coming out after a slice of chocolate cake so happy to be here tonight this is so much more fun than putting people in prison i cannot be the luckiest person in the world particularly because i get to actually give my dear friend madeline blaze her award i want to keep my remarks to just a few minutes but i want to touch on three things first i want to talk about the sammies themselves and the jones second i want to touch on what is perhaps an old overlooked gold star in maddie's writing career that was not mentioned in the program and third i want to highlight a special quality in maddie's superb writing that i cannot pass up the opportunity to praise okay first the sand we're here tonight obviously to honor maddie blaze and these wonderful amherst regional high school theater program and that's terrific but we're also here to support the jones library our own amherst library now almost a century old in a time when so much seems to be pulling our nation apart and sometimes even our community a local library like the jones pulls people together i go to members in a community radiating more pulling in all sorts of different people and i've given a lot of talks and libraries around the state and they're all like that they're vibrant they are essential to a community so critical so precious and we owe them our support uh financial it's got to be on everybody's donation list every year doesn't have to be a lot of doing it there's no excuse everybody can afford something and i'm so pleased to hear that a renovation of the amherst library is in the works supported it's important it's a good thing for the community has the same pattern the old beautiful center of the library which is preserved and then a large efficient airy complimentary wing we need that an amherst we deserve that an amherst our community deserves it and i hope people will support it second maddie's gold star i don't know if she was just being modest or if this was overlooked but i should point out that malin blaze is a Pulitzer prize winner it's not in your program in 1980 she won the prize for a feature article that she wrote for the miami herald called zeps last stand Pulitzer prizes do not come out of cracker boxes they only give out 25 a year and they give one for a feature article and she got it in 1980 i guess who won the uh Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1980 it was norman mailers novel executioner song now i have tried to read mr mailers book and i've read maddie's piece on mr zep and i strongly recommend that if you have to choose between the two go with maddie's piece it's shorter it's a lot better you'll get everything out of it that you would have gotten out of reading execution that brings me to my final point uh at zep's last stand like all of maddie's writing is brunette it tells the tale of a world war one veteran who was discharged dishonorably in 1919 and spent the rest of his life trying to get that stain removed from his record and she follows mr zep on a train ride from florida to the pentagon where he makes an appearance before the uh board or whatever it is group of people who have the power to turn his dishonorable discharge into an honorable discharge and i'm just going to read you a paragraph from zep's last stand you can get it on google you just have to google zep's last stand it's a great read and see how she uses physical objects and physical details to convey emotion and biography this is just a short paragraph and she's describing mr zep this 80 year old man going up to washington to make his case to the pentagon to try to get this uh dishonorable distinction or dishonorable badge of shame removed from his record the old man wearing a carefully chosen business suit which he hoped would be appropriately subdued for the pentagon sat in the chair of his roomette as the train pulled out of dearfield beach with a certain palsy eagerness he farged his briefcase i love that before the train reached full speed he arranged on his lap the relics from his days at war there were the dog tags and draft card and even his department of war risk life insurance policy there was a letter to his mother written in 1919 in france explaining why he was in the stockade his fingers curled with arthritis and in pain attacked several documents he unfurled the pages of a copy of the original court martial proceedings which found him in violation of the 64th article of war failure to obey the command of a superior officer there was also a copy of the rulebook for fort leavenworth where zep had been sentenced to 10 years of hard labor wow a paragraph that delivers such punch and such richness and tells us so much both about the emotional character of the individual she describes and the individual's context this is maddie blaze to a tea whether she's writing about girls at amherst regional high school finding the character to battle for the state basketball championship or about the struggles of her widowed mother with a large family or any of the other scenes she paints so beautifully she has the generosity of spirit and the verbal adroitness to place us in the mind and the heart of another person and another situation this is the most essential and most profound magic that art can produce and madeline blaze performs it consistently it's a gift to read her it's a great pleasure to know her and it's really fun to introduce her and here she is madeline blaze i tell you that when i asked michael to perform this honor he was very good about accepting her readily but i said to him two things don't make me blush and don't make me cry judges never like getting orders i was particularly thrilled to have him come before you because i love his late in life career hope is the person who gets his first novel published after the age of 50 and although he is used in his career as a as a as a judge uh in used to imposing sentences trust me he now composes very imposing sentences i also uh want to give a shout out to ron moyer i know he planned to be here he really when you write a book as an author the one thing you can do is say finally mine i did it i wrote a book in the case of in these girls actually ron and i i think are the co-authors on some level he he is the heart and the soul of that book and because of the way he is in this world he helped expose the best of amherst the best of its heart and soul i believe in that story so we especially miss his presence this evening i was going to make a couple of jokes if you were here i talked to his wife this afternoon she said go ahead and make them but i can't so i want to also say thank you john john runs a theater arts camp in dearfield that many of you are familiar with my daughter went there as a camper for several years in a row and then became a counselor and due to john when she went to college what did she major in theater so she's now an educator and she feels that that is the best preparation for what she does so thank you i'd like you to travel with me a mere 10 miles across the notch to the center of granty massachusetts i'd like you to go back in time 40 50 60 years and i'd like you to visit my childhood library which was literally across the street from the house i grew up in an old center staircase colonial this library was built in 1917 to the tune of five thousand dollars it was part of the carnage foundations effort to bring libraries to small towns in america so that you didn't have to live in a big city to be able to get books it's a beautiful building it is uh praised often for its greek and roman influences which i can trust you when i was growing up you can trust me when i was growing up in grand b those influences sounded very hypothetical and hardly a compliment this was a town that takes its cow pastures and the price of corn seriously so talking about greece and realm seemed a little bit affected the building is a very balanced building it's uh two stories when we were children it had two librarians it was only open two days a week uh the librarians are the people i want to introduce you to right now but before i do i want to also say that that uh that the upstairs of the library had a long honey colored table a reading table in the middle it had stuffed birds and glass cages which were not as airy and inviting as i might have liked the downstairs the basement was where the children's room was where we where our collection was housed and this is the place where when you walked in on the right there were picture books and then on the left there were books without pictures and you knew you would become a more sophisticated reader when you could say with swagger i'll take that one without the pictures this is where i got to meet hans brinker and heidi and mary lennox and thus travel to holland the elps and color ridden india there is no frigate like two tragically ancient women my age now served as the librarians and their names are perfect for new england high new england in my opinion miss groot true taylor who lived next door to us and miss winterford fisk who lived up the street miss taylor had grown up in grand b she went to framingham normal school and after that she spent her the entire the entirety of her working career as a teacher in new jersey by the standards of the day as a woman on her own leaving not just her hometown but also her home state she qualified as a mad adventurous she was stout her visits fit a description i once read in a book supplied by her i suspect of someone whose face possessed a staircase of double chins if miss taylor had a streak of excess it was in the profusion of african violets throughout her small sloping home and in the minx stall which she wore once a year when she joined our family on christmas eve on that occasion she brought a big box of wonderful homemade candy which we of course had ransacked by the next morning when we squabbled there were six children in my family born within nine years of each other so we inevitably did squabble miss taylor offered old school yankee wisdom least said soon as mended born in 1888 miss winterford fisk left grand b to go to middlebury college from which he graduated in 1912 she thought about becoming a teacher but she was too shy and decided to pursue a career as a librarian in holioc massachusetts she lived up the street in a house was multi-generational which means that it included her grand niece and grand nephew our childhood friends eileen and brian we were in and out of her house and we were allowed to address her as aunt winne she lived in a navy blue suit jacket and skirt with an ivory white blouse with a small collar in aunt winne's bedroom was a long narrow mirror into which we sometimes glimpsed her fretfully checking to make sure her slip was not showing children make the best spies she was known to have only one swear word in her life when something had happened with the insurance that it didn't work out and she said damn brian eileen tried to get her to be more up-to-date children are always trying to modernize their elders and they got her one time to watch the ed solving show when jay when jim Morrison the doors were you know that would be untrue you know i'd be a liar if i was just anyway after the show aunt winne loved berber shop quartets so it's too bad people don't do harmony anymore just as a footnote the sponsors of the ed Sullivan show tried to get the doors to change the lyrics to girl you couldn't get much sweeter the doors agreed and then of course when they performed they changed their mind thus getting them banned from ed Sullivan forever aunt winne was just as old-fashioned as miss taylor maybe more so because she had never even lived in new jersey these women were not rabble rousers aunt winne consistently supported republican candidates and miss taylor when she died at the age of 98 left her modest savings to the united church of christ in the center of town there were bastions about work propriety but they knew a reader when they saw one and knew on some level that literature occupies that slippery shadowy destabilized place where indeed people often don't do harmony and it is rarely a case of least said soon as mended aunt winne mostly read westerns but for some reason she loved withering heights she pressed a copy on me while miss taylor nodded chins quivering in approval i was in about the seventh grade of course i devoured the book but afterwards i did wonder had they read it and withering heights people's slips are showing and how by the time i was in high school i moved exclusively upstairs and these women took to saving for me many of the new releases the freshly minted hardbacks that crackle with their own anticipation when they're opened you know that sound everyone in this room knows that sound and thus is a result i got familiar with early up dike middle malamud the bachhoff's pale fire of which i understood not a single line but of more promise to me as a reader was flannery o'connor's collection of short stories o'connor who hailed from a farm with peacocks in georgia and who believed the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach her character specialized in conveying that drumbeat of insider information that binds a small town the gossipy postmistress the irksome garrulous grandma you mean you can write about that it would be easy to dismiss miss taylor and antwin as meek or call them old maids but they were in their own way ferocious they understood as muriel reichhauser once put it the universe is made up not of atoms but of stories i feel i owe them my livelihood perhaps even my existence in the way they stood guard over my burgeoning intellect when i was the age of these young people in the first row here they gave me the keys to the kingdom and this is what we are celebrating this evening every day across this country in big cities and in small towns librarians are creating the same everyday miracle for patrons young and old to quote saint kurt vonnegut the america i love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries an ounce of cynicism left in this room it's my pleasure now to introduce the leader of the amherst libraries so amherst is blessed with an extraordinarily dedicated and talented staff and is blessed with a leader of our libraries who every day embodies in what she does and says the belief that libraries make a difference sharon sherry is a woman who is not afraid to use the word love i think it's time to express a little love for sharon sherry and i do love you thank you all so much thank you awesome oh and what was that about following students and following Pulitzer prize winning wow wow maddie thank you thank you congratulations again to all of you thank you so much for being here um i have really enjoyed getting to know all of you the past year and thank you all so much for coming tonight um looking out over this crowd it is so humbling and it warm and fuzzy and uh i will cry that's what i do so there's a few people that i want to thank by name first i want to again thank our primary sponsor people's bank kim and kathy are here i also want to thank our major sponsors barry roberts and td bank uh next i want to thank nadine shank for the music over in the meet art museum i also want to thank the many community minded businesses and individuals so many people have donated to the library to this event uh to make this happen including applewood oliver scott photography judy's restaurant i love them uh v1 vodka black birch vineyards building eight brewing the artifact cider project whole foods and big y thank you all so much special thanks to diva little eileen smith danielle amadeo and the entire mead art museum staff we've been here for three years we've been celebrating here this event and it is such an honor and a privilege to be able to be here and to work with these individuals they're wonderful a special shout out to greg wardlock i don't know if he's in the room i can't tell and his entire amherst college catering staff they are incredible it takes a bunch of people a lot of time to put this event together uh so i want to take a quick moment to thank the very special jones library staff especially janet linda matt mia roxanne lisa john cindy and george as well as many community volunteers especially claudia molly tony erica deb elizabeth nat and will for their value this event would never happen with all of these people i also want to thank the jones library board of trustees i say this a lot but i mean it with all of my heart and soul their support and dedication and passion uh they're not just in this because they like to come to a meeting once a month uh they've really cared so deeply about this town about this library about library services about the patrons in this in this town and they are really so uh dedicated to supporting the staff and so on behalf of the staff i thank all of the trustees for their support i also want to quickly thank my daughter molly it's her first sammy's event um i want to thank her for being so supportive of my career i'm very proud of the young lady you have become and finally please join me in thanking misha archer the creator of this year's gorgeous art print on our agenda for this evening is our drawing yes everything is in place okay we have three prizes to give away two golden tickets to upcoming amherst regional high school theater productions and one set of autograph books by madeline plains five one six the name is paul zikos you guys uh erica where where are you you can come up and get the envelope after the ceremony okay and the yeah is that you no no it's not but i know her you know alex alex will pay to receive exclusive exclusive tours to special collections they'll be contacted in early may to make arrangements so in addition to a tour of special collections featuring some of our treasures these folks will be the first to experience a newly developed tour of our fine arts collection uh these people are really in for a treat and so if any of you would like to upgrade your ticket to join the tour you can come see me afterwards that's it uh thank you all again for being here for supporting the jones library for your love uh now please join the honorees misha archer here on stage if you'd like a book signed uh or to congratulate them in person they'd love to talk with you and then enjoy coffee and chocolate outside thank you all so much