 I'm Robert St. Giovanni and I'm here today with Peter McLaughlin from the Space Gallery and Peter, I was walking around town and I saw these waking window posters and something about a hundred plus bands in two days. What's what's going on? It's the Waking Windows Music and Arts Festival. It's a two-day festival here in Portland and it is a diverse mix of music and performance, authors, comedy, genre-defying events and it happens over two days tomorrow, this Friday, September 21st and Saturday the 22nd and across 18 venues and it includes over a hundred per individual performances and performers and a dozen special events and yet it's a real community event. We think of it as a real celebration coming together of disparate arts and music scenes both in Portland in the state and far beyond. We have bands from as far as Italy this year, number of Canadian bands, bands from New York, bands from Philadelphia as well as all over the state of Maine and New England and of course Portland is very well represented, always about half of the performers are from Portland and the surrounding areas and it's in its fourth year and it's grown a little bit each year. I think last year we really hit our stride, we found our vision for what we wanted the event to look like, what we wanted the format to be, what sort of programming we wanted to have, whatever the voices that we wanted to highlight, what are the voids we are trying to fill, the sorts of events that aren't happening, the sorts of people in our community that perhaps are underrepresented and that's really what we want to do. Like I said it's a community celebration and we want to highlight the most exciting and perhaps under the radar things that are happening in our community. The Friday night of the festival happens all in Bayside, all centered around Bayside Bowl. We'll be using the downstairs there as well as the rooftop for some DJs. We'll be in the public workspace with a brand new formerly city-owned warehouse space where we'll be doing a fashion show of sorts, a form subverted. It's a bit different than what you think there'll be there'll be no runway walking, it'll be more immersive models in the space and morph into a dance party at some point in the night. There'll be new fruit as well which is a incredibly powerful feminist art collective that works in the new system laundry building on Paris Street. They'll be doing a roving performance that will begin over by the mecha dormitories on Shepley Street and be a procession to the new fruit space on Paris Street. The new system exhibition space also in that same building on Paris Street will also be open. The Euphodian Theater will be doing music and we'll be doing a big kickoff concert on the USM Payson Smith lawn that will start in the late afternoon. Then Saturday is all on Congress Street. I'm not going to list all the venues because there's 12 of them, but it spans from Space Gallery a half mile down to Tandem Coffee and lots of the players that you would expect are involved from the museum to Congress Court Park to Geno's and Empire, Blue, Local Sprouts, the Jewel Box, One Longfell and more. There is a incredibly diverse mixture of musical programming, but we also have a film screening at the Portland Museum. We have our record fare. We have the vibrant and really always incredibly inspiring reading series happening from 12 to 3. It's kind of a pub crawl style reading series. It moves from Tandem to One Longfellow to Local Sprouts and the whole audience moves with it. A handful of different readers at every event. An incredibly wide range of activities. A lot of them are all ages, right? Yes, thank you for pointing that out. Most of our venues are all ages. There are few that are not, that are either 18 or 21 plus, but the majority are all ages. We think about it as a family, a friendly event. Sure, there are certain performances that push boundaries, and we encourage folks to look through the calendar or the schedule on our website at WakingWindowsPortland.com and go to the lineup page where you'll see photos of all the performers and links to their individual pages and really explore things. But yeah, it's not just a community event. It's not just a family-friendly event. I think it's an event with a little bit of something for everybody. I get asked sometimes, who is this event for? I'd like to think it's for everybody. It's for the community. It's not just for the serious hipster heads who look down that poster with 100 names on it and are so excited because all of their favorite bands are there. It's for the people who look down that poster and see one name that they recognize, or none. We want those people to come out and it's a discovery event. It's about discovering new things and perhaps finding some inspiration and a new favorite, a new love. Nice, and how do people find out about where to get tickets and all that? Yeah, you can get tickets at WakingWindowsPortland.com. You can also find them through the Space Gallery website and you can get them in person tonight. Tonight being Thursday the 20th at Space Gallery during the Algiers show, which is a WakingWindows kickoff pre-party as it were. And then anytime during the festival, the box office will be open at Space Gallery and you can get tickets there.