 I take a great notion to jump in river range, my man. I'm not sure if you know. Well, you can handle any of those. Sometimes she wears pajamas. Sometimes she wears a lap. Thank you, Leadbelly. Good afternoon. My name is Matthew Cowell. Thanks, Rachel, for having me out. From Colorado, when people are there and their mouths are open, they're walking around. We call them gapers, because the mountains are so pretty. And I've been like that here with the apples and the trees. And in September, it's a beautiful place you live. Thanks, Vakdarn, for having me. I'm an emergency preparedness consultant for Performing Arts Readiness. I'm in Denver. The Office of Arts and Venues hosts me there for Performing Arts Readiness. There's a city owns Red Rocks and Coliseum, and the money from that pays for our cultural programming. And I learned about the Performing Arts Readiness Grant, and I have a one-year, 18-month term in Denver. And then, hopefully, there's a three-year grant to do this Art of Mass Gatherings concept that I'm going to tell you about today that I got inspired about along my journey as being an event producer. I'm a musician, and I'm glad to have a role in recovery and healing, resilience, and innovation through the arts, like Sarah Lee spoke about. I learned about American history and social justice through the songs of Woody Guthrie and Elizabeth Cotton, Bob Dylan, that our dad would sing us as bedtime stories. And I'll share some songs like that tonight. A little about my journey. Has anybody heard of New Belgium Brewery or Fat Tire Beer out west? Yeah. The brewery was employee-owned and born on a bicycle and had this concept that we could take the show on the road and mostly put bikes in the picture, and then we could add the Fat Tire Beer and stuff like that. And it took off. We'd have 25,000 people per city. That's me in the hat there. That guy just traded his car for a bicycle in front of 25,000 people. I hired a band. They came and sang, this little bike of mine. I want to take a ride. Those guys in the gold vest back there singing, and then they would go through a tunnel of love where the audience would make a tunnel, and they'd be welcome to their car-free lifestyle. We came up with that idea on a bike ride on the Willamette River. My event producer partner and I, and we thought about the Guns for Cash program. We thought, well, what if we did a car for bike trade? 110 people traded their car around the country. Over the 10 years I was there, we raised $5 million by throwing free bike parties in the park. We'd have hundreds of volunteers per event. And I learned a little bit of something about event producing. So we had cool art, weird bicycles. This is the beautiful dream that would come true. In cities around the country, it's thousands of people who rode their bicycles and something kind of like a critical mass, but a lot friendlier. We got the Golden Halo Award for content, or sorry, cause marketing. Sort of an idea of saying, let's put this cause first and then see what happens for the event rather than the brand first. So we owned our own stages, power systems. We're the largest solar powered system. 10 years ago, we started three-stream recycling around the country in a network. And this is our, you can see the silk screening. We call that the Born Again Boutique. We would collect thrift store articles that were cool around the country and have hundreds of things people could silk screen things onto rather than buying new shirts. It was kind of cool. So, yeah, I learned about brands are sort of like can be a container for people's identity project, which I think is interesting and sometimes weird and I'll talk about that in a minute. Lots of amazing artists like Maya and this local community of circus folks. I know a lot of them. I had probably one of the biggest touring variety shows in the country for a time. So, towards the end of 2016, I was pushing for even more bicycle-fronted content at all of our events. Just at the same time as Craft Brewing was getting pretty soft for the big companies like New Belgium and Sierra Nevada as lots of new companies came up. And we were a woman-led company, employee owned, but Kim Jordan left. And sort of in that vacuum, the marketing folks who came were like, he was from Guinness and he said, at Guinness we had a harp on the side of the label. Doesn't mean we need to talk about it. So my bicycle community project festival ran out of road. So in 2016 the festival changed. The company stumbled as it changed leadership and hired a big agency out of LA to do 30 shows instead of 15 and send it in containers around the country. And you see the plasticky stage, what used to be handmade turned into this fat tire vinyl vomit. And my money that I'd spend on great performers all went to these millennial friendly bands that just didn't really work out. And this was the audience that they had in some of their cities. It was just sad. And my heart was kind of broken. And I couldn't hang. And I went to Standing Rock with my wife. And I learned a lot and what it looks like to have women and elders in youth and leadership and how delicate a community can be when it's facing floods and other hazards. Thought about what my role could be. We spent a week there in the cold, went out thinking I'd cook and do whatever. But really started to see that the things I'd learned as an event producer, I produced 120 events around the country, mostly around 10,000 people. And we owned all our own power and waste systems. And I didn't really know what I was gonna do with that because I was like, I don't like this perpetuation of fame worship that most festivals are. It seems like we end up electing people who are famous for being famous. Where's this all leading? You know, I didn't really wanna go there anymore. That little amplifier though, it was a little bit of a clue for me. That little amp I'm holding on my shoulder, we would use instead of megaphone to some of these demonstrations. And it changed the entire tenor of everything. It made things more connected and it didn't feel like we're here protesting. It felt like we're here talking. And so that's sort of where majestic collaborations got its start. And I helped figure out these temporary electrical systems while we were there. I realized that I knew a lot more about refugee camps and power damaged cities than I might have thought. There we are fixing some stuff that people, we had giant generators that were not connected. I'm doing something tomorrow if you wanna come learn more about the details. So anybody here like to cook? I know Rachel does. I got this great dinner last night. There's this new book called Salt Fat Acid Heat. She's an amazing chef and she has this idea about balancing flavors as being the kind of way that delicious food gets made. And I love these sort of, have you read it? No, okay, I get it. This is really about the journey, not the destination. And then you kinda practice. She says, if you wanna do heat, what do you wanna practice? All right, layering. Here's these flavors. Try this stuff. This made a lot of sense to me. And so what I've developed as we started this company is this kind of four main flavors of making a successful event. Their safety, sustainability, community relationships and accessibility. So you can throw a festival that might have two of those three things going on really well, but it may not have accessibility figured out. It may not have very good community relations, but if you wanna kind of get some excellence going, then these are the pillars for a successful event. So I took this idea on a trip to DC. I met Jack Stiluka and Michael Orlov at the National Endowment for the Arts. And I said, I think event producers could be really instrumental in emergency preparedness. We make temporary cities all the time. And they said, this is a great idea. Why don't you poke around? And I took a course on community resilience with performing arts readiness that Jan works with. And afterwards I talked to Tom and told him the idea and I got a home. So Arts and Venues is hosting me there. I have a grant from performing arts readiness to work on this. And they've allowed me to kind of specialize a bit more in this art of mass gatherings idea. So as an experiential learner, I was a teacher. I really think adults learn best from doing stuff. And so PowerPoints are fun and all, but really doing it in person is what we wanna do to share the skills that event producers have. So this art of mass gatherings, let me see how much, I have this is the first time I've given the presentation. All right. And I want questions at the end. So here, I'll go ahead and give you the whole spiel. Back up a little for me, Seth. And majestic collaborations, we believe in the immense power of the gathering, the communal coming together of large groups of people to share, celebrate, debate, rally, sing, dance to thrive. Because to us, the beauty and power of a mass gathering is to bring together communities around mutual passions in a successful, safe and sustainable way. It's a critical part of the human experience. So we help organizations that produce events from civic and community organizations to government, private event producers and corporations to understand the underlying dynamics of events and discover ways to integrate core aspects of successful mass gatherings into their planning and operations. Here's where it gets interesting. To a large extent, a lot of these skills already exist in your community, but you may not have met each other. So what we're doing is taking these temporary cities, and we took an excellent one in Denver, we took the Pride Fest, it is a 500,000 person event. They have the best safety plan of any event in Colorado. They're generous enough to make it available for other people to read. And we went and studied their waste, water, power, crowd control measures, and we brought event producers and city planners and Office of Emergency Management and the fire chief was there for Denver and the head of paramedics was there, the environmental health was there, and we said, this is the place to examine, because usually a city, all of the power and water systems are under the streets or in the walls, but if we look at this festival, we can see how the generators, water and waste systems work. So this is the place, the nerds out there, tactical urbanism, this is a place you can try new ideas for transportation, this is a place you can try stuff, because we have a city for three days in a park somewhere. So we chose Pride Fest and they hosted it, and this was our first group. We were all wearing those cool vests and we went around Pride Fest, and it was timely, our Office of Emergency Management and our Denver Office of Special Events are instituting 2020, all public events have to have an emergency medical plan submitted before they get their permit, and that was kind of fresh. You'd think in a city as big as Denver, they would have already had that stuff, but this 2020 is when they come online, so they were excited for this Artemis Gatherings, because they were like, this is how we can share the information of the best, the 500,000 festival can share with the 50,000 festival and cities like Chicago have 200 festivals per summer. So how do those people kind of all get a chance to learn, that's what we're looking at. And skipping ahead a little bit, I will tell you that my larger idea for this comes from visiting Lafayette, Louisiana, where they took in 50,000 refugees from Katrina the first couple of months. They were buying a lot of guns and a lot of ammo and they were expecting that all of these people from New Orleans were gonna wreck their town. They wouldn't tell you that now, they would tell you now that they were proud to take them, 15,000 people stayed in Lafayette and it's transformed that town and there wasn't the violence they expected and things ended up going well and they practiced something that I'm calling radical hospitality, right? And Einstein's theory of relativity was you spend an hour with a pretty girl and it feels like a minute, you spend a minute sitting on a hot stove, it feels like an hour. So our towns have to kind of go through this experience, this experiment of swelling and taking in people because the Dust Bowl was just our first example of human caused climate change migration and we'll get back to that in a minute but I really think that these festivals can prepare us for our best days and celebration in the park and also serve as a chance for us to practice all those pieces we're gonna need to use to some extent, hopefully not a big extent, hopefully music and art will help fortify our science and share good ideas and we won't have terrible things to deal with but this is the first Art of Mask gatherings, I've got the notebook in the back, you can take a look at what it was. These are all the things we taught about, you can't see it, it's too pixelated. If we get the grant, we'll be able to come back to a few areas in the next three years. I really think Vermont seems like an opportune place to kind of explore the urban and rural and you can kind of thread the needle here, I think it's wonderful, Rachel, and the work that she's doing with historic mapping and all of you folks, I think it seems like a pretty good fit and there's money for it so I'm not here asking. All right, so four things, what are they again? Safety, sustainability, community relations, accessibility, start with safety. Now this would be kind of fun watching the middle here. So emergency plans, that includes stuff like fire, medical emergencies, crowd control, ingress, egress, contingency, venues, wastewater food, active threats. State of repair, that's a kind of neat, one of my wife's a civil engineer and this is sort of the thought of what happens over time. So yes, you made great plans once but are the fire extinguishers still charged? Are the alarms tested? Did mice eat your food? These sort of things can change. We were ready before, is it still ready? And then what's your backup plan for maintaining safety and extreme weather, power loss, stuff like that? So there's a lot to remember, right? That sounds crazy. That's what the Artemis gatherings is for. We spend time in an actual well-run event to help get this information titrated into adults who learn by doing. So we have symposiums, Artemis Gathering Symposium followed up by seminars in topic areas. We're doing one on event power in a few weeks in Denver and we've done one on harm reduction. We are kind of guided by the local requests. Here's some of the stuff I've gone through, a stage contractor, I had to show 2,000 hours of experience to get a license to erect stages and it was an EMT and we do these FEMA courses and crowd management stuff, a lot of you've done and I would encourage you to understand what the incident command system is. I guess another thing I would say is that FEMA's not gonna be there for a lot of emergencies. We'll have to take care of each other and if we do have a highly federal presence in our communities, it might not feel like we want it to. You know, it might feel more militarized and those sort of things. So if we're ready, then uh-oh. Storm alert or something's happening. That's a pager, I haven't seen one of those in years. You guys remember the codes like for hello and millennials are like, don't know what I'm talking about. VHS, Betamax. What? So here's kind of a fun picture. That's one of my festivals. On the left, that person's having a ball. The crowd's all really encouraging it. Here's what it looks like and then on the right, there's what I'm seeing and thinking where's the electric cords, where's the, you know. So here's one of our Art of Mass gatherings that's talking about the stage of Pride Fest and how the ballasting works. And even if you aren't the person who's responsible for setting up the stage as the event producer, you have to understand whether they're set up correctly, if people are taking shortcuts, that sort of stuff. So that's just a picture from our Art of Mass gathering symposium in Denver. There's Tom Clairis in our buddy. There's somebody from Mojo Barrier talking about crowd control techniques. The woman there is our keynote from San Francisco, Elliot, who produces Bottle Rock and hardly strictly bluegrass. And she's talking, she talked at her keynote about finding meaning as an event producer and kind of understanding how valuable it is. This is a workshop on harm reduction. How am I doing for time? Dude, it's going fast. We have time for songs. Here, we have one coming up in just a minute. There's our chief of paramedics and one of our, they were talking about the new medical plans that all Denver event producers need to do. There's a class on power workshop. Safe temporary power. And again, to make the point, those generators and distribution that we're setting up for these giant three day festivals are the same things you'd use in a power damage city post disaster. So seeing the stuff and touching it is a good idea before it gets critical. All right, so this'll get a little bit interesting. I wrote my first for a musical a few months ago and this will be fun for some of the conversations around cultural placekeeping and using archives as a muse for content. I was approached by this theater to help write for this fire in the streets plays commemorating the 50th anniversary of the West High School walkouts. West High School in Denver had a Latino students who were being told they couldn't speak Spanish and that they were gonna be stupid for eating beans and treated like really rough and they walked out of the high school and Denver police department had purchased riot gear recently that they wanted to try out. And so this play went for a couple months in March and it was a children were the or high schoolers were the actors and there was a band and singing and I wrote a triptych of songs. One of them was about safety and kind of feeling like you should as a kid at school and the another one was about West Side Pride and the third one was about police brutality. And there are some cheery songs but the first one you're gonna get is about the police in that moment. DPD have to try out their new riot gear when you're a hammer don't the whole world notice like a nail and the hammer came down jack boots on the ground the crusade for justice met abuse of power through the scope of a cops rifle and a school tower the children look like ants in the schoolyard down below the cops eyes were blazed as the riot was waged. You can come to Denver, it's happening again in November and you can hear the less depressing songs. Isn't it neat how music and food and those sort of things cross the conversations that'd be so much more difficult to have. Glad for it, the art, that's what it's performing arts are for, right? So clicker did safety, what's next of the four? Love you guys. All right, way systems. I'm just giving you the overview. Come to one of these and we'll get deeper. Way systems are challenging the dominance of single use models for special events, multi-stream reuse and diversion that can happen. There's a great chance for city planners to look at multimodal transportation opportunities when they have these large events. Let's try out some new idea for our transportation infrastructure and let's practice our resilience backup plans for maintaining sustainability even during extreme weather and power loss. Sustainability becomes very important during emergency situations. Is that generator running a 25% duty cycle or 100% duty cycle? Cause there's batteries in front of it. That's gonna make a really big difference. That's how much fuel you have on an island. Sustainability isn't just about feeling, swaging your white guilt. It's about whether you have enough fuel to keep that hospital running for a while. Sustainability is very real in those circumstances. By the way, I think, is there anybody here who works with parks in our city? In our cities? There's a good opportunity, I think, for infrastructure when it gets built to include three phase power and potable water in parks so that during the special events they don't have to rent generators or do bottled water. But if that park needs to turn into temporary housing and emergency, you have the infrastructure buried under the ground and it's less susceptible for getting blown over. So here's a water tree. Seems simple. This can reduce thousands of bottles of water just cause people can refuel. But you gotta have the potable water available in your park. That's some of the stuff we already talked about. Solar, biodiesel, temporary making your own art. Here's something we did on stage. I had a song about this. We divide our waste in two, three streams. We got compost trash and recycling. Make some noise if you compost at home. That's for real. Make some noise if you compost at home. Today at the Tour de Fat, we have 21 pounds of recycling, 17 pounds of landfill, 222 pounds of compost. Good job everybody, you did that. You collected all that stuff. Thanks for all the volunteers from Illinois Recycling. They're the ones diverting it and we'd give honorarians to the university's environmental health. They would generally bring out 20 volunteers to our special events and they would run these three stream recycling stations. And you could get a 20,000 person festival. We'd cover three stream by giving a thousand dollar honorarium to the university cause the kids wanted to come out. They also got a free beer. They do an hour service in a compost sorting. But just ways to leverage community to help make that happen. Okay, I'm taking you down to depths a little bit here. We talked about this before that the Dust Bowl, I grew up listening to these songs from my dad. He was an old Woody Guthrie fan and second generation Quaker peace activist guy and when it would get time for bed, you see you get one more. And we'd ask for the ballad of Tom Jode cause it was like 12 versus long. Who knows where that song, what it's based on. Grapes and Raps. John Steinbeck heard Woody sing it in a coffee shop and he told Woody, I think I like your song better than my book cause it's shorter and more to the point. I need to get a few words cause I'm all 12. Tom Jode, killing charge. Tom Jode, come walking down the road. Tom Jode, come walking down the road. Woody went on down to the neighbors farm. He found his family and it took three, took Casey and he loaded in a truck. His mama said we gotta get away. Tom, mama said we gotta get away. Well, it's well. And he said I'm staying with this farm until I die. He said I'm staying with this farm until I die. If that coffee and sparrows and soothing syrup's Grandpa Joe did die. They bear a gram on the side of the California side. They bear a gram on the California side. He stood on a mountain. He looked off to the west and looked just like a prong. He fired a little Saturday night. He shot a woman and took him off to jail. But then he words he didn't say, these few words he didn't say. He said I've reached my mother's door. He got a chance if he don't. Vigilante, now when mama's get down, let's get to the empire. Tom Jode, his mama was asleep. He woke her up out of bed and kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved. And he said what preacher case he said. He said what preacher case he said. He said mama, just one big soul, sometimes it looks bad. What's the third one? It's easy. It's a patient. It comes from the open dialogues that can change the course of your event or plan design. You're not collaborating if you've gone into the conversation with the community and you already know how it's going to go. You have to go in and let it change what your event is going to be. Learn to thrive in that instead of avoid it. Involvement and buying is dynamic and requires attention and care. Here's what you get. If you can muster hundreds of volunteers at your event, you have a force magnifier for your programs. That's eyes and ears. Those are all people who can see something, say something. And if you want to make a more sustainable event or have accessibility stuff happen, you can't hire all of that stuff. If you can find the volunteers, then you're in the right thing. Here's what you also know. Colorado has had a whole bunch of festivals come and go. I get asked when I'm consulting about new events, like, hey, what would work here? Could we do a pro-cycle challenge or these sort of things? And my advice is just don't leave the room until you figure out something that's bigger than yourself, that's bigger than just the music, until you figure out something the community truly wants. And then those people who are coming will organically share with each other that this is a cool event. And right now, Facebook got everybody hooked. And now you can hardly reach anybody with advertisements. It's very difficult to pay to reach other folks. But organic share still works. So this is kind of a... This is a good sell to your event producers to say, keep working until this is really resonant with the community because it's hard to find audiences sometimes. And think ahead, what's your backup plan for community and media communications for extreme weather, power loss, stuff like that? So give your good day plan for community relations and your bad day plan. One of my ones that went well, anybody heard of the Moth Story project? I had some friends there and we put together a national call for bicycle stories and we got some great ones and we recorded some at our event. You can hear Malik's one on there about... Oh, I can't do it justice in a short time, but it's really worth hearing. But how did I put this? If you have a synergistic relationship with local people who will come out socially motivated and then if you can find national media that wants your story, you can reach 3 million people or more with this. What happened with the Moth for this bicycle concept? And that's one time I did it. This one's sort of funny. There's a DC show. We had a thematic stuff where... Maya, you guys might know some of these performers. Those are the handsome little devils. So during the car for bike trade, we had these aliens come down to Earth and they were sent on this mission by their overlord to take us out because we weren't respecting the planet. And they said, would anybody here trade their car for a bicycle? And then the person who had been selected was like, I'll trade my car. And they were like, all right, we'll let the planet live another 10 years, but we're going to need to send a picture back to our boss that we wiped you all out so everybody played dead. So everybody laid down. They're like, all right, and car for bike trade. This is the eighth year you've got to do stuff to keep it interesting, right? This was another thing we did for one another year. The bike is right. This one was fun. This is going very far off of a joke. What are the mistaken lyrics? My sister used to sing one was The Rolling Stones. She'd be like, I never leave your pizza burning. And then what's the common one for Elton Johns? Hold me closer, your tiny dancer. Hold me closer, Tony Danza. So we drew up this thing on a cocktail napkin. And we said, we want to give the audience a hug in the box. What if we built this and came through the stage with Fogg and a two-wheel crazy dirt bike lady. Put down your kickstand. He's an actor. And hold me closer, Tony Danza. And people are just looking at you like, this is happening. Oh my God. And it was, I don't know, it was a hug in a box. That's what that community engagement. Here's one of our power projects. I work at McNichols, Civic Center Park downtown. There's 20 food trucks with all of these generators running every day right in our park by the Capitol. And I talked to Ms. Pamela's crew. I said, do you guys want to learn how to run temporary power? I'll teach you. So we went, there's three-phase power under the Greek Theater and we ran distro to all these trucks. And it was silent. We did three-phase power and three-stream recycling and the park was transformed. And now those guys know how to do it. We got the power. This portion is about native land recognition. Has anybody heard of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture? It's not a real department, it's a non-profit and they have a handbook for incorporating land acknowledgments before your events. It's worth looking into. I will say one of the things I feel good about sharing is that you should always invite a culture bearer or an elder to do it rather than just adding a obligatory language to your event before it starts. Invite them to be part of this. And it's an ongoing reconciliation and community building that's not just saying words. I grew some tobacco and shared with these guys and found an honorarium. Some friends knew them. They host a run from Sand Creek Massacre every year east of Denver and we're good friends now. And they surprised me. Remember when we did the first Art of Mass gatherings in Denver? It was at Pride Fest. They came out to speak and had a lot of wonderful things to share about Two-Spirit, the history of the multiplicity of sexualities and being less binary about these sort of things. It was really well, it was wonderful to have them do it. All right, I have another song. This is from a bicycle celebration days about the celebration of the bicycle. Now remember, this isn't best done with a PowerPoint presentation. This stuff is best done in a real environment where it's going on really well. Or even if it's not, you can at least look at it and say, all right, those cable ramps are the old style and they're this tall and if you're in a wheelchair you can't get over it. You know, where are they going to find the new type of cable ramps where people can get over it and those sort of things. So I'll just throw out some of the highlights of things I've figured out and they say an expert is somebody who's done everything wrong once and remembered what they did, you know, right, Jan? Here's one, this is a visual map. Good part is if you don't speak English you know how to find your way around the place. Bad thing is we put it low and people could come and mess with it. So note to self, put it higher next time. If you can use words, maybe funny is good. Here's some of our tricks with compost office, beer tokens of affection, wristband camp, diversity of leadership and artists. You have to affirmatively seek out people for your team and it's not enough to just say you're non-discriminatory in your hiring practices. If you're a talent buyer, if you're trying to put together a team you have to seek out youth, people of color, older folks. This is not something that will just come to you. You'll just be fishing in your own pond. So it's upon all of us who have budgets to hire people to go and find a diverse pool of potential candidates. Meet Steven, a sign language interpreter. He taught me about how great it is for interpreters to meet with the artist beforehand and ask questions like when you said, I forget some of the funny things, when you said this, did you mean that or this and at any rate it's really great for the sign language interpreters to have time with their folks. Sensory friendly concerts are starting to blossom. That's a wonderful thing. Eagle Stadium has a sensory friendly room for people who are suffering memory problems or have on the spectrum and able to enjoy the game in a way that isn't over-stimulating and their family can kind of go. There's giant balls in front of subwoofers can feel great for people who can't hear to be able to feel the beat come through their body. All right, so this song is about what we can do together. I already told you about Lafayette, Louisiana. I was going to talk about that a little more. Remember relativity, what a city can feel like if they want to be radically hospitable. That's something I think I would love to see these Artemisque gatherings do, is not just to make our events safer but really make our cities more prepared for change. And I'll be ready for some questions after this song. This is one that I wrote and you can... I brought some records, I'll give away. Fall into you with no reservation because you got this mass communication with utter honesty and I'm too tired gotta let it go it seems like my patient for so long, for so long. So I want to thank my wife Molly for live streaming this. I just love you and thanks for watching, kids. I think now would be a good time for some of the love from Rachel and all the people who put this on. I had a feeling about getting on your feet going down that aisle over there and Rachel would take a little walk through there for all the good work she's done. She deserves it, right? When you showed a slide of people standing on a sidewalk it had to do with crowd control kind of and there was a stainless steel bracket. What was that? That stuff is called Mojo Barrier and it's sort of like Kleenex where it gets named after the company but then there's other people that make it but basically because you're standing on that L plate it doesn't tip and so they can put it in front of giant crowds and it creates a barrier between the audience and the front of the stage and then they'll usually have a pit there where security can kind of move, take people over the top. So Mojo, come on, there's crazier ones than that. Thank you for... This is the first time I've shared this. I really appreciate an opportunity to talk about it and the Artemis Gatherings book is out front, my card. Performing Arts Readiness, thanks for having me out and everybody else. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Actually, since we have just a moment I'd like to invite Karen Dillon from the Chandler just to come down here for one minute and say hello. We want to thank you for all the... Your staff, Seth, and for the use of the space. Really, thank you. Hi, I just want to say a quick hello. I'm Karen Dillon. I'm the new executive director here at the Chandler. Thanks for coming. We love having the Vermont Arts Council here and thanks to Seth Stoddard, my staff, who's taking good care of you today, I think. Before you go today, please check out our programming. We have some exciting new programming coming up, including the fretless this Friday. We have Darling Side next week on the 20th. We're also doing lots of art classes, workshops. We have a new Writers Literary series that's kicking off on the 26th of this month. What else do we have going on? We have a new film society that's starting this Sunday. We're doing Singing in the Rain on this beautiful screen. How often do you get to see a movie that big? So please check out what we're doing at the Chandler. I think it's exciting and thank you all for being here. Thank you so much. This is just a great spot for this. We really appreciate being here.