 I'm Kate Snodgrass. I'm Artistic Director at Boston Playwrights Theatre, the home of new plays in Boston. Yes! And these are my lovely colleagues who I will introduce. I apologize to you now. I have truncated everything. So I'm sorry for what I don't say. But I will read you a little bit about them. On my right, the other right, is Winnie Holtzman. She's an actor, producer, playwright, and librettist. She was nominated for a Tony for her book For Wicked. She's written extensively for television with my so-called Life 30-Something once again. She's also appeared as an actor in the film Jerry Maguire and in Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Her new play, Choice, will be produced at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Thank God! In the fall. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you. Yes. Next is, but not least, is Kirsten Anderson Lopez. Is an Oscar and Grammy co-winner along with her husband Robert Lopez for her song Let It Go from the Disney animated film Frozen, for which she collaborated on the score. She's the author of In Transit, a musical song without accompaniment, which was nominated for a drama desk, drama league, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel Awards. And she wrote the feature film Winnie the Pooh and finding Nemo the musical, wrote music for the feature film. Right? Yeah. As an actor, she's appeared in the original cast of You're in Town and as the voice of Kanga in Disney's Winnie the Pooh. Her musical Up Here will be featured right in this city in La Jolla Playhouse's 2015-16 season. Next, Georges Stitt is a songwriter-composer working now on Snow Child for Arena Stage and Ajax for Water Well. Her shows include The Danger Year, Big Red Sun, Samantha Spade, Ace Detective, Mosaic, and The Water. She's had three albums of her music available and her songs are featured on numerous solo albums. Her orchestral piece Waiting for Wings, co-written with her husband Jason Robert Brown, was commissioned by the Cincinnati Pops and premiered in 2013. She was last seen on television as an actor in the live performance of Sound of Music where she played a nun. Next, Lisa Crone is an award-winning playwright and performer. She just won a Tony and Obie, a Drama Critics Circle Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for her work on the musical Fun Home, which is also a Pulitzer Prize and Kennedy Prize finalist. She's the author of In the Wake, Well, 2.5 Minute Ride, among others, and award-winning actor as well as a playwright. She's enjoyed a Guggenheim Sundance and McDowell Fellowships, and she's on the boards of the McDowell Colony, The Lily Awards, and The Dramatist Guild. And last but not least, Julia Jordan of The Count. Her plays include, among others, Boy, Titania in Color, St. Scarlett, Smoking Lesson, and her musical works include the books for Sarah, Plain and Tall, and The Mice. She wrote the book in lyrics for Murder Ballad and Bernice Bobs Her Hair. She's been recognized with a Kleban Award, Jonathan Larson Award, and a Heidemann. Produced all over the country, she's received numerous fellowships at Sundance, The O'Neill Playwright Center, among others, and she's one of the founders of The Lily Awards for Women in Theater. So you have to share the mics. You know, when I looked at the title for this, I have to say, Women Writing Women. And I said to myself, yeah. And I was kind of at a loss for what to ask you, because it all seems so obvious. So I would like to start with, you know, just a basic, very basic question of, would each one of you tell us why you started writing plays in the first place? All right, because I've been talking about it all day. I actually started back before they invented kidnapping. There used to be this thing where your parents would open the door and you'd go out the back door, and you'd see all of the other kids who also weren't signed up for summer camp. And there were like 20 of us. And I had my own little rep company back when I was like five, six, seven, like five through ten. I had a neighborhood group of kids with nothing to do, and we did plays on my back patio. And we would write them that day. We would do the costumes. I'd star in them, of course. And that's how we kept ourselves busy. And I talk about this a lot. There's this narrative, or there was in the late 70s, early 80s, where if you did stuff like that, that meant that you really were into acting. And I kind of digested that message and found myself saying, oh, I want to be an actress. I want to be an actress. And yet my whole childhood, I had really been a lyricist, writer, librettist, director, designer. But there weren't a lot of female examples of that. So my parents couldn't say like, oh, she's going to be a lyricist. And it took me a very, very long time. It took me until my 20s when a bunch of two guys who had been through BMI, Jeff Hardy, a composer, and Mark Holman, I was working on Your in Town with Mark Holman, they both said, you're a lyricist. And I was like, that's a thing? Like, what do I do with that? And thank God for the BMI workshop. And that really, it was something that I've done since I was a kid. And it just took me a long time to codify that it actually was a job that I could do for pay. Excellent. Anybody else? I was in acting school and I had a teacher who was very creepy. And he was always trying to get the women to take off their clothes. And I wouldn't do it. And so we had a little bit of a standoff. Howard, where were you? Where was this? This is very common. So anyway, we had a little bit of standoff. He didn't like me. I didn't like him. And then they had us write these, they called it personal monologues. So everybody was supposed to write something from their life. And it became a big confessional theater. Everybody was telling these terrible things that had happened to them. And there was a lot of emoting and everything. And I was a really bad actress. I was very shy. I had a hard time being on stage. I was not good at it at all. But there was no way in hell I was going to tell this man any of my personal secrets. So I made one up. I just completely made it up. It was a complete and total 100% lie. And I got up there and I don't know what happened to me. But I think because I wrote it and I knew exactly what it was about and exactly what line came out of what line and why, I all of a sudden became a much better actress. And I made the man cry. He was sobbing at my incredible acting, which was really, you know, actually just to pick on somebody. What was the story? And I just had him up on my hands. And I was like, wow. And then all the girls in my class, they, we were all starting to audition and they all wanted to use my monologue. But we were all going out for the same things as we didn't have agents. So it was just backstage. So they couldn't go in one after another doing the exact same monologue. That was all a big old lie anyway. But so I started, so I wrote separate one. I wrote them each a different one. And then a friend of mine was starting a theater company in the Bronx and he asked if he could put three of them together and sort of make a night out of it. And he did. And there were like three shows running. One of the other writers who was brand new was Stephen Adley Gearkis. His first show and my first show were in the Bronx and it was weird, but it was great. And I just, I didn't even know what to think about it. But I went up there. It was on Arthur Avenue, which is a very Italian section, still very Italian. And this guy who started it, Dante Alberti, he got all of the merchants on the street to give him a little money to start this theater and it was just a room. And on each chair they put a little plaque that said like Joe's mozzarella. And then Joe was trying to find his seat. Like everybody was like looking for their particular seats. And I ended up sitting next to this little lady who was Italian and spoke almost no English. And she was watching my show and she did not know that I had written it. And she kept grabbing my hand and laughing and going, oh, and I just spent the entire time watching her. And I thought, this is great. So I just kept doing it. Great stories. I'm struck by how both of you, the similarity in your stories is I didn't know I could do this until someone told me I could, until someone asked me to do it or someone took what I was feeling and impulse for and gave me permission to do it. And that I'm not a playwright. I'm a composer and a lyricist. And I started out as a classical pianist as a kid. And I was a really good in my small town in Tennessee classical pianist. And so I went away to music camp one summer. And while I was at music camp, we had to take an elective. And one of the electives was composing. And so for the summer I took composing. And my roommate that summer played the viola. And so I thought, all right, I'll write something for my roommate and I to play. So I wrote a piece and performed it on the last day of camp. And people clapped and said I was really good. And I thought I'm getting more attention for this thing that I did than for any of the solo piano work that I've done all through high school. And I want to do more of that. More attention. Yeah, it was about the attention for sure. And about stepping out from the crowd, doing something. And specifically, I don't know that I had the voice to be a solo pianist. I don't know that my piano playing was any better than anyone else's piano playing. But my writing was distinct to me. And I felt like I had, especially writing this thing for my friend creating an opportunity for her to play and for her to do what she was good at. And I thought this is exciting to me. And so I came home and asked for composition lessons. And then ultimately, it wasn't until, I'll say college and maybe even grad school, I went through the NYU musical theater writing program, which Winnie also went through. And it wasn't until then that I realized that the poetry and things that I was writing in my journal just for me could actually be song lyrics. And it really wasn't until a teacher said, maybe you want to try writing your own lyrics. You know, instead of being frustrated that this lyricist and this lyricist and this lyricist are not giving you what you want. Maybe you ought to try. And my first thought was, well, I'm a pianist. I'm a composer. That's not what I do. And I thought, actually, I've been doing it for 15 years. I've just been doing it in my journal. So similarly, it was someone, a teacher, saying, maybe you ought to try this, that led to the lyricist part. And that's where the whole composer lyricist thing happened. Meaningful. Yeah. Lisa, Winnie? Here, it's so similar. I mean, I definitely put on little shows as a little one. And I always was doing that. And when I look back, I just think it's sort of funny and charming and cute that from the time I was little, I was sort of always doing what I'm doing now. It was just kind of funny. I mean, you know, my little dolls, I was making little tiny musicals and making them sing to each other. And I would have little scripts. It's just hilarious. And I'm sure this is true of many, many people in this room that you were playing with dolls or playing with your friends and lip-syncing to certain things and putting on shows for your parents or your neighbors. And it touches my heart, really. I mean, it's just like, it's just one continuum. It really isn't any different now. I'm just older and have worked with a lot, a lot of amazing people. So I've been influenced and nurtured. You know, I'm so lucky. But it's the same person who was that little kid. I mean, it's just incredible. I don't have anything that interesting to say about it. I, you know, I also made up shows. Porn Plays. I did a lot of really good porn plays. Gunfight at the Ok Kibbutz was one. Broadway melodies at 400 BCE was another one. And I'm telling you, they still talk about them. In Michigan. But I didn't write. I wasn't, I didn't ever picture that I would write. But at some point, I think, you know, I was sort of, I was performing and I was putting together anecdotal stories and figuring things out. But there was some point where I kept trying to, I figure out how to do one thing. And then I would realize it was something else I didn't know how to do. There was some other, there was some further iteration. And at some point, the further iterations required the kind of writing and, you know, the kind of thinking and they required writing. And so I sort of, in my haphazard way, clawed my way forward through hideous trial and error to learn something about writing. Yeah. Well, outside I was introduced to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and I was worried about the questions I was going to ask you because I did think, oh, duh, what could I ask? And so I asked her. And she said that she was tired of seeing Kim Kardashian's ass and that she wondered if, why is it that women can't write the truth? Do you have any? Huh? I don't know that it's true. Well, I just think right now so many women are writing their truths. I mean, I'm really, I feel really lucky to live in America right now and have the ability to write my truth. That's how I see it. I mean, that's happening just all over. Yeah. Jenji Cohen should be up here. Yeah. I'm Amy Schumer. Yeah. I don't know any musicals about Kim Kardashian. I mean, I don't think, I don't think in our business that she's getting a whole lot of airtime. I mean, there are two things when I looked at the title for this that I, that sort of came to my mind. One that, you know, people have heard me say before. You know, when we talk a lot for reasons that I understand about women's voices and that we need women to tell us about women. And I, it was always sort of stuck in my head in a way and it sort of troubled way. And I realized that for me what I'm interested in is hearing women write about the world. And that there's something so reductive to me about the idea that the only thing women have to offer is to tell us about women. And that is what I'm, that's, that's what I'm interested in. That's what I'm interested in. The parody discussion in the diversity discussion is that I, you know, I don't think we need all these people who aren't coming from the standard white male perspective to tell us about themselves. We need to see what the world looks like from different perspectives. So that's one thing. And the other thing was, been thinking about this obviously a lot and it was really interesting in the last season to see the revivals of musicals by Comden and Green. And then to see the ways, I was thinking about women characters because the first, just to preface this by saying, when I looked at this title I thought, why can't we talk about men writing women? You know, I want these characters to be better. I want these characters to be better. And I feel like I see, I'm seeing male writers grappling with this and really, really, really trying to figure out how to write characters that are human and I think these are very honest efforts and I think these are real problems. I mean, you know, I can't write a teenager to save my life. You know, I think it's, playwrights are asked to write from the perspectives of people unlike themselves all the time and it's, it's the, you know, the great struggle of being a playwright and you know, failure is inevitable. Figuring out how to give women characters volition is a struggle for people and it's so interesting to see on the 20th century and see that Comden and Green didn't have trouble with that. To see that, you know, that the romantic lead when she's singing about what she wants, you know, in the romantic story it's also what she wants in terms of her career. It's what she wants in terms of her expression as an artist and that the plot hinges on that old woman who has all the money. She's a business woman. It wasn't difficult for them to figure out how to put these female characters in the plot with lives and interests of their own and a quick thing that my partner Madeline George named which is really, really helpful for me. It's, you know, there's a thing that happens where women characters get motivated by figuring out how to further the plot of the male protagonist. People default to this because we have seen it over and over and over again. So how do we write our women, when we write our women characters maybe what we need to think of is what do they want? What do they want? And they, and sometimes I think in trying so hard we end up with these characters in which basically what women are acting is they're justifying their place in the story, you know, instead of just assuming they have a place in the story and giving them something to do. Giving them interests, careers, desires, you know, let them, yeah, let them need something on their own rather than being there to further the interests of the male protagonist. But you know, it's also, once you write them it's also about the actors who play them, right? Yes. Lisa and I have talked about this before too and I've worked a lot as a teacher both at the university level and in private practice with actors helping them as a music director, vocal coach, learn material and there have been times, especially with young women where the thing I keep saying to them over and over again is where is your power, where is your power? You're giving away your power. As a character you're giving away your power. And what happens, even though the lyrics are I'm giving away my power, I'm giving away my power. What if you say, I'm not playing that. I'm going to play something different. I'm going to play the, I don't have much power in this moment but here's the power that I have. And so when you start looking for that in the songs it challenges the actors to perform in a different way. And I've had, especially at the college level, I've had a lot of young women really, really struggle with that because they've never been asked to do it before because the songs that they're singing from the golden era of musical theater do not require them to do that. In many cases, there is, of course, exception to the rule but in many cases, and I finally had one girl who was very frustrated to say to me, I have never done a role where I wasn't wearing a bikini on stage. And I thought, that's my job. I'm going to write the roles that don't require you to wear a bikini on stage. That's why I'm here. That's why we're here. It's part of what's so exciting about Frozen. You know, to see these girls, four girls, you know, that the story revolves around them. Well, you know, it's interesting because you're talking and I'm trying to figure out, for me, process of how these stories get written can really affect change in what we're seeing in content. So, for instance, Frozen was the first time that there were two females in the core creative team. Jennifer Lee, first it was just one female. First it was just me and Bobby and a male screenwriter. And that was the time when we had a princess trying to be a perfect princess and her evil blue-haired villain sister, who was this wild child, came and kidnapped her and froze her heart. And the movie wasn't working very well. It didn't sing. And, you know, we had to kind of have a heart to heart. Like, we could tell this story and this movie could be very good. But it's not going to be a musical. Or we can all hold hands and say, let's make a musical, but we really need to look at our main characters if you're going to have two females and what will make them sing. And then we were very lucky to have Jennifer Lee come on who has a very strong female voice and is used to being in, she had just come off Wreck-It Ralph so she'd spent a lot of time with a very male room and had sort of found her power and her voice. And honestly, it created for me kind of a rule that got codified in my head of the two women in every story room rule because if one of us said, you know, every time I've ever been really upset at somebody for something like something small, it really isn't about something small. It's usually, it'll trace all the way back six years to that time that she slammed the door in my face and I felt so horrible and I never said anything. And that will play out, you know, six years later in this and that the conflict between the sisters had to go much deeper than being mad about a crown or often in the story room a group of incredibly talented male story minds would go to like, they should be fighting over the man and Jen and I often were like, no, no, we're not gonna have it be fighting about a man. That's not what gets between two sisters. It's so much deeper than that, your problem with your sister and it just helped to validate our points of view and I think we were listened to when we could kind of have each other's backs and go like, hey, hey, no, that's not how girls work. And I gotta say John Lasseter is really fantastic about listening to that too. He's learned enough to listen to the different voices in the room and know that if you're gonna make different movies, bring in those different voices. And so there's a leadership at Disney right now and at Disney Animation that really supports the different voices. Not only is it validating, it's the truth. We were definitely both of us, our sisters. I'm the older sister and Jen was a younger sister and it was so funny is that she was always like, you were my Elsa and I was like, actually I feel so much more like Anna. I am not Elsa. But I have to say I have a four year old and our kids go to school together and we know each other well. And I don't think I've ever told you this but I think it's true. Girls are obsessed with Elsa because she's unlike a ball. They like the moment in which she gets to be like, I mean it's that line. Nicole never bothered me anyway. Slam the door. I mean it's the bitchy line that they like to act out. That's what draws them to it. I have a joke for your four year old. They wanna do that because that's true. None of the other stuff is true. Oh yeah, yeah. That, that, yes. It's what my daughters do. It's a thing. And actually I will have to give my husband credit. My husband, father of two daughters, he was the one who fought for that. There was someone who wanted us to cut. Nicole never bothered me anyway. He created that line. That comes from Bobby. What's your knock, knock joke? Oh, knock, knock. Who's there? Nicole. Nicole. Nicole never bothered me anyway. Anyway, just to keep the conversation moving forward for two seconds. The other thing I think Lisa was making me think about, about why, why we make our female characters occasionally make choices that don't inherently line up with our own organic experience of the world. And I think a lot of it also has to do with feedback. As a, as a female writer, as a female writer, which is such a label that I don't know how I feel about that. But I was raised to, I was raised, Carol Gilligan talks about this to compromise to if your friend comes over and she wants to be the mommy and you want to be the mommy, you have to learn to take turns and you have to be the daughter sometimes and she can be the mommy and vice versa. And you were taught to, to make those compromises very early. It's a core component of how we are raised. And yet you grow up as a female artist and suddenly that instinct, all of those lessons don't serve you when the, we're in it right now. We're in the crucible of change it, don't change it, change it, don't change it. We're in that place of I want you to get rid of the thing you care most about in the, in the show. And are, are we being precious about it? Are we not being precious about it? How do we listen? Do we not listen? And you really have to shut that voice up that says compromise, compromise. You know, if you've been given four notes, you have to take at least two of them to show that you can play nicely. And, and I think I, I see again, I'm, I'm lucky because I can, I'm a control group in my husband who, who doesn't have that instinct, who, who doesn't ever feel like, well, if I don't change two of them, I'll be considered a bitch. Like he never thinks that. And, and so it's good. And yet I will also say on the other side, there is a, if, if we're in balance, the yin and yang of that is that he can also be a hard headed asshole and be like, this is my vision. And sometimes you do need to listen. And, and if you're hearing it from enough people, just try it. Just try it. And sometimes you can end up finding out. So there, there is a balance. But I do think we're raised, we're raised in a way that, and that I'm fighting a lot to not just compromise for the sake of compromise, because you do need a true north. I think, you know, when I was talking to Linda and she said the thing about why can't women write the truth? I didn't take it to mean that we can't do it ourselves. I took it to mean that we are encouraged not to. And, and that that is, it's a political act for us to be writing plays, I think. For sure. But I mean, I mean, I'll just say, for me, I'm just, I'm feeling a lot of feelings right now as my, as my daughter would say. Because I have had my whole life since I was in my 20s, certain men have come into my life who've really nurtured me as an artist. And I'm not saying that I never had a woman nurture me as an artist, but I'm going to practically say that. The people that came and really brought me to that next level and opened doors for me and went like that to me and said, we believe in you. Like those guys were men. And so I just want to say that. And I think for me it's gotten to a point where it isn't about what's between your legs. It's all about what's in here. It's just not about the literal like what sex are you. It's because to me, the feminine values that we are so lacking in our world today, I can't necessarily go, well, women will bring those values. Well, some women might. But there's a lot of women who wouldn't. And there's a lot of men who would. So that's how I feel. How I feel better. Well, let me ask, I think I know the answer to this, but directed to the men in the audience, do you think differently when you're writing men? I actually was really stuck when I went to Juilliard. Marcia was my teacher. And for about 10 years, I couldn't get produced. And my friend, David Auburn, had just written proof and had a massive hit. And I actually was commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club. Part of my commission was to, like, intern with one of the big playwrights. So it ended up being Dave, who was really my contemporary. I mean, I actually was the person, you know, that when he was writing, I was like, what should I do? And I was like, I don't know, maybe, I mean, we were really contemporary, but we had to pretend that we were doing this. So it was weird, but it was good. And then after he had this huge year, he was like, he came over and he's, and I was crying. I was like, I don't know what to do. I'm not getting produced. I can't write. I don't know what to do. And he said, why don't you switch the gender? That's what I did. Wow. That's why I wrote this play called Boy, which actually did change everything. All of a sudden, I wrote Boy. People wanted to produce it. People started reading everything else. I had four productions in one year. But the lead character was the boy. It's me. Yeah. It really is. It really was just a gender switch. Everything that he wanted and felt was what I wanted and felt. So it really was... What's wrong with women as hero? Sorry? Women as hero. I mean, the hero of your play... I think at that time, things were different. I mean, at least we used to talk amongst ourselves and say, you know, if you want to have a hit show, it's got to be starring a man. It casts as many men in it. Yeah. And I think it was true. I don't think it is so true anymore. I really don't. It's less true. Yeah. I think it's less true. But I don't know if I believe it's gone away yet. Well, Casey Childs, who produced that play Boy, actually came out and said and allowed them to quote him. And the Niska study that I was talking about, he said, I passed on wit and how I learned to drive. Because I didn't think that my audience would identify with the female character going through those dark times, basically. But look how wrong he was. But he allowed her to quote him. And he said, I stand corrected. Yeah. You know, so I think it really was a thing. Yeah. But that was 20 years ago. It's a long time ago. Yeah. It's a whole other thing now. Right. I also love thinking about that proof was written for a male character. And then is that what you're saying? That he says the gender of his character? Well, he said that he was stuck. And so he wrote from a female point of view. And back, you know, I think it's just interesting. But they had conceived it differently. The subject matter of that play and why it was so, I mean, it's obviously written incredibly well. But I think it also, it just touches a nerve with the majority of the audience. Right. Yes. Yes, indeed. Well, let's open it up to questions. Yes? Yes. Yes. Why do you think that is? And how can we change it? I guess so. You can elaborate on it if you want. Patriarchal world. I mean, you noticed that. I mean, you know, everything, everything is pointing to that. Everything's been like that. You know, it's, we're living in a very interesting time because things are being questioned and shaken up. But, you know, we live in a world where our lives as American women are really different than most women in the world. And even our lives are compromised by, you know, rape and very dangerous and, you know, very sad statistics, a bunch of which were demonstrated last night. I mean, that's, I mean, the reason I hesitated so much is because I, I don't know, I really don't, I don't like to think, I'm not really into dwelling on that. I mean, I'm just gonna be honest. Like, I can't even explain why. I literally can hardly talk right now because it's like, I just feel like I just, I just, I'm just gonna do what I'm gonna do. It's almost like, you know, I was once with somebody, I forget who, but a fellow writer, a guy, and he was describing something and he was describing, I'm very bad at sports, but like race, race, when people race and if you go like that, you know, if you keep going like that to see what everybody else is doing, like you will, you're just gonna stumble and fall. I can't even explain it. And that's certainly not a very good metaphor compared to what you're doing. But I, I, I guess that I have a tendency not to not, and it's not that I live in, I think there are different forms of denial. I think there are positive denial. I think negative denial is like, you know, you, you pretend that the person you're living with isn't an alcoholic, say, but, but you know, there's a lot of positive denial. And I think I live in positive denial. You can't let the fact that it doesn't exist change or affect you. You have to just keep trying to push it forward. And I think we're in a really exciting time. And we're really at, we're at a tipping point. For real. Look at Fun Home. Look what it just did. I mean, and sort of following from that, I think, I think that that's totally right. I mean, I've always felt about my timing, that it has been the most perfectly lucky timing for me, because if, you know, as, as Winnie said, we're in this moment of flux and change. You know, some of the particular moment of changing the theater is happening right now because of the work that, that Julia has initiated. It's happening. And it's happening everywhere. So what that means is that for an, you know, our job as artists is to carve out new definitions and ideas of the world, new experiences of the world. The luckiest thing that can happen to an artist is not to be making, not to try to be figuring out how to make work that a million other people have in a culture that is so established. You know, to be in the moment where the door is opening up, where we can create, where, you know, now there's this, I mean, I felt if Fun Home had happened two years earlier, we would not have the reception that we had. There was this, you know, cultural framework that was, you know, had been formed by the work of, you know, decades of work by activists, by artists, certainly the gay marriage thing penetrated deep into the mainstream of America that people could meet that show in a way that I never, ever, ever. When I'm in that theater and I see the way that the audience just goes right to the show without, you know, this sort of barrier of there are those other people who I can't relate to, which I would have expected and which would have been the case before. That is the luckiest timing. So what that means is that as artists, we're so lucky. As women artists, we're so lucky that we now get to create those definitions to have, you know, I read one time about Paul Manette that he had developed all this craft, all this craft, all this craft for all these years. And when AIDS happened, which of course was the most tragic thing that could have happened in that man's life, but he had his subject. He had the thing to write about. He had the thing to pour into all that craft for an artist that is an extremely lucky thing. So for us as women writers, we are at the perfect moment. Absolutely. You know, speaking of the... Well, there's a lot of questions. Before we do the question, I just want to point us to Inside Out, the Pixar movie right now that is so much about the mind of an 11-year-old girl. And I took my two daughters to it, and they both sobbed through it, and I sobbed through it. And for different reasons, really, you know, I was sobbing to it as a parent and someone who used to be a girl, and my daughter was about, well, about losing childhood and, you know, whatever. But I read an interview where Amy Poehler, who played Joy, the main adult character, said that when the offer came to her, she expected that she was going to be the sidekick, the funny, wacky sidekick character, and they were like, will you work on this movie? Yes. And when she read the script, she thought, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's me? I get to be the main character? This is my story? That's unbelievable. And Amy Poehler is at the forefront of smart girls and, you know, all that, but even for her to say that. And then in the follow-up, I read another article that said, here's why it's so important that that movie isn't about princesses, because we're allowing our young girls to have something else to model. And I think that's because of you. I think it's because... No, I really do. I think it's because frozen, because of exactly what you were talking about, about breaking the model of the girls having to fight against each other or the princesses, that sort of thing, saying there is another way to model girls and it is successful and it will make money and pave the way for things to... for new stories to be told. Well, thank you. One last thought in all of this is that when you're dealing with a time of change, it's very easy to get very serious about things. And I think where we will find success is like Fun Home did so beautifully. So many of the panelists here, their work combines these important, big, changing ideas with entertainment. There's like a great partridge family number in Fun Home that also is providing, because it's so... If you've been sitting on an unfair powder keg for this long, it's so easy to just explode in anger and ideas. I have to say, just because we have Winnie here, when I first laid eyes on my so-called life, I hadn't ever seen anything like it before. I mean, I just remember her face and that she looked like a person and that she was... It was like... That was the goal. It was just so unusual. I was just kind of like, what is that? And I've never forgotten that. Just that image that it was so... She was so wonky and weird. It was amazing. And the fact that it was amazing is shocking. I mean, that was what I was referring to before, is I met these two men and they said, we really believe in you and we want you to create a TV show. And we wanted to be... It was their idea that it'd be a teenage girl. At the time, my daughter was seven or six, seven, and I wasn't ever thinking about teenage girls. I was surrounded by other six or seven-year-olds. I never in my life wanted to recreate my teenage years because they were devastating. And I never would have come up with that idea. You could have locked me in a room for a million years. I wouldn't have come up with that idea. But they were like, we think that you should do that. And that's what I'm talking about, the beauty of... I don't mean to be too sentimental, but of a man who has power coming into your life and saying, I believe in you. I mean, in our generation, hopefully all of us are that, of course, to younger women, of course, because without saying, but I didn't have that from a woman. I had that from all these amazing men. Actually, I told you the story about my creepy acting teacher. There was another acting teacher, whose name is Richard Pinter, who's gay man, who was the opposite. And he told me, he made me do that monologue for him, and he said, I want you to bring me five pages of writing every week and bring it up to my office. And I did, and he would take the five pages and put them in the drawer, and then he'd be like, who's sleeping with who? And I would just tell him all the dirt in the class. And then the next week, I would come in with my new five pages and he'd give me back the other one and he was like, what's going on now? He never said a word about the writing. I don't know if he ever read it. He just made me do it. That's awesome. And I did mention John Lasseter. John Lasseter is the champion of certainly for me and for Jennifer Lee. He will listen up in these big story meetings. He'll lean in and go, well, let's follow that thing Kristen said, which had never happened to me before. And he does that for Jen, and he's a real mensch. One more question. Yes. Just one? Well, I'm full of lots of feelings too. I think this panel has been really tremendous. The whole conference has been so inspiring and so empowering. What I wanted to address, and I love the work that Julia is doing, and thank you so very much, all of you, especially thank you Julia. You know, there's a deep sadness that I feel about this ongoing war between men and women. It's a sadness. And I think that perhaps what we need to do is encourage this culture to self-reflect. To self-reflect about this war, this sadness. It goes so much deeper than anger. Anger is the top layer. So we can get underneath that and see what all this fear is about. Write that play. I did. I did. And I keep writing it. I write about women in history. That's my great passion. Cool. And I keep doing that and doing that. I don't want to talk too much about my personal artistic stuff. You'll see it. But what I want to say is, when we're talking about Kim Kardashian's ass, this is a cultural mind screw. And we've got to unscrew it. And again, it's not about the anger. It's about this sadness. This sadness. We've got to get... I'm teaching a class right now. And I have one student, one female student in my composition class. I've turned it into a feminist writing course. And we're talking about the history of misogyny. And we're talking about the history of the negative aspects of the patriarchy. Not the wonderful aspects that you were talking about, Winnie. And they do exist. I've experienced great support from men too. So I just wanted to open that up. That underneath the rage is a sadness and I think a deep love that has to be realized. And maybe we can heal this. Maybe we can heal this and have all of our voices come out on stage in a really new, unique, positive way. I'm really optimistic about that. Thank you. You know, thank you. I think we're well on our way to getting out of the hospital. And what I hear saying is there's a lot of tipping points happening from childhood on and I have great expectations for all of us. Thank you, ladies. Thank you. You were wonderful.