 Well, from Spectrum Theater, we are doing another live panel with the member, well, I'm not just introduce Anna first. Anna will do the whole kind of spiel. Anna is our general manager. Obviously, as you can see, we have images on the screen that our presenters are showing. So go ahead, Anna. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Dan. So as he mentioned, my name is Anna Zembo. I'm the general manager for Spectrum, and we're really, really excited to introduce our next featured program. So we have Kate and some of her friends here from the Gotchall Access Program, which is a community autism resources program at Bristol Community College that do some really awesome work with theater. So I'll turn it over to Kate, and she can talk a little bit more about the program. Thanks, Anna. So as Anna said, the Gotchall Access Program, or we abbreviate that to GAP, is a three-year college program for autistic adults 18 plus. We have some core area courses of study, one of them being life skills, which touches on social skills, occupational skills, job and college readiness, health and wellness so that our students can have independence and enjoy a healthy lifestyle, find ways to do that for themselves in a way that they'll enjoy. Our enrichment courses are traditional college courses like art, photography, philosophy, journalism, computers, coding, and then finally, of course, why we're here is we have a theater curriculum. And what we found is that the theater curriculum really lends itself well into a lot of the other skills, and I'm sure you've been saying this for the past two days, that theater just suits the autism population so well in working on some of those skills that they need some strengthening with. So just in terms of like conversation, voice, volume, pitch, speed, cooperation, the back and forth of conversation, nonverbal language, confidence, public speaking, projection, there's just so many skills that you work on within theater that then is so helpful in occupational, in social, and in lifelong learning as well. So with saying that, I'll turn over to Jeff, who is our theater instructor for the Gotcha All Access program. He's been with us for three years now. And Jeff, if you just want to speak to, so the students have three semesters in each semester, they take a different theater course. So I'll let Jeff talk to you about that. Thank you, Kate. Hello, hello. Yes, I am Jeff, and that is exactly right. We have three semesters each year, and we do things that kind of relate to each other within the year. The first year, we start off with acting, get everybody's feet wet. We move into directing, the interpretation of stuff and communicating with others. Then we sing, we spend most of the second year writing, we sing some more. And a good chunk of the final year is taking everything we've learned over the past couple of years of putting it all together in one show. The way we've done this so far is every student in the particular cohort of students, they sort of, they pick anything that comes to mind. Could be a passage from a novel, could be a favorite movie, we have a video game that we're working on currently, and we find a neat little, a neat little through line. We take all these separate pieces and figure out what they all have in common. Speaking of having things in common, I think it is worth noting that a lot of what we do with theater, in particular, our writing and directing stuff, we're figuring out how to interpret the way that people behave. A question that I ask a lot of the students, a lot of the time is why? Why is this character behaving this way? Why did they say this? Why did they do this? What might they be feeling? Which is also pretty useful in real life. From experience, studying this stuff has certainly opened up a few doors in my own interpersonal relationships as well. So we wear a lot of hats. We look at a lot of different aspects of creating art. Recently, we threw in stand-up comedy, also, which our first cohort of students to try it just went by with flying colors. They did so, so well. And I think that's a good enough segue to turn over one of our bright shining stars, Cassie, who has just been thriving in this program so far. So, Cassie, what do you have to add? Hi, Jeff. Thank you. So I've always been overly self-conscious of how people view me, how I view them, but gaps acting curriculum is such a light and fun way to dive into deeper issues and help with that. If you ever have come to one of our variety shows, it has also a great way of showing that being autistic isn't just a tight cast of traits or that it's for only children or something like that. We are just as capable of having a full set of multiple and diverse roles. This also came much easier to me than I expected, because I actually hate feeling like I'm being a prima donna or taking up the stage. So this was, you know, a bit of a surprise that how much I was good at it, to be honest with you, or if I messed up that I was going to leave an image that seriously followed me. With acting, I learned that it's okay to be a lead. You can't help how people are going to interpret your performances, but there's always new venues to play at or new leads to play your characters and above all, new audiences. Not everyone is going to critique you either, and that has been one of the biggest challenges that I've been working on that acting has helped me with. Fantastic. Thank you, Cassie. You're going to make me cry. Cassie's a current senior in our program, so she's finishing up her senior year. Of course, everything's up in the air right now. Of course, we'll have our final showcase, but that's going to take a little while for us to pull on that together. So we get to keep you a little bit longer, Cassie. We're trying to make me happy. Hoping it extends. Absolutely. Are there any questions or anything else? Did you guys want? I can give you some questions. Sure, let me hang on. I've got this. Okay, here we go. Now we're good. So one of my first questions from listening to you guys and ladies talk comes to a question. So you've talked about a bit of your, you know, how you work with your plays with your students and that. So let us give us more an idea of what the creative process is in your program. How you come up with, you know, how do you come up with what plays you do, that sort of thing, you know? Jeff, do you want to speak to that? Sure. Well, when we start off with the classes, like the acting class or the directing class, I have a few, I can probably see you over over my shoulder. I've got a pretty extensive library of a large number of plays all the way from the Greeks up until a few years ago. So I got a few monologues and scenes that helped me a lot when I was a student. So I've passed some of those along to the students and everyone seems to like them so far. When we do original stuff, it's sort of a free form, brainstorm, hey, rhyming, kind of thing. We just throw out any idea. If we like it, we write it down. If we give it a shot and it doesn't pan out so great, no problem, we find something else. Pretty much anything that comes to mind we think is worth a try. I think it's important to note too that we're well aware that not all of our students want to be on the stage and that there's so many other components that are involved in theater from set design, writing, directing, costumes. So we certainly don't force students to perform if it's not something that they're interested in or comfortable with. We encourage everyone to give it a try. But we also explore all those other dimensions of theater as well for our students who might not necessarily want to perform. All right. So thank things to find another question I have. So you were talking about how some students don't necessarily always want to be involved in acting in that. So what are some of the other challenges you faced with students of varying abilities and disability? Well, not disability, you know what I mean. And how do you resolve these? How do you get out of the challenges that you are faced with? So I have to say, first of all, that our staff is phenomenal at just meeting our students at where they're at and developing their skills from there. Our expectations are certainly not the same for each student. So that's a huge piece of our teaching method is wherever the student is at, we meet them there and we challenge them to make those next steps. So each student's writing, each student's play, each student's performance is going to be different from one another. And as far as measuring their success, again, that's individual for each student as well. Anything to add on that, Jeff or Cassie? I do. One of the things that, you know, has been kind of a struggle, but that we work on really well is that because we are so diverse, some of us might want to have more mature content in our plays, but we have to make sure it's okay because we try to keep our showcases very family friendly. But at the same time, a lot of us are, you know, want to be treated more like adults. And, you know, we've been infantized a lot because of our diagnosis or things like that. So it gap tries to find a balance in between that that we can still show that, hey, we're adults here, but, you know, we can also keep things family friendly. Awesome. I have a question about content and, or maybe about content, but one of the things that I've been enjoying hearing from our featured programs is kind of what is the most fun? What's the fun stuff and where do you enjoy it most? And I'd love to hear from all three of you. Well, for me, it's the performance, you know, the final outcome of all the hard work. I, you know, I'm bouncing between class to class every day, so I don't always get to see the nitty gritty and the step by step process. So every summer, every semester, we do a showcase of some of the skills that they've worked on. And so sometimes I've only seen little pieces of it and then to see it all put together and to see the students who have made such enormous progress is, for me, that's the best, the absolute best part of it all. Awesome. Cassie? Oh, sorry, Cassie, go ahead. It was just my next window. To be honest with you, you know, some of the most exciting parts are seeing what gets accepted and what doesn't, because it's just honest critique in there, what, like, if they don't like something, they're going to tell you. And it's great to kind of get that kind of feedback and it makes it feel all the more authentic. To be honest with you, we just like messing with Jeff too. Gee, it's not long. Just a couple minutes left. I'm going to ask you if you have any more questions. So we did get a question from one of our Facebook viewers that I wanted to pose to you guys before we wrap up. And that is just, so the question is, do you believe in the saying there may be small parts, but no unimportant ones and how that relates to your program? Yes, Jeff, you take this one. One thing that we take a look at, especially when we are writing our stories, we look at how all the different characters matter. We look at the place in the story and what purpose that they serve, because no character is in a show by accident. It serves a purpose. It could be one line. It could be 100 lines, but every part is equally important in telling that story and should be treated as such. All righty. So we're almost at time. So I'm just going to say thank you, thank the three of you for joining us, Cassie, Kate, and Jeff. At Spectrum Theater, we really look forward to working with you in the future, collaborating. So everyone who's watching, we're going to have to take a short break. We will be back at I believe four o'clock for our next discussion. So stay tuned. Thank you, everyone. Take it easy.