 I might tear, I believe, so yeah, we can turn that one off. All right, you can feel free to come forward, guys, in the back if you want. Hello, hello, everybody. Thank you, Barbara. That was a really nice introduction. I really appreciate it. And I feel the same way about that full circle. And that's what I'm here to talk about. It's just been a very inspiring weekend, and I really have enjoyed. I've just really been appreciating hearing what you guys are all doing with your work. Makes me very happy. And I think Viola would be very, very pleased. So there she is, Viola, in the 1930s. This was her head shot when she went to New York to study with the group theater. My father, Paul Sills, used to start his workshops by asking all the teachers to raise their hands. So roll call teachers. How many do we have here? A teacher of any subject doesn't have to be improvisation. You don't have to get paid for it. Well, this is pretty good. Usually in my workshops, it's about 75% because that's what a spoiler workshop is all about. We have so many teachers. It's really wonderful. I think we got closer to 100% here than ever. You guys might win. So he would ask, yeah, where are my teachers? And they don't get to play. Then he'd tell them a story about how his mother, this woman here, Viola Spohlin, found a true teacher named Eva Boyd and how improvisational theater emerged from that opportunity. And he'd thank them for sharing the work because that's how it got out to the world, right? They both very much believed it could save the world. So I'm here to tell you that story today, how Viola found a teacher. So we're going to start by talking about her here, Paul's teacher, his mother, Viola Spohlin. And in case you're unfamiliar with her, I'll read you the very first words in her book, Improvisation for the Theater. Oh, I don't even have my copy on my hand. It's usually nearby. Someone got it. Deanna, third edition. I would like to add, for those of you who are doing this work, you know, there's lots of editions available now. Third edition, you work from that. Here, oh, Deanna has the right copy. Of course, thank you very much. All right, third edition. Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stage worthy. We learn through experience and experiencing. And no one teaches anyone anything. Talent or lack of talent have little to do with it. So what she's talking about here is experiential education, something she learned about at Hall House in Chicago. And so we'll get into that too. Viola was born in 1906 to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Let's see, does this work? I hear she is a young girl. She had five siblings and busy parents so the kids played in the streets in abandoned construction sites, swinging from the equipment anywhere they could. They made up games and learned games from neighborhood kids. And she was an energetic, totally modern girl. So this is 1920s where she's like 14 here. Here she is a few years later. I'll give you a moment with this one. Take your time, take it in. This is the girl we're talking about. Yeah. So she was totally modern, right? She went to Lakeview High School in the 1920s when she played basketball. She wore men's overalls with red lipstick and bobbed her hair. And she ran around with her girlfriends in an old model team board that they all got, they purchased together and they would run up to Lake Geneva and stuff like that. Her nickname was Spark, appropriately, right? So yeah, isn't that picture amazing? It challenges our preconceptions and assumptions, doesn't it? Of what young women were like at that time. This is another picture of her as a young woman, to mama, love Viola. And here, I love that one. Here you go. Those are the girls. Those are the girlfriends. Chick was Paul's aunt and one of those girls was Chick. And Viola is the one holding the gun. Natural. Natural, right? All right, Viola told Jeff's sweet, you know, the theater historian, Jeffrey Sweet, who wrote something wonderful right away. He did an interview with Viola when she would not let him publish. But I'll read you a little bit of it here. The estate has allowed him to publish it in his next edition. It's really wonderful. She just wasn't in the mood. She told him, quote, I don't know how I got through high school. I was so busy with basketball and baseball. I tried to get into drama class, but my grades were too low and they wouldn't take me. After high school, though, luckily, her older sister, Pauline, took her to see Neva Boyd, who held classes in group work at Hall House and what they called a group work then, we call it social work today. And she had a recreational training school. Let's see, here she is. There's Ms. Neva Boyd. And Neva Boyd was an early theorist of the uses of play in education and social work. Viola studied with Ms. Boyd from 1924 when she was 18 until her first son, Paul, was born in 1927. Viola said, quote, Boyd taught group work, table games, arts and crafts, folk dancing, Kentucky running races. She'd traveled all over this country and Europe and brought back games and folk dances and taught them to us. Today, I can still call a square dance. This was maybe the late 70s. She was in her 70s, Russian Jewish girl from Chicago who called a square dance. She touched everything that was traditional that had the spirit of play in it. Her basic theory was to adjust the child to the existing culture, to adjust them to live happily in the existing environment. Viola began to see how learning unfolded organically through experiencing the world through working with Neva Boyd. And she saw that play was an integrated, near perfect system of learning. Neva Boyd was part of the progressive education movement that had flourished around settlement houses, including Jane Addams famous hall house where Neva Boyd worked from. This is in Chicago. And she was influenced by educational writers and reformers like John Dewey. And Neva Boyd ran her recreational training schools there at Hall House, but also at her own house until she would just use her house as the school they'd go there, or her apartment. And until eventually her school was absorbed into the sociology department at Northwestern University. So I need to backtrack a little bit and tell you about Jane Addams. Who here has heard of Jane Addams? We probably, a lot of people here, that's right, this is my crowd. All right, but very often, I give a short version of this talk in the beginning of each workshop and very often they've not heard of Jane Addams. Mostly in Chicago, you know, a little bit. So for those of you who have never heard of her, she was a remarkable woman. Here she is as a young woman. She inherited a lot of money when she was young and she dedicated herself to helping the poor. She became one of the leading lights of the progressive era. She was an activist, a social reformer, a public intellectual, and a philosopher. In the late 19th century, waves of immigrants were coming to Chicago from all over and settling, well, from Russia, Italy, Mexico, Greece, Ireland. And so in 1889 with her partner, Ellen Gates Starr, she rented a mansion that had long ago been abandoned by the owners because the neighborhood had turned into what they used to call a slum, right? We don't use that term anymore much, but it was. And this is where, it was smack dab in the middle of an intersection of a lot of different immigrant communities. And they called it Hellhouse after the name of the man who had built the house originally. And they offered an array of classes for all ages and lectures and community activities and social services. Their idea was to help integrate the residents of the near west side into American culture and help alleviate the crushing effects of poverty. And the needs were huge. There was something like a 40% child mortality rate at that time. Children were working in factories. And so these were wealthy women from a different class. And so they came in with an idea of what was needed. But they lived there. They actually lived in Hellhouse. So they became members of the community. And so they learned from the community what was actually needed and it changed over time. But their goals went beyond only meeting the immediate needs, which were quite vast. But they ran to the betterment of all aspects of community life. The first building they built outside of Hellhouse was an art gallery because they believed in the arts as a way to uplift the human spirit. Kids and adults could study and practice art and ceramics, music, dramatics. The little theater and community theater movements can be traced directly to Hellhouse. It came right out of Hellhouse. People would actually be in drama clubs. Like kids from the neighborhood would join a drama club starting at age six and being at their whole lives till they die, where they'd get together once a week with their club and put on Shakespeare or whatever. So Adam's in the work she did at Hellhouse. They're partially responsible for many of the reforms of the Progressive Era that we've until recently mostly taken for granted. Like child labor laws, women's suffrage, trade unions for women, compulsory education, juvenile courts, public playgrounds, improvement and working conditions all over the place. It just goes on and on. Once Adam's was in the community and listening to the problems and concerns of the people who lived there, she began to see the systemic injustices that kept poor people poor and she got kind of radicalized. And she realized they would have to move beyond charity work. She got, at that point, she realized she would have to get into public policy and change laws. But if you recall, women still couldn't vote, right? So that was one of the first things she had to figure out was how to get women to vote, the right to vote. And she worked on that. And then they just kept working. They were changing laws at the state and national level. But she organized people. She knew how to do that. She lobbied, she advocated, she listened and she provided spaces for groups to come together. That was her, one of the things she was capable of doing. And she became an activist through that. She was a co-founder of the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Women's International Leading for Peace and Freedom. All of those organizations are still in existence. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize for her anti-militarism activism, which is actually what turned the American public against her, which is so telling, right? Anti-war activity work. But, so I know I'm going into detail here, but it's important right now, you know? As we're watching the 20th century be repealed before our very eyes, we're gonna have to fight these battles all over again. But she's someone who can help show us how, you know? But back to Ms. Boyd, we'll head back to the subject. Jane Adams was a supporter of Neva Boyd's work and on the board of her school. And so you begin to see the viola's luck at meeting this great teacher was, it just wasn't chance. It was because there was a community of people who came together, a lot of them women too, a lot of them gay women, it was the whole house was among other things, a gay space. And it hidden, obviously, right? But that's lively participatory democracy where all people deserve access to education. That education is a liberatory force, right? And not only that, democracy doesn't function without that. But back to our Ms. Boyd. There's a story that I like to tell that sort of demonstrates what she was like as a teacher. She noticed that a school near her house had just torn out all the trees and plants from their playground. And she'd been an early advocate for playgrounds. They didn't even have these. The first playground, public playground in Chicago was right across the street from Hall House. It's now a parking lot for UIC. But they didn't, nobody thought kids needed playgrounds, but she had advocated for them and she trained playground workers. And she believed they believed that children deserved access to the natural world, right? And so she was really sad. But at that moment, she couldn't do anything about it. So she sat down with a group of children on the front steps of the school nearby and told them folk tales. And the children listened. And when she finished one of them asked her, couldn't we come to where you teach? Social living, Neva Boyd wrote, cannot be maintained on the basis of destructive ideologies, domination, hate, prejudice, greed, and dishonesty. A society cannot hold together without a good way of life for all. Virtues are dynamic products and cannot be taken over fully developed without being continuously developed. And she also wrote, play involves social values as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control and imagination. They become habits of meeting situations happily. So she said, I talked a bit about this last night, that idea that children learn to work out their differences through play because they share a common goal, right? To keep the play going, just to keep playing. And not that it's so easy, but it's a process and how else are they gonna learn it? But when Boyd writes about social values, she's in conversation with Jane Addams there. Her, Jane Addams wrote a book called Democracy and Social Ethics. And the idea, the basic idea is that democracy functions best if we all get out of our own spheres, cultural, religious, racial, class, you know, whatever they may be, and meet people who are not like us and get to know their needs and concerns. Jane Addams wrote that quote, a standard of social ethics is not attained by traveling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where we'll almost turn out for one another and at least see the sides of one another's burdens. And so Neva Boyd was saying, play does this. She did become a major figure, Boyd, in the training of social workers. Many of you probably have, you can visit her archive at the Houston, Texas. But she is not often given enough credit for her role in the history of improvisational theater. So hopefully if you don't already, you'll all go look for her handbook of recreational games. It's very helpful in workshop. And in a spooling workshop, we start every workshop with a game that she got that Neva Boyd gathered. So after training with Neva Boyd, Viola worked with a lot of recent immigrants, orphans, church groups, and lots and lots of neighborhood kids. She described one job on an early resume as folk dancing and group therapy for working girls. So she was working with groups of all kinds, wherever she was needed. But from childhood, Viola was drawn to the theater. She said, my father was a Chicago policeman. He was on opera detail. He took us to the opera all the time, and I fell in love with it, especially when it snowed on stage, la bohem. That was pretty exciting theater for a kid to see. And I was a super once and wore a skouden off with Charlie Oppen. I did my first play when I was 10 years old, wrote, produced, costumed. For admission, I charged a penny or 10 tins. I don't know how I came up with 10 tins. Certainly a penny would have been more useful. That was Viola. Here she is, I like this one. This is her, she and her girlfriends. Chick, there's Chick again. Chick Silverberg, my, Paul's aunt. Putting on a show, clearly there's some sailor pants and banjos and cigarettes and looks like a good one. She came from a big extended family. They were all pretty much, except for one grandma. They were all Russian Jews and there was an Irish mother-in-law, I guess, who all got together and sang songs. They played charades and put on shows. Viola said, every Sunday we'd take the streetcar and meet at somebody's house. Nobody had babysitters. They always sang, they always danced, and they would make up the funniest operas. I remember I had a friend, a very proper English girl. She came with me one time and said to me, I didn't know people did things like this in their house. Lucy, here's Viola looking very proper. That's another teenage, she's about 14 here. Her brother George, who would become a state senator, described a family gathering for which Viola and her siblings and cousins wrote and performed a three act play about their aunts and uncles harrowing escape from Russia. Complete with costumes and sound effects like rumbling sheets of tin to stand in for the Cossacks and all ending happily in a double wedding in Chicago. And afterwards they improvised scenes in which he said Viola was doing these great impersonations of aunts and uncles. So this was the family tradition that Viola came from. And you'll note that phrase, nobody had babysitters, right? The family unit could include play for entertainment before television and all that. And in the 1930s, Viola majored in Dramatics at DePaul's Night School. Here is she, this is from the newspaper, Viola Seals has noted role. She studied at the Goodman Theater and with the group theater in New York. She acted and worked as a stage manager. She absorbed knowledge about the theater in every way possible for a divorced, by now divorced mother of two. And naturally she began to teach Dramatics, working mostly with recent immigrants with limited English skills or with children. And lectures and traditional training and all the ways that she had been taught acting, even though a lot of it was Stanislavski and lively and fun, but she used its own terminology that wasn't helpful for the people she was working with. She realized that none of that was gonna help her in her classroom, working with her students. But she knew from her training with Neva Boyd that play would solve all those problems. As she said of Miss Boyd, the effects of her inspiration never left me for a single day. Every time Viola encountered a problem when directing her players or working with them in workshop, such as not being able to hear them, I'd be one example or them being afraid to touch each other. There's a million things, the way they hold their hands all over the place, all that kind of stuff. She created a game with a focus to help them learn through playing. And through play, her students discovered not just that they should share their voices with the audience, because the teacher told them to, but why they needed to include the audience to make sure that they were heard. And so as they learned through doing organically in their bones and through experience, that it helped them overcome whatever the shyness or the self-consciousness that solved the problem in the first place, right? And as we know, true play helps the player enter into the present time, right? With all our senses and our intuition activated. It's a state. That's the state that we're always trying to get our students into, right, as side coaches. Because it allows your players to solve complex problems without thought, without thinking of them. Or in that state, we're liberated from the mental chatter or the conditioning, anything that holds us back. As Viola said, through spontaneity, we are reformed into ourselves. So Viola would eventually create hundreds of theater games over her lifetime, and they actually amount to a complete actor training method if you do them, all of them, which most of us don't do. We just dip in and do a few. And a non-authoritarian teaching method, which I urge everyone here to go and explore. I find it still incredibly radical and ahead of its time, her teaching method. Still difficult to work with for the teacher and yet, ultimately, incredibly liberating for your students on a personal level as well. So in the late 30s, Neva Boyd recommended Viola to the WPA to be a drama supervisor. And Viola rented space at Whole House, just like her teacher, and she would sometimes have to literally go into the street and round up the kids to get them to play, to get them involved with her program. Here is a picture. This is a picture of Viola directing on the whole house stage. Look at all those kids. They've got their scripts. And I love how there's like every sort of attitude in the rehearsal process is represented in those children, right? But that is Paul Sills in the middle with the script in the short pants on the piano. Isn't that amazing that that exists? And Viola said, I remember trying to get boys to join the group. I don't want to, they said. I want to play hi-ho silver. So come play hi-ho silver on the stage, she said. So they came in and they played hi-ho silver till I was about to die. Some of you may know the feeling. And then they gave it up and worked. This is an article from 1940 about her work. Let's see if I can read this. About organized recreation for children takes many unique forms, none more unique than what is being done at whole house. Aimed at stirring creative ability inherent in all children. It's a program of unorthodox drama that hues to no lines, knows no cues and never heard of a rehearsal. The youngsters are given a bare idea. Characters are chosen and the impromptu play begins. It's fun, stimulates reading, eliminates the dis, dat and doze from the children's speech. Are these young thespians good? They're the finest ad libbers the stage has ever seen, says director Viola Sills-Bowlin. Her performances with children at whole house are some of the very first recognized times that suggestions were taken from the audience to create performances. So these kids, these neighborhood kids, these are all your improvisational ancestors, right? You get a, today's news is tomorrow's play. Here, 11-year-old Leonard Curfman reacts as he imagines anyone would in an air raid up there. And in this one, oh, they're ad-living an emotional, the diaper, that one's called. They were, they were actually, their stuff was coming out of their own lives. When the villain comes to collect the mortgage on the old homestead, grandpa Vincent Lombardo, 12, and Jeanette Catapano, 11, just stepped up and bopped him one. So, and he sort of says they have improper costuming and stuff like, he's like, you know, but that looks pretty good to me. We're amazed to see costumes at all, right? There's another amazing quote. It's on the bio at violasbullen.org about a show that Viola directed and it was written by someone and the script doesn't exist, but it was, it's worth going to read. I should have just gotten the description for you here, but they, I do believe they improvised parts of it. Every immigrant group and by Viola's time, there was, there was like every, there was like a train, it was about a train and there were like hundreds of people in this show and it would stop in every neighborhood. So it would stop in Greek town, in the Italian section, in the Black neighborhood and Russian Jewish and there were, it was this whole big, huge, integrated, improvised and written thing put on entirely by the people themselves. It's kind of like an amazing event, but this is the kind of stuff they were up to at whole house. So I'll read you a little bit about how she developed her games because it might be of interest to you guys. I'm sure you're working on a lot of, when you see a problem, I'm sure you're working on this. Here's a quote about how she developed a game called Stage Picture, which helps players essentially to block themselves, right? Which is an amazing thing when a group of people can begin to do that with themselves, they can begin to devise their own theater, right? If you, she, they sent through playing, they learned to understand where they are in relation to their fellow players on stage and to every member of the audience. It's a remarkable thing. This was at her young actors company in Hollywood where she taught and directed a professional children's company in the 1940s and 50s. She, quote, I'd need something or something wasn't happening. That's how she would develop her games. I remember Alan Arkin was with me when he was a kid for a few months in California. And a friend of mine sitting next to me said, you ought to have him right stage. You gotta say it like that because it's just like, do we still say right stage anyway? I love that. You ought to have him right stage. And I said, yes, I know I should. Well, why don't you get him right stage? I haven't figured out how, said Viola. What do you mean you haven't figured out how? I'm not gonna tell him to go to right stage. He has to figure out for himself. So maybe that's where share the stage picture came from, she said. At first I would name the person so and so share the stage picture. And then I realized it was everybody's responsibility to share the stage picture. And that's what that game is all about. And it does a lot of work in a short amount of time, right? And so just because you guys might appreciate this, here's some pictures of her. This is her in that period of her young actor's company. This is 1946. This is her working. They would do, it was the children's Repertory Theater as well. They would do elaborate productions. And this is her backstage. I think this is from once upon a clothesline where they all, it was all took place in a backyard. The Alan Arkin is the child in the middle with those Spock-like eyebrows. But and his brother, I think that's his brother too. I don't know what they did. They gave him a little make up there. These are children pretending to be dolls, you know. And look at their bodies. I mean just, and that clown up there, that's Paul Sand, who some of you may know from the second cast of Second City. And he won a Tony for Paul Still's story Theater on Broadway. He worked with Viola when he was nine years old. So some good actors came out of this training, I have to say. This is another, that's Jackie Joseph. She was a television and film actress in Later Life and Paul Sand is to the right. But look at these productions. And they were very popular too. I just love to see the movement, always with the movement reflected. I went a little too far, let's see, we'll go back. All right, so that was just, there's many, many more beautiful pictures of that. But I wanted you guys to see what she was up to in that period. She published this lifetime of research in 1963 as improvisation for the theater. Thank you, Deanna. The book that launched the improvisational theater movement in the US. And it also transformed and in some way democratized the American theater. And true to her original training as a social worker, Viola's theater games have gone on to be used in all, you guys just tell me where your countless fields, call out what you're doing with them, right? Or with improvisation, psychology, English, religion, mental health, and on and on and on. All this, to help doctors and scientists communicate. Anyone want to throw anything out there? What are you doing? That's a new one to me. Yeah, let's find people working with lawyers and politicians I heard, but law, yeah. I forgot to mention a student who actually, I didn't know she was in the audience last night who is a immigration rights attorney. And I'm so happy she's doing that too. Helping to train, oh yes, wonderful. Thank you, thank you all. Emergency managers, yes, fantastic. What a good idea, this is great. Say that one more time. Revisioning research, yes. Viola also created Two Sons, and sometimes I even forget to talk about Paul, because there's just so much to talk about. But her first born was Paul Sills, and I just skipped ahead a little. And thanks to her, Paul was born into the theater. And not as Paul sitting on the lap of Neva Boyd. Yes. Look at that baby, though, for a minute, too. Look at his eyes. He's already directing, someone. I don't know, but it's hard to believe this exists, but there he is drinking at the mother's milk of play. But, and Viola would invite all her, but if she wrote about this, there was a time when she couldn't work, because she had a baby, so she would invite all her girlfriends over to her apartment for game nights. And they would just prop the baby on the bed, because remember, no babysitters, nobody could afford that. And she once said, quote, I think that's where Second City began. People used to say, you guys ought to rent a theater, because they were so hilarious. I think Paul absorbed a lot of this as an infant on the bed. So Paul went on to become the founding director of Playwrights Theater at the University of Chicago with David Shepard, and Ed Asner, and Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, Joyce and Byrne Piven, and many more wonderful players. And he co-founded Compass with David Shepard, and which is considered the first improvisational theater company. In, let's see, here he is in that period. There's some, I've zoomed in once. It's Lucky Strikes, obviously. But Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Lucky Strikes, I can't figure out what the book on the bottom is there. Paul said in 1955, quote, Compass, if carried to its logical conclusion, is a sort of do-it-yourself movement. I'd like to see neighborhoods all over the city form groups like this. It's a search for community. It's just a little prophetic, that statement, isn't it? But, and also talk about a boy who spent a lot of time at Hall House. He always talked about community. I think it was the word he said most. In 1959, Paul co-founded the second city, and as its director, he provided the artistic inspiration for the theater while he was there. It's been about five years. Here he is there, smoking again. Sad, things did not go well at that rehearsal, it looks like. But I never knew him to be a smoker. He quit by the time. But people sometimes ask me, did your father die of lung cancer? Because there's a lot of these pictures of him smoking. No, I know, but luckily he quit. I'm gonna fast forward through the history of Second City and Compass, because that stuff's readily available. And I'm gonna move into stuff that actually, that he loved to talk about. But here's a night, unfortunately, this is a little small. This is a Second City photo I really love. That's Paul, and the producer, Bernie Solans, in the front. Paul's the one with the very large head. And, but there's Viola on the left. And you don't often see, can you see her here? Yeah, you don't often see her in these pictures. And that's Severn Darden on the left on the top. But he married my Aunt Heather, Carol's sister, my mom Carol's right next to them. I don't think this is the only picture that exists with all of them in it. And many wonderful people you'll recognize that's still close on the right. And some, Dennis Cunningham and who went on to become a very, very pivotal civil rights lawyer after being a Second City bartender and player. So, let's see, what else do we have? Oh, Viola was the director of workshop at Second City. And this is a picture from her workshop. It's just beautiful. By Morton Shapiro, who took beautiful pictures in that era. And she waited until after seeing Second City to publish improvisation for the theater. Because she, at that point, she saw her work in action with some really amazing players. And she found new things there with them and new games were developed. Paul was directing Second City in New York in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Or was it 64 anyway? You guys, you'll forgive me. Oh, good, all right, I got it right. He was inspired, the civil rights movement was happening and that had really got him worried about the direction the country was taking. And he returned home back to Chicago. And that would have been the period he was working with Alan Alda in 63. So that was interesting. We sort of worked that out last night. I was trying to figure out, I talked to him a few minutes before, when was this? And what a period, what an amazing group of players they had together. Oh, wow, Olympia Dukakis and Jane Alexander, incredible. So that was a very productive period in New York, but he wanted to return home, quote, in search of community, he wrote again. Because he wanted to see what was going on. He gathered friends and activists and actors to play Neva Boyd's traditional games in Lincoln Park. So this is how they thought, how are we gonna get back into our community? Let's play some games in the park. And it was summer, so they could do that. And when it got too cold, they moved inside and played Viola's theater games. He was seeking, as he told an interviewer in 1964, quote, something that has the sense of the great periods of your youth when you're working with people. This great sense of being part of a group that's fun only on an adult level. Well, you say, how do you do this? The community theater should be more interested in the community than the theater. Isn't that a good line? Write that down, everyone. The community theater should be more interested in the community than the theater. Sorry, I have allergies, that was. Reed Plato, Samuel Butler, Martin Buber. In talking about space, Martin Buber has said, in effect, that the stage is the creation of a sacred ground. The meaning of the ritual theater is that what you do is real, not symbolic of what is real. And here he starts talking about his players. The actors train themselves and work at handling imaginary objects so that they're good at it. They can make an agreed stage space where there are real things. When you get actors who are capable of doing that, you get actors who are capable of connecting with each other because they have made an agreement that together they can both create reality. A guy puts his hand out and that's a soda fountain spigot. The other puts the glass underneath. They have made a tacit agreement that they are together in a drugstore. It's orpheus. They send a poet into the nether region and he comes back with a message. Therefore, the only thing that I can see is the game. At least games are where the actors are that night, in the room, with the audience. I've seen it and it's more exciting than anything. The recognition sweeps over everybody that they're all there. Wow, that's the theater, unquote. In this interview, he goes on to talk about how he was gonna turn Second City into an all theater game, like improvised format, which is so interesting. But he thought better of it. He moved on. And with Viola, Carol, my mom, Carol Sills, and members of their community, he started the game theater in Chicago in 1965. Let's see. And here's their logo. I've checked out the audience players, audience players there. They played, true to their name, they played theater games. And they took suggestions from the audience and the audience members participated. It was a total community experience and Viola would often run the game nights. The Women for Peace and the Northside Cooperative Ministry met there, they founded a co-op school because they'd had a family now and had children. And so the parents would teach the school. It was an arts-based curriculum. But it was in the bar at the game theater. So once the city realized they were running a nursery school in a bar, they had to move. They didn't mind, either. There's Viola at the game theater. This is a picture I found on a proof sheet when you call this, and I zoomed it up, so it's not great quality. It's of an audience doing a space walk before, like, as part of the show, right? The audience would just get up and do a space walk. But if you'll notice that I was like, that guy looks like Roger Ebert. Do you see the one, yeah. So it is, my mom sent it to his wife, and sure enough, well, that was the kind of neighborhood place it was. You'd go to O'Rourke's and go to the game theater. It was a place where both Paul and Viola really explored their visions of a true community theater. And they also really got to explore the theatrical discoveries that were made by playing Viola's theater games. And how the players and the audience, everyone was transformed by those explosions of spontaneity that happens when the intuition is tapped. By 1968, the game theater had closed for a variety of reasons. Wait, one more. This is Paul at the game theater. You can see the space in those hands, right? You can see, that's nice. Some space shaping going on. It looks a little grumpy, but. It had closed by 1968 for a variety of reasons. People tend to move on and that kind of thing. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and then Bobby Kennedy and the Democratic Convention, National Convention, was gonna be held in Chicago of that summer, and thousands of students were coming to town to protest the Vietnam War. And Paul was asking himself how the theater could be relevant at such a time. And some of you may be asking yourself that question right about now. And he said he thought of a show where they could put the Democratic Party on trial for getting them into Vietnam in the first place. But then he wrote, the spattle for the soul of the people was beyond satire, unquote. He read, he happened to read the Grimm's brother's story, The Blue Light. And he saw, he wrote, I quote, I saw it on stage in the space, then and there, without the need to change a word. Stage space is capable of transformation without mechanical scene changes, as we knew from working with Viola Spohlen at Second City playing the game, Transformation of Relationship in The Blue Light. In that story, there's an old soldier who's all beaten up and wounded, so he's kicked out of the army because he can't serve the king anymore. And on his journey home, he's tricked by a witch who traps him in a well. And he realizes there's no escaping out of the well, but he still has a pipe, and so he lights it, thinking all is lost. He might as well have one last smoke, quote, and lo, a little gray man appears and offers to do his bidding. This is a motif in fairy tales, the power that's given from nowhere, just when nothing seems possible. In the depths of the despair, there lies the spark, the transformation of reality. The soldier gets his revenge on the king and triumphs over all authority and power, and when the paternal power was overthrown in the highly charged political situation of 68, the young people cried, right on. It was just in the air. This is the story theater cast in 1968 with the, in the beer garden of Second City, because that was just about to be torn down, and that's Joyce Piven on the right, Warren Lemming, Jeannie Ross Lemming, that's Court is Fired. The Nehru jackets are nice, right? That's Paul on the left of the Nehru jacket. And then here's the audience. The show is free because they wanted everyone to come. From the community it was for, that's what they really believed in. And so this was the audience all lined up, and that girl is holding a Doors record. And because it was free, the kids came too. So it was like all, all ages, they always joke that that guy was a narc. I don't know, there's like a kind of, they were definitely, they definitely had FDI files by this point for having things like women's meetings and stuff like a nursery school in a bar or that kind of thing. So during the week of the convention, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he wrote, the police chased demonstrators out of Lincoln Park, right to our gate, but did not enter. Like the churches of the neighborhood, the theater was somehow a sanctuary, off limits to police, unquote. And I talk about the theater as a sacred ground. Stories, Paul believed, teach us of our own innate and hidden power. Our ability to overcome insurmountable odds through them, he believed we are, we learn we are possessed of a self that's capable of personal liberation, right? Once you get, once you come to, so for him, this was his belief, personal liberation, to Paul paved the way for political liberation. Quote, Cinderella is not allowed to go to the dance. Simpleton cannot be permitted to go into the forest to chop wood, but these most miserable creatures do overcome. This is real teaching to my mind. All these heroes do what is on the face of it impossible, build castles in a single night or die and come back to life. And in this way, stories point to the seemingly impossible task each of us has assigned to become who we are intended to be, the surprise self. And Viola, Viola said, story and games bring out self rather than ego. Story Theater went to Yale, the Mark Taper. This is the forum in Los Angeles and then onto Broadway and TV in Canada. That's what Alan Alda was in, the Canadian TV show. This is the Broadway Story Theater cast. These were all amazing improvisers. That's basically how you got cast by Paul. You could play theater games, but that's Paul Sand and Valerie Harper, Mary Fran, Richard Libertini, Peter Bonners. Is that Dick Shaw, I think, and Hamilton Kamp. Paul was a student of the American Revolution. He read and wrote extensively about his heroes, Joseph Warren and Samuel Adams, whose words about self-direction and the spirit of liberty ranked true to him because they were in philosophical alignment with his and his mother's vision of an improvisational theater. And he adapted and directed two shows from historical documents of the American Revolution. That were performed in, and this is, oh, this is Valerie Harper and Dick Shaw, and I think that's Mary Fran in the back, in Ovid's Metamorphosis on Broadway. I think that's Io and Juno has just turned her into a cow. And this is Paul directing just Story Theater in Chicago in 1980. That's what he looked like when he directed. Did anyone here see that? Anyone know it in this audience? He danced a lot when he directed. He was always like physically communicating the sublime, what he wanted, and yelling, he yelled to. But there's this, but people talk about that, but they don't talk about this. But that's what I remember that he looked like when he directed. So he did, he also did these American Revolution shows, which I wanted to tell you about because people don't really know about that history anymore. And they were all from source material, but it was his commitment to talking about where this country came from and where it could be, those ideals. This was a poster for Sweet Bloody Liberty, and it told the story of Chris Bissatix. These shows were difficult because the source material is difficult, but someday we gotta get them back up. Paul wrote about this show, quote, we came before our conscience in protests against tyranny during the 1960s. The fact that the show's actors who lived through that period have been able to speak in truth and reality, the words of their forefathers points to the way Americans must take if we are not to become a nation of tame and contented vassals as Samuel Adams warned of. No one in America can escape the consequences of our creation as a people intended to live together as free. If we do not struggle personally for liberty against tyranny, we deny our personal existence and submit to chains. I used to think he was being a bit hyperbolic. I don't know anymore. He was also an inspiring and passionate teacher of his mother's work until the end of his days. He used to say, honor thy mother. And he told us she had a teaching that would outlast us all, and he found connections between the practice of theater games and literature and philosophy that he loved to read. The Dao, Shuang Tzu, Shakespeare, Martin Boover, Thoreau, Rumi, Emerson, those were, and what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy. That focused attention is a way out of the human predicament, as Viola called it. That was her phrase. Or as she would say, a way to get out of the head and into the space. Paul said, quote, I am a son of Viola Spohlen. So I was in some of her theater game workshops at Hull House, Chicago. It was her influence which led me to read book after book of fairy tales from many cultures. Since she was the student of Neva Boyd who taught traditional games and folk dances at her recreational training center. Here, we'll give you him talking as we do it. Give you some of the idea. I came in for a lot of playing. He said, all of this has stood me in good stead on my journey, unquote. Jane Adams once wrote, the creative power in the people themselves will come out only if it has a chance, unquote. We, all of us in this room are very lucky that Viola was given that chance through Neva Boyd, her teacher, right? Viola, she wrote privately that where she broke with the progressives and I was over the idea of adjusting the child to the existing culture. She said I wanted transformation. I transformed the child, transformed the culture. We have a lot to learn from the progressives and we can learn from their mistakes too. And I think they would have been right there with us knowing what we know now. True education is follow the follower, right? We learn from each other. We learn from our players, they learn from us. And in that, in so doing, we're all changed and that change can ripple outwards. I think Neva Boyd would have been, would have agreed if she had, she never got the chance to play mirror and follow the follower, I bet. So there is no more whole house as Viola knew it. It closed as a social services organization in 2012. Due to state budget cuts, it had become almost entirely dependent on state funding and we know what's been going on in Illinois. So it was closed. It was still serving like 30,000 people a month. So there's still the need, but there's just no whole house as a social services organization anymore. It's a museum now and it's a wonderful one and I hope you all visit because it is the site of the big bang and it is, they're aware of it now. We've been working with them a lot and they're really excited about that connection. It's part of our collective history but what still exists are your classrooms and your programs and your groups where you get people together. So guess what, tag, you're it. That's how it goes, your whole house now. So it's up to you to make sure the next Viola is given a chance to transform the world. Everyone here today is a direct descendant of this lineage even if you did another form of improvisation. You still, you count, now you know. Service, community and the healing potential of play and communication, they're just built in and Viola knew it. She would not have been surprised by this movement but she'd be grateful. All through her life she worked with groups outside of traditional theater programs and in her later years she worked with prisoners and she worked with patients in hospitals including catatonic patients and she saw them benefit from, I don't know what games she did but she found what she adapted probably just like you do to your students, right? Whatever students from the late 70s told me Viola only wanted to work with hospital patients at a certain point and she would let them teach the actors. She knew the power of this work held because as she said the techniques of theater are the techniques of communicating. So the last thing I'm gonna leave you with is this. I came across this amazing passage from Viola that explains why she was the spark that ignited this new art form and I think it'll be a particular interest to this audience. So in 1955, this is from a letter, it's like I actually have, copy of yours should show you, it's five single spaced typed pages in italics. David Shepard was planning to write a book about how to start an improvisational theater and she was saying, hold up, that's my work you're talking, you were doing. She was reminding him that the work they were doing had a source even if it didn't seem like it. He'd learned it through Paul and through workshops and then they'd bring her out but it felt sort of like it belonged to everyone, right? But she hadn't published her book yet and it had a source, her and Neva Boyd. So I won't read you all five single spaced pages but here's what I'll leave you with. Quote, I was trained to be a settlement house worker, a creative group worker by a great woman, Neva L. Boyd. She believed in the right of creativity for all people, all caps and she inspired in me this belief we were taught games, handcraft, storytelling, a forgotten art, dramatic play, creative dramatics, folk dancing, fencing, gymnastics, camping, et cetera, et cetera. I studied with this woman more than 30 years ago and she inspired me so with the right of the individual to his or her own creativity that I never lost sight of it. Loving the theater passionately directed my first play at eight years old, exclamation point. I moved from community work to put all my time into the theater. Being trained as a group worker, I was able to develop many techniques that the average theater person would not or could not have developed. For the combination of a creative group worker and a creative theater teacher is really remarkable. I worked to develop a tool for the average person. I sought to free my theater from exhibitionism and compulsion and competitiveness through actions, not words, techniques. I ate, slept, dreamed and worked much as a laboratory worker always seeking the direct experiences that would be self-revealing, exciting and refreshing and yet carry the responsibility of the art form within them. I don't expect to get rich on my book. It is just that all the past years of work will be fulfilled. I simply want authorship. Yeah, I know, here she is. Let's get there, let's give her a look, yeah, yeah. And it's really, it's really it. I'm often correcting people about, you know, there's this line at Second City, they always say, she created work to help children communicate better and stuff like that. Yes, it does that, it does a lot of things. But she created work with those two fields coming together. It was the meeting of those two fields in this committed and observant and curious and open person, a child of immigrants, a young woman with a spirit of adventure that created improvisational theater. And so all of us who practice it, we all carry the responsibilities of the art form to use her phrase in us as well. And that means using it to help others, to bring them into community and dialogue and to help them transcend their own limits and to go beyond what they know and what we know, right? So I will, I was gonna read you some Martin Buber about this period we're in, but maybe we'll get to that. I'm gonna stop it there for questions. See if anyone has it, what was it, Tony? That's a really good question. Oh, okay, great, thank you. I can repeat that question though. Were they always able to support themselves and their families with theater work? Or straight, you know, times were different. They only ever, well, Viola had had a lot of jobs before, you know, she had this whole life before she published improvisation for the theater. She was a Rosie de Riveter and Oakland, and I mean, when she had to support her boys, she did a lot of different things. But pretty much no, the answer is that they always did what they had to do, and they made their lives suit their income. She lived in the funkiest house you could imagine, and it was beautiful, but hand-built, whenever they had a little money, they'd just dig out some hillside and get guys from Second City to do it, and they lived, they were incredibly forward-thinking and bohemian, and they weren't interested in the trappings of middle-class culture at all, so that was as hard as a kid sometimes, but they, you know, and there were periods of money, like, sorry, theater, my dad bought, he bought the farm in Wisconsin, so that there would be a place for us, you know, we had a homestead, but they didn't, money was not something they worried about or thought. They always believed the money would come if they did the work they needed to do, and sometimes just enough to get by, but that was just how they lived and how they believed. Does that answer your question? It's different now, things are different now, they have no idea how much we need just to get by on the skin of our teeth, but luckily, you know, so a culture that, you know, it's a big subject, when you read like Harold Klurman, The Fervent Years, you know, about the group theater, it's all about raising enough money to do your work, isn't it, it's an ongoing question, and I know that must, you know, a lot of the reason we need research and we need to, we know that this work works, but we need to prove it so that we can keep doing it, right, because you gotta get through to the funders. It's a big subject, to go waiting in the sea of, in the Bay of Funding, they used to call it. They didn't like to go, they didn't, so Paul actually, instead of having a professorship or he couldn't, it wasn't in his nature to work within an institution, so he would have, he had a community theater in Dork County with like bartenders and potters, he worked with schools, he worked with whoever he had, and he made those casts pretty great through theater games, so like, that was their ethos, and they lived it, for real, I mean, that's a good question, thank you. All the way in the back. Oh, I'm sorry, oh, first. So imagine if for Vera Spaulding, she came here today, and we are teachers, so what, because sometimes we use her activities games, so what she would tell us, like. Play the game. Um. It's tough because I know sometimes that these, this is a talk, and it's very different from workshop, and so I don't have time, you know, like. She would, we, you start, we, every workshop starts with a traditional children's game from Neva Void, like we still call it pussy wants a corner, but you'll have to change the name, I know. And, or whatever, New York, no, and then a space, a feeling self with self, then a space walk, and then every game, you never give the group, she would tell you, you never give them anything they're not ready for, you know, ease into it, and, but the main thing, I don't have time to give you a workshop right now, but she left us very good instructions. So dip in and, but it does help to do workshop and then read this, because she said it's like a cookbook. It's hard to read a cookbook and know what the food tastes like, you know, you gotta play. Oh wait, all the way in the back, I'm sorry, I called her first and then over here. Thank you Barbara. So two part question. One is you spoke about research and so I'm curious, what is the kind of research on play that we need today that is still forward thinking and not pointing towards capitalism and seeking legitimization because that is furthering the agenda of the other not viola, so that's. That's a really good question. I really leave that up to you guys. This is, I am in such a privileged position that I can teach pure spoiler and not, I have to worry about paying my own rent, but I don't have to legitimize it because I'm lucky that people come to me for this reason. And so I am not in a position to answer that really good question. Is there anyone in the audience who has a thought about that? Cause I don't want to leave you hanging. I think you probably know better than, do you have a thought about it? No, I'm just opening it up for all of us to be in conversation because if you don't define the agenda, it will get defined for us, which is happening. I'm calling for an open whatever space. Oh, Gary has a thought. And one more question on a question, Mike. Okay. About your mother, Carol Sills. You just mentioned her in passing and I know it's not in the title, but it's gotta be part of the story. It's a huge part of the story. So in a few words. Oh yeah, well Carol is living. She lives in Wisconsin now. She married Paul in 1959 and so she was part of every single show that he did in some capacity from then on. So she's a great wealth of knowledge and of this information about this work. And she was Viola's editor for the second and third editions of Improvisation for the Theater. This was from the 80s on and all the other books that were published after that. The Fear Games for the Lone Actor, which some of you may not know about. That's a helpful one. It's about side coaching yourself into the present time. And the director's handbook, The Fear Games for Directors. And she was an arts educator who came from Canada and where she worked with a great progressive arts educator who did group art forms murals and group clay building and they'd have these beautiful multicultural, and this was like, this would have been the 40s and 50s in Canada where they would learn all about the pottery making techniques of an African village and then the whole, all these Canadian kids would do it and make a mural and make pots. And this was the way she was educated in Canada, luckily enough. So she moved to Chicago to find out what was going on in the heartland. She wanted to work with Frank Lloyd Wright but that was all falling apart. She ended up becoming a waitress at Second City and where she met Paul. And when she said, when she met Paul and Viola, she said, those are my, they were the first people who were speaking the same language of those kind of group art forms and she was really, really excited by that. And they were, she and Paul were both reading Martin Buber. And so that was that, you know. So that's Carolyn and Nucho. I could go on and on, sorry. But thank you for asking. I do, a part of this is bringing, you know, the women of this history in back into the story and reminding everyone that the originators of this art form are women. And she certainly played a huge role, especially in that game theater era where she was the women, she had, they had her murals all over the game theater and they were women for peace was making, she was a part of making murals. So she was heavily engaged in Paul's activist spirit and I furthered that as well. Oh, Gary, back to Gary, sorry. She asked me about my mom, I'm sorry. Go on and on. So regarding the question of the state of play and Viola used to say, she said, the salient point of her work is that it's not about competition. And she regarded competition as a toxic element to be sort of, you have to use it in play, but it's not the ultimate aim. She said, her work is about extending oneself to your full capacity and maybe beyond. And that is through pure play and competition creates competitiveness, aggressiveness, promotes cheating, uses the goal. So you go back to the very old saying, it's not whether you win or lose, it is how you play the game. And that's been true ever in time immemorial. So we have to remember that and don't use competition as the catalyst, use play. Use play. Oh, I misunderstood your question. I thought it was about research. About research, I'm sorry. But I like what Gary said, thank you. Thank you, Gary. We have, oh Barbara, you go ahead. Just timing, you probably have about 10 more minutes. Yeah, whatever you guys say, I'll answer. I'll go as long as you can stand it. You gotta go somewhere else, I know. Thank you so much for sharing these stories with us. What kind of games did Viola play with you when you were a kid, if any? Yeah, that's a really good question. Not none. We played games. She wasn't that interested in kids. I don't blame her, but yeah, she would talk to me, when we were one-on-one, she would talk to me about stuff, about her work. That's what she liked to talk about was her work. But yeah, it's funny. She was, you know, we'd be there with Paul. They'd be talking, you know, they'd be into it. They had a lifelong conversation about the theater. It's pretty amazing. So I don't know, we went off and did our own thing. But yeah, we played a ton of games. Mostly back to my mother, Carol. And my dad, too, we would get us doing some games. But he didn't work with kids either, for obvious reason. But we played the games through with Carol. And then with each other, and luckily, I had siblings and friends, and we would do story theater and we'd make up our own shows and play lots and lots of games. I said, oh, sorry, I'm not appointing. Sorry, yeah, no problem, we'll get to you. Yeah, I rule, yeah. Thank you for the stories and all the stories about your mother and grandmother and all the important people here. But I would love to ask you, how do you feel that maybe it's, are you standing in the shadow or spotlight of the legacy? How are you doing? I don't know if you answered that partly already because you can teach pure spoiling, but I would love for you a little bit more. How are you doing? Oh, thank you, what a nice question. I'm, it's an interesting thing. And it's complex, and I've learned over my life that when you're like the child of someone, everyone thinks you're incompetent, it's hilarious. And I did, it's like a natural assumption. And I don't blame them. But I've had to learn how to teach on my own kind of, and that Paul was my teacher, and he was an interesting figure to be the student of because he didn't teach like Viola did. He was a director and not being someone who wanted to improvise. Like many of you probably want, some of you anyway, must have wanted to jump on the stage and improvise. And I was just terrified of it. I felt that that's part of who I am as a teacher is making everyone feel safe and welcome and making sure, so I do what I can. I think the thing that interests me, the thing that I feel like, I don't even know how to put it into words, but what I see happening, the improv world essentially entirely, almost entirely rejected Viola, right? And I see a, and I think, well that's stupid for a lot of reasons, because the work is so effective. It's so beautiful and good. And I get to see more of it. I think some people only get through like a first three hour session and they think, well, what was that? We didn't, you know, I wasn't allowed to talk a lot. And so I feel bad and, you know, they leave it, but when you get into it and you realize it's so, Viola's work is so profound and endless and that I'm still just discovering it and every time, and I will do games over and over again until I'm like, oh, I don't know how to explain it. Oh, yes, you know, and then a facet of it will become clear to me. And I still think, so basically, for me as a teacher, I have no problem just doing pure and swollen improvisation, but I work toward creating a class that helps people understand where it can lead. And people are now beginning to have an understanding of, oh, ensemble theater, devised theater, mindfulness, these, you know, elements of mindfulness in the theater, they all go back to Viola. So I feel like we've reached a turning point and for me, that's on, and that there's a woman originator to this field and it came out of women protecting each other and helping each other out and so for me, this moment is really wonderful because I've lived through many, many years people asking me if I knew Del Close. But luckily, improvisers didn't, improv people don't really come to my workshop so I didn't have to deal with that much. Actors and educators, but this, we must stop doing that. And so everyone who's been a little afraid to drive a little or whatever or you can't get beyond mirror in a few other games, get into it. You're going to discover what you need in there and the reason is because what she created, she was solving a problem as she did it. And as, so they still go back into the rehearsal process. They still, they go back, you know, they are still usable on every level and just as we've seen for communication and it's so great that Alan Alda like brought out, you know, I've done mirror for years and people will talk about empathy, will talk about all the stuff that happens, the transformations in people when they play. But like professional improvisers will tell me things like I was so not wanting to play mirror. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it. And then I cried, you know, because that's the experience it has. So we're, I think we're all getting past that and in part because of the applied improvisation movement that people are saying, oh, look at all that it does, but we can't bypass Viola to do that, right? So I mean, anyway, I hope that answers your question. I rambled this patient gentleman down here and the blue shirt really needs the mic. I'm not really patient. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm going crazy inside, but you know, fine. Really moved by your talk. I love the title about community and then what you did is you told us, first of all, when I listened to Improv Nation in the car, I felt like I won something when I learned of a name, a strange name I'd never heard before. Viola Spohlin was the originator of Improv in America. That was like a treat. And then to hear your passion and to tell that story with those amazing women and then you invited us into the family and legacy. That was generous of you and I'm grateful for that. And my question was really, you're welcome. And my question really was, when did this align in you? When did you, when did this become something that you knew that you had to be a voice for? Yeah, that, it took a really, really long time. I'm a very slow learner. I always, I mean, I taught, you know, I studied with my dad from like being a teenager and I started teaching when I was like in my mid-20s and I had other fields. Making that back to that making a living problem. You know, you always gotta do something else, right? It's only in the last few years I just rely on this and that's, it was, I started to just realize that I really needed to. I had spent a lot of time listening to Paul and working with Paul and just feeling that their voices needed to be raised. Viola's voice needed to be raised. So I began just, I would do workshops even though very few people would come like in Los Angeles, I would just do them to teach my, to learn how to teach. I just had these like really cheap workshops for friends and family. Like Hamilton Camp Jr. was in it. Like people from the Mishbook as Viola called it, you know, would come and take. That means family. Yeah. And so yeah, just over the years and so gradually I got to the point where even when I was working I would do like one class a year or something. And just gradually I got to the point where I felt I would read Paul's notes and read Viola's book and bring their words out and workshops. So it changed for me how it felt. And then I went to grad school to get my MFA and I learned how to be a better teacher by having all those problems that you encounter at trying to teach writing to kids. Like I was working with undergrads but there were undergrads in a UC school. A lot of them didn't, you know, that they hadn't had, they needed a lot of help. And so that was helpful to me too. So yeah, just over the years more and more. It's just realizing there was a need and wanting to and just getting annoyed at seeing a lot of erasure, you know. We've had, I think we have time for one more. We had, oh I see lots of hands, oh. You can catch me later. Okay, if we can be super brief we might be able to get to. All right, I'll. Yeah, this will be quite brief actually. Loads of wonderful stuff, thank you very much. Can you tell me where we could find out more about that? I don't know where. I have no where, that is stuff that she would talk about. And so that's all I have for you now. If in my research later I come up with it going through papers and stuff which, and letters, which there are a lot of, I will post it on our website as ViolaSpolin.org right here. And there's a bio on there that right now I wrote it with the help of my mom Carol. And right now that's pretty much the most historical information about her available right now. But I'll update it. That's what I got, I told you what I got, yeah. Did you say there was, I told you everything I know. Okay, we have a question. Hey Aretha, thank you so much. Your grandmother's work is deeply personal to me as a social worker who improvises. And I've always felt that everything I do in life I approach as a social worker. Even now that I'm working in the corporate world, yes I am a social worker. And I'm wondering if Viola saw herself as a social worker or more as a theater teacher, director. I think she thought of herself as everything. I don't think, I really believe she knew that this work was for everyone. And that was deep in her bones. She knew, so who called it kindergarten for the 21st century? Gary, do you know who said that? I don't know who said that, but she liked that. She said that. So it was like, she knew that it went beyond theater and into every pocket of human consciousness and understanding and relation. And so I think she was, that's how she saw herself. As Severin Darden said, I'll leave you, this was, Severin Darden said Viola is too vast. So I'll leave it, that's the last. I think those are. Thank you, thank you. Thank you Viola and Paul.