 Absolutely fantastic. So to hear just a little bit more about the process of how this came about, Dana, how did you go from sort of, you know, the book, how did you carve out the libretto from that? Easy, because I just put the book aside. I lived the story, I knew the story, and I just knew I had to tell it from Alice's point of view. So the stories were with me, and then I just spoke the way she spoke, and that wasn't a challenge, but to hear it then some live now is I'm overwhelmed, so I maybe should be the first one to answer a question, so thrilled to hear them. And Eric, how did you, coming across those words, reading those words, how did you choose a musical language that could convey all that? I mean, I heard everything in there from, like, our median folk song to, like, Ankita Blues. How did you find the language appropriate? I think of myself as a musical storyteller, and I try to take whatever I need to take to tell the story effectively. I had this living, breathing person that Dana had presented me with, and the words often suggested what I was to do. I just needed to find themes that would then, musical themes that would represent what was going on. So you may have heard some sort of dreamy music some of the time. That was fairy music. That was when Dana was with her, or the parts that were really hard that had an insistent base. Those were parts where she feels regret, and one of the great things about opera is that you can repeat ideas and nobody yells at you. People say, oh, I recognize that. So, I don't know whether I answered your question, but it was just wonderful. I had a wonderful time. The repetition is so much like dementia too, living with dementia. So that was a real turning point for me within the middle of, yeah, within the middle of dementia. A real turning point was to sort of recognize that repetition was a form of prayer, and that if I just thought of it that way, which is kind of analogous to thinking of it as repetition as themes in opera, that there's a reason that these things are repeating. It was much easier to not get wound up about it. No, you just told me that. Instead it was like, oh yeah, those flowers are beautiful. Maybe I should be paying more attention. So it was a resonance between dementia and the world of opera. Yeah, wow. And so, I mean, Allison and Mary, you then have the job of actually kind of creating this character, who has at this point now been refracted through a couple of people. And, you know, as Mary's final words even suggest, someone who also is at different ages simultaneously transparently laid over one another. You're simultaneously playing a child, playing a little woman, playing a little woman remembering a child. And Allison, you are somehow sort of surrounding her in a kind of psychological network or something. So how do you approach a score to recreate a personality like this? It's still a work in progress. That's actually the easiest answer is that there's going to be more and more, I think, layers that are unfolding as the piece grows and as I grow in the piece. But I think trying to stay true to the Alice that she is in the moment has been so far sort of my guiding force that embodying the different ages in voice and body. But also in some ways like finding, yeah, like pivots, for example, finding that like aliveness, that real like 20s lustful sort of aliveness. And trying to embody that versus in the first scene, when she goes back to being a child at the table with a lamp set on the table and I feel very small and very awkward. But it's, I mean, it'll be a different conversation in a year or more when we have more time in it. But it's a really fascinating, I've never done a role like this before where I'm kind of having that many layers of time versus maybe layers of like disguise. That's a little bit more familiar in the realm of opera and song literatures, like pretending to be someone else. But this is actually someone embodying themselves in different stages of their own life. So it's a real challenge. It's really interesting. I'm enjoying it. Yeah, I think it's very inspiring to hear things that you do with the voice, especially in the mother, the mama no part, because there are parts where it's Alice speaking as a young person as well as, you know, and it's really haunting to hear you do it and it causes me to react more to that. I'm the vampire of the team. I like, you know, get really inspired by all things that Mary sings. It's beautiful music, so it's a joy to work on. You're not really a vampire because Mary would have a tough time without you, so you're not sucking anything from her. And so it seems like, you know, I mean, you've talked in a sense about how like this sort of this cyclical thing of recreating this in a way, you know, not only reproduces some of the feelings of Alzheimer's, but you feel like it's almost in itself like an act of prayer, you said. In a sense, what are you all of you sort of as you bring this piece together? What is the journey you want us all to go through as we listen to it? It really is a healing journey. For me, even being the first pass at putting it together, having written the words to hear them performed with Eric's music was fundamentally healing. That I was able to come full circle on so many things from even going this far within, and I can only imagine how it will grow as we go to full production, as we add all those additional layers and so forth. But healing is the essence of it so that we can recognize all of the people involved in all their journeys, all of the social forces that are out there making it hard for us to love each other, us to see each other, us to forgive each other and to forgive ourselves. So that to me is how I see it and I feel like I'm working with a team who just makes it all happen, so it's pretty amazing. This was a story that I bought into from the very beginning. Not only was Alice very vibrant to me as a character, but it seemed to me that where cancer was 20 years ago as something that was shameful and that people didn't talk about, you know, women who had breast cancer, it was just, oh, I've got a problem, you know, that's no longer shameful. And I thought, what if we could do the same thing with dementia? What if we could humanize the condition? And that's what we're after. And I have to say, I have a personal stake in this, not because I have a whole lot of experience with family members with dementia, but during this process, I've heard from countless people who have and that has helped to keep me going. And the other thing that has kept me going, aside from the wonder of the story and the joy of just making music out of it, was that having had two brothers with brain cancer, they're a lot of similarities. And that gave me something to try. I will say, I don't talk very much. I will just say that when I started it, I was thinking of Alzheimer's is a very negative kind of thing. And I was starting embarking on the music, thinking like, I have to play this all very angrily or something. But that's not the case at all. We added in exuberance and swashbuckling and other things. So it took me a while to get it, but I'm getting there. So that's been a very interesting part. What was the question again? What is the voyage that you want us all to be going through with you? Well, I love the idea of the healing journey, because Eric's written a bunch of interludes, not just the interludes that you heard, but also just musical interludes. And obviously, when I'm not dancing on the stage, like I will be, I'm standing more or less in one place, it's been really, that's been interesting and challenging to figure out what's happening in those musical interludes in between the singing. And something that Dana mentioned on Monday, she came to our rehearsal, and after that middle section, all about Fran, and forgive me, Fran, at the end of that. And then there's a bit of music afterwards. And I said, what's going on? What's going on in this music? And Dana said, well, she's releasing that shame and that guilt. I was like, oh my gosh. After each of these admissions and asking for forgiveness, she's releasing them and Eric has written music to release them. And I just thought that was a beautiful thing, a dramatically something I could really get my head wrapped around and really be intentional about feeling that in myself before moving on to the next switch or the next age or time. Oh, and I also wanted to say, ask, maybe you can tell me later Dana, or you can tell everyone how you had, who taught you to have the grace to perceive the repetitions as prayer. I'm super curious about that because I have personal experience with this as well. I really do think that, I mean, sure, of course, I was doing things like meditation and so on and so forth, and probably used most of my adult life or my whole life as a spiritual journey. But there was a time before she actually got diagnosed where she was playing solitaire all the time, and she had some rough things going on in her life. And right then, which now in retrospect were probably early signs of the dementia starting. And it just, I could see she was self soothing with the solitaire. And then, and then just think about all of the literature about how prayer helps people in medical studies, they can do trials, people who pray, do better in medical contexts, you know, all sorts of things. But it, but more than anything, it was Alice literally looking at a flower and saying, oh my god, that's beautiful. And I started to realize I'll look at them once, but she would look at them repeatedly. And that is what prayer is. So she taught me. I learned everything from my mother. She's so happy to hear that. She really is. She's loving this. She's loving the attention. So there's a good place to stop. But are there any questions from the audience before we go? Anything you would like to hear about before we close for the evening? Oh, yeah. Oh, well, that is the first illustration in this book, but it is not the first illustration I did. So the Mo Willems, the cartoonist gave a talk once. He said, when you're doing a visual story, you never start on page one. So he started on page eight, which is when Alice has the broccoli growing out of her ears. And I knew I had found the voice and I went back to page one and made that drawing. And my oldest son, when I was working on these, he came into the room one day and he said, ma, I want to see these giant. So they were originally made as part of a project called the Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook Project, where artists from all over the world fill out these sketchbooks, send them in to the art library. And I loved it because it mixes up the rules of books and art. Usually you touch books, art, you never, never, never touch. But here you were allowed to touch these sketchbooks and then they would disintegrate and go away. And I was thinking that was just like letting go of a person. All you have left is a digital record. So I had scans of every drawing. So I followed my son's lead and started making them giant. And that was one of the first ones I printed up. And it's on canvas. So then I started embroidering them because we used to give Alice all of our mending because she wanted to be useful when she was living with us. And so I embroidered her halos and her slippers. And then that became a two-sided piece of art. So in the final production, you'll have light shining through that and all sorts of scrims and screens and projections that play on that double-sided thing. But they're all collages using cut-up pieces of Alice in Wonderland because that's how we did dementia. It was a wonderland. Sometimes you were big, sometimes you were little. Sometimes it was scary, but it was always interesting. So we used that as a guide and improv as a guide, really, just which is what Alice did in Wonderland too. I mean, you know, whatever the queen said, that was the reality. And I think that the more that dementia works like that for families, it cares the better and easier and less stressful it is. So I love to see a world where someone gets the diagnosis and they get signed up for improv classes. I mean, like, that would be so cool. Social prescribing. You've got to learn how to like go with whatever outrageous thing is happening right now. It could be good for all of us. So there was one other question. Yes. That's a question for both Eric and Dana. You both into, you've got a lot of ideas about the final staging. Can you tell us a little more about your imagining? It's, as I said earlier, what we will have is an ensemble of 10. So that's string quintet, that's two violins, viola cello, bass, woodwind quartet, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and piano to give a lot of different colors. And, you know, Mary has done a wonderful job in a concert setting of embodying Alice, but in the show she'll be moving around a lot more. And there are a number of scenes where somebody is up there with her. So for instance, when she says, you, you get up here in that bed, you know, she actually goes out into the audience. And Dana, her daughter, goes out and brings her back. And that's why she says, but I know the truth on the way back. And so having this silent character to perform roles as daughter, as a care worker, as, I mean, my original vision is also to have one that dances as Alice's spirit. And that's what a lot of the interludes are both to change the mood and also to allow for some fantasy, for some magic that is visualized. So I don't know that answers your question. That's my take on it. And those are wonderful takes and seeing all that Mary's able to do without the full stage just means that it's going to be a wonderful collaborative process to keep up building it. And Crystal Brown, who's an extraordinary dancer, activist, thinker, creator, she's agreed to be the silent character in the full production. So we're hoping this will happen in the next little bit of time. So contribute. It'll happen faster. Well, we can't wait. And thank you all so much. Thanks again.