 What is it, Audrey, the 26th? Can you believe? May, no, I can't believe it. May just is like, woof. But yeah, we're here and in spite of everything, we're here on Tuesday to work together. We've been doing this show, Watch Me Work for 11 years. I'm Susan Lerparks, I'm the master writer of the Public Theater and we've been coming together for 11 years now to work together, to support each other. And for me to ask you questions about your creative process, whether it's writing or whatever, and that we can talk together about your creative process. So a lot of people get confused about that title, Watch Me Work. They think it's about SLP's work, but it is not. It's about you and your creative process. What we do have a lot of time to do is work together, whatever your project might be, and to talk with you about your creative process. We don't have time to talk with you about something specific you're working on, like the care, you know, like that. Process, big picture questions so that everybody can be a part of the conversation. But do you have a question or not? Audrey will, I almost called you Rebecca for some reason. I don't know why. Audrey will tell you how to get in touch should you have a question. Go girl. Hi, I'm Rebecca and I would like to let you know how to answer questions. Basically what you need to do if you're inside of the Zoom is you'll press the raise your hand button on the participant tab. It's likely on the bottom of your screen on a laptop or the top if you're on a tablet or an iPad. If you're watching on HowlRound.tv you can ask us questions via social media. You can tweet at us at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D or you can tweet at the public theater at public theater and why or go to our Instagram there. And that's all. So many ways to get in touch. Okay, we're going to work together for 20 minutes and then we're gonna talk with you about your work and your creative process. Here we go. All right. Yay, we're back. We're back, we're back, we're here. We never left really. And we're now we're gonna, if anybody has questions, considerations, concerns. We've got a question. Yeah. All right, Reggie, you're up. Can you hear us? There we go. Hi, Susan and Laurie. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm a huge fan of your work. My question for you is, I started a 30 for 30 project where I write a poem a day. I'm primarily a poet. One of my favorite works of yours is 365. So I really wanted to go back into the process as I am trying to continue doing a poem a day even throughout the year as much as I possibly can. I wanted to ask you what that experience was like, keeping that stamina up and how you found inspiration to really just trudge on. And if you even cheated and maybe did two plays in one day. So I just wanted to just hear your, what you learned from that and what you could share. Sure, sure, sure. I mean, it's tricky because this is supposed to be about your work and your creative process. So we're gonna make it, Reggie, we're gonna make it as much about you as we possibly can by asking you things like, when did you start? How's it going? How far along are you? Well, I started in April and it was all junky stuff that I was cooking. And then all of a sudden, after 15 days, the seed sprouted and then it just started to just, I was like on attack and it kept going. And I was just shocking myself. I would look at Poetry Foundation for their poem of a day for American Academy of Poets looking at their poems. The intensity of the pandemic was intense so the feelings were there and finding itself through. I am experiencing some burnout now that there's this seasonal shift. And sometimes music would be a good catalyst for myself, but... I mean, it's 30 for 30. So you've passed, I'm guessing you passed the 30. You've done 30 for 30. So now you're gonna keep going. Is that what I'm hearing? I'm going, I'm trying to go as much as I can. I've been working with my fellow playwright, Sujin, who were both writing together because of this practice. So we've been writing together and just... Fantastic. Working together to encourage us to keep going. But I think I'm going to Monday through Friday schedule and just giving the weekends a little bit of a break. But you said you're gonna do this challenge. So you're gonna write, so that means you're gonna write like two poems on Monday and two poems on Friday? I'm not letting you off the hook, yo. I don't know if I'm gonna write... If I cheat, I don't know. I even allowed myself to do a haiku. If I needed to give myself that, I have the haiku card. I know that in your plays, you had a play called Lady Slips. It was all action and very terse and... It was going through the motions. It was going through the motions. It was a lickety split. I hear, but I hear something in what you said. And I just, I have to call it out. So you said you have the haiku card. Now, does that mean that a haiku in your mind is not a real poem? I mean, what do you... Because here's the key, dude. Here's the key, Reggie. Sorry, it's like quality is the thing that's gonna bite you in the booty. Right? So if you get all hung up on like, it's gotta be a poem that gets published in, I don't know, your favorite, the New Yorker or whatever you hold in high regard. You know what I mean? Any of those esteemed places or publications. Then that's gonna bite you in the booty. But if you say it's a poem, it's something I'm writing that's a poem, then you're doing what we... I talk about a lot. You lower the bar and you allow yourself to write a poem. Right? And that's the secret to my success in all forms, actually. Just get the shit out there, you know? And then you can, you know, if you wanna publish them or whatever, you're gonna have a reading or whatever, then you can get into rewriting and all that kind of cool stuff, you know? But if you wanna try, if you wanna continue, just, I mean, sure, you can give yourself weekends off. Don't please, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you wanna do the one a day, then consider just lowering the bar and being okay with just doing what you can do. I mean, like I also have a daily yoga practice. I get on my mat most days and I go, we do not have to be heroic. You know, I don't have to try for that pose that I've been looking at on the poster for the last 40 years. You know what I mean? I mean, really, we just have to breathe in, breathe out, you know? You were gonna say something, Reggie. What was it? Yes, I'm very quick. Having another person that we were exchanging was a good catalyst. I also had other drafts of things. So that way I, if I couldn't come up with something, then I had another seed that I could put out there. So even though I was going for the poem a day, I also allowed myself to plant other seeds and to cook other pots. So that way, if something didn't come out, then I had other things to draw from. And I'm wondering if that is a good kind of practice to have other, because I know that I got to show something to my friends. So if nothing's coming, then I can whip this seed, this peanut butter sandwich. Sure, you can do that. I mean, it's your game. You're making up the rules. You know, you're completely allowed to do that. You're also completely allowed to show your friends something that's not good, whatever that means. And that could make things suddenly very interesting. Suddenly, you have a real friend. You know what I mean? I mean, like my husband, you know, who's over there off camera. You know, I read him all kinds of shit. I read this, what do you think, honey? He's like, you know, I mean, that means you're really in a, in a, in a, your relationship, it takes your relationship to the next level. So you can do that. But sure, you can do anything you want. It's your game. You're making up the rules. You know, if you want to pick up an old thing and try it out, great, great. This ex, this, this journey you're on might give you some fuel to, oh my gosh, I haven't looked through that until I wrote it 10 years ago. Now I got finally figured out how to do the rewrite. You know, you know what I mean? So sure, you're totally allowed to do that. You're giving to yourself by showing up every day or five days a week if that's what you want. Thank you so much. You just gave me a new poem of the day. There you go. I'll write about that tomorrow. There you go. Right? Right. And also, I mean, Reggie, just so you know, I mean, there's so many sources of inspiration, some of them not as uplifting as we would like. There is the news, my friend. You know what I mean? So if you're ever, you know, you guys, what am I writing about today? Here's that news feed. It's like sticking your head in the sewer or in the toilet, someone else's toilet, a public toilet that belongs to, who knows who, but there is a lot of shit in there. So, you know, and we say you ship for fuel. So there we go. We have plenty of stuff. Okay. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. You gave me so much. I've got at least five poems. There you go. See, see, that'll take you, see? Now you're writing on Saturday again. That's what we wanted. Ha-ha. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Reggie. Thanks, Reggie. All right. I've actually got Paul. Paul, are you with us? Hey, I am. Thank you so much. Paul? Thank you so much for just this platform and for doing this, guys. So my question is about frustration. It's in the artistic process. Yeah, the green-eyed beast. I have been experiencing a lot of frustration in creating that is sort of new to me. I've lived a pretty freaking privileged life. I haven't had much difficulty and I've experienced my upsets. I've experienced traumatic events and bad things in my life. But it's experiencing frustration in my work is making me realize, I think, how unprepared I am to work with it, to work through it, and to let it propel me forward. I was practicing the other day. I do music. I sing and do vocal looping a la Reggie Watts. And I got so frustrated singing. My voice wasn't working out well. I slapped myself. I physically slapped myself. And I literally feel like the least angry person in my world. I never feel anger. I just feel very unprepared to sort of bump up against it and let it move me forward. I don't know how to deal with it, I think, in a big way. Can we make a guess? I mean, if you became so frustrated in your own process that you slap yourself and then you say you're the least angry person, so I would, and this is the thing. I would say that perhaps you have, like all of us, I hope, perhaps anger. I mean, if you don't, I mean, like Joe Biden would say, if you're not angry right now, you're not black. No, but if you're not angry right now, you're not awake, you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Because there's so many things to be angry about. You could be angry about having to wear a mask or not having to wear a mask or whatever. I mean, just, and that's just one thing. Yeah. So your feelings are coming up. You know, your voice might be changing in a good way. Interesting. You know, you're feeling some feelings that maybe you haven't felt before. Sounds like. Yeah. Where do you, is it a, so you're a vocalist, where do you feel it in your body? Can you say where you feel this frustration? Throat. It's like a lump in the throat. And it's obviously doing vocal stuff comes from, I mean, it shouldn't come from your throat. I think it should come from lower, but it gets sort of caught in the throat. You know, there are no shoulds. There are no shoulds. There's only whatever the fuck it is. And you know what? You're feeling it in your throat and that's exactly great, you know? So you've had this lump in your throat you know, and you're a vocalist, so that sounds like an awful feeling. And it just sounds like stuff is coming up. Yeah. You know? And so as artists, no matter what our, how we make our work, or what kind of work that we do, even if we're not artists, you know, let the feelings come up. It might well change the kind of work you're doing. I think I'm interested in the sort of difference, I think this plays into it, between practice and performance, because so much of what I do is trying to hone these specific skills. I play keys as well in addition to singing. So I practice them separately in order to sort of combine them into these improvisational performances that are totally audience field and are super on the fly and really demand the act of being viewed. So when I'm not being viewed, there's less impetus to perform and play, which I find very easy in a big way. And I think really the frustration only comes out in these sort of dedicated moments of practice, of sort of rudimentary like, time to play my C scale. I'm time to fucking, like those nonsense moments where I'm trying to- That's interesting. Have you ever read, there are two books, they're written by the same people, I think. The Inner Game of Tennis, have you ever read that book? No. It's okay, forget that book. There's another book called Inner Game of Music by the same, I think it's the same people, at least it's one of the same people. And the guy, forget his name, he talks about how, we think that practice should be like fun. You know what I mean? If we think of like, I mean anything, like you're practicing your scale, I mean I play guitar mostly, so you're practicing your scales or your chords or whatever. It's, he says, he suggests that it should be uncomfortable. And that's when you're really doing the work. We all have this thing that, I'll sit down at my journal and I'll just write, which is a writer's version of practicing your scales, right? Or practicing. It should feel great, or I sit down and work on my novel and it just all pours out, it's great. But actually practice, it's okay if practice doesn't feel comfortable, because you're getting to your deep stuff, maybe, and you're polishing it, and you're working on it. And maybe you work on it so that performance might be more enjoyable, or there might be an aspect of your process that might be enjoyable, but maybe the fact that your practice is difficult is what's bothering you. Yeah. You know, let it be difficult. You know, you say you lived a privileged life. You know, you're walking into your Thunderdome, dude. I mean, go in there, go into your lion's den. You have to, you know, this is why you're on this path. What are you going to do? Have just a happy, I'm a happy artist. I make happy music. I'm never angry. There are a lot of things to be angry about. Today, you look on the news, look above the fold of the Huffington Post. See that man's face and the cop's knee on his neck. You know, feel, feel. We need you to be angry. You know what I mean? You need you to be angry. So go ahead. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and thanks for, thanks for the question. It's a beautiful question. And that's one we might come back to often. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate your question. Thanks, man. Thank you, Paul. All right. Up next, we've got Catherine. Oh, Catherine, are you here? Hi. Hi. Oh, thank you so much for being here. I have a question about revision. Mm-hmm. Because my process right now in this particular play I'm writing, it's it's not a story that I'm writing beginning to end. I'm doing like the, you know, Irene Fornes write a scene. And so I've piled up a bunch of scenes. I don't know if it's going to be a chronological play ever or an unlinear one. It's just I have a bunch of scenes. And so I'm wondering, when will I get a clue to stop writing more scenes and then go back and start doing another draft of it? I know. It might it might take you the, you know, you might live to be 112 and you might, you know, the day, you know, on your 112th birthday. I think now I've written enough scenes not gonna put, I mean, I, I don't know. What I do know is I, my guess is that you'll reach a point where you're like, you'll feel it. Like, are you, are you in a relationship? Dicey question. I know. Go ahead. Maybe sort of maybe. It's the same kind of feeling when you meet someone you'd like to spend a little more than a coffee with, you know, there's a feeling there, you know, when you, when you, maybe you're writing a scene and you're like, yeah, I could get into that scene. I could get into the subject of that scene. There's a feeling there that draws you to it. Right. So you're, you're, it's a feel thing and it's something that it's not that you'll necessarily know it when you get there because different people, some people never know, but I have confidence that if you keep writing and enjoy the process that you, and you keep, you know, you have three ears, right? Two, and then probably one here. Right. You keep one of your ears open for, is it time to assemble? Ask it. I mean, or you can also ask yourself. Yeah. You know what you're saying that and I'm like, here's what's happening. I know that there's some really scary, serious scenes that have to go in and I'm not doing it. Like I'm putting my hand on it and I bet when I do that that, that's going to be the puzzle piece. So the real question for me is like, okay, just we, we move, you know, show, go ahead, do it. Because I, I guess I'm scared. I'm scared to write those scenes. It's okay. It's okay to be scared. We're all scared. We should be. Again, we should be angry. We should be scared. We should be hopeful and joyful and loving. We're also, also angry and scared. It's okay to be scared. You know, you can, the tricky, the, the fun thing about being scared is that now, okay. So, you know, it's like any great hero, you know, Wonder Woman. I don't know, was she, she was in the movie, right? That's, that's, she, she had fear, you know, and Luke Skywalker, you know, they all had fears and Princess Leia, and they, they, they didn't go without fear. But they also had an arsenal of tools to help themselves through their fear, embrace their fear, manage their fear, dice it up in little pieces. We have this, which is great, not this one, but it's a timer. We have time to help us manage our fear. So if you, again, if you're training for a marathon and you're afraid, right? I don't know, you know, whether you're a marathoner or not, pretend you're not. And you, I say, great, train for a marathon. Catherine, go out and run, run for 10 minutes, right? Time is going to help you manage your, your, your fear, your distance from where you are now to the goal, all those things. So you take your timer, which is why we use it every day when we're here, and you set it for 10 minutes. And right on your scary scene, I'm calling it a scary scene because you said it was scary, for 10 minutes. Yeah. 10 minutes, three times a day, maybe. Just a little inch forward, right? Okay. That's fabulous. Okay. You're welcome. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Actually, don't have a next question, quite yet. Uh-huh. Oh, just kidding. That's okay. It's okay. Isaiah. Sorry, my, I mean, there you go. Hi. Hi. Hi, Susan Laurie. I have been coming here most days, every day, yes, whatever. It's been now a couple of months and this has been a sanctuary. So thank you. Thank you. I plug it in my charger. Sorry. I had to plug in my computer because it's down to like 2%. Okay. There we go. Now I'm high. Yes, sanctuary requires electricity. So the question is, I asked this, a similar one, a similar question to you last month or so. It was about, that was about like, that question was about like, if I was writing a play at the time and I felt myself like very often, just writing things from my own personal life into the play and your advice was like, that's fine, like don't be hard on yourself. And that was very good, very helpful. Now, so that, I was writing that play as part of a class and that play, that class is over. And it was a first draft class and I have a first draft, which is really good. Yes. Thank you. But now I want, I want to be continuing to work on creative stuff. Like, I don't know, plays another play or a novel or something creative. But I find myself sort of like, only being able to write in the form of my journal. Like, I don't know, I have this, my sort of writing process I guess is I just sort of like, I live and then when I like, get the feeling that something can be written, I have, I try to have a tremendous amount of respect for that feeling and like do everything I can to get to a computer slash my journal to write stuff down. But these days, I feel like the only things that I feel like I get that bug to write about are just like, shit in my own life, which is very valuable and good that I'm writing about that. But I, I guess my question is about like, I want to write something creative, but I also don't have, I don't feel like I have the infrastructure to like force myself to like sit down and write something creative. Like I want to follow that sort of intuitive bug. But I also want to understand writing as like a practice that maybe like, isn't always just going to like come to me, as you said, to Paul's question before. So I, so I don't know if if you can like pull a question out of everything I've said or I don't know. Like just, so you finished your, you finished a draft of your play that you had written for a class, right, which was really, really great. And now you want to go forward and write something new. Yeah. It sounds like you're doing a lot of journal writing. So it sounds like you show up for your journal quite a bit. Yeah. Daily, would you say? Daily, if not daily, then every other, no, yes, I'd say probably like five to seven times a week. Okay, great. Great. So you have a writing practice if I, you know, you know what I'm saying? Sometimes we don't, sometimes you say, you know, like, I don't, I don't have a, I don't have a head because I can't see it. You know, you have a head. You know, so sometimes we have to mirror each other this is part of what this community is. And I say, guess what? I see your writing, I see your writing practice. I see your writing practice. You have one, right? You have one. It's a five to seven day a week writing practice that mostly takes place in your journal that mostly you talk about what you're going through. Again, I'm going to say that is a totally valid thing to write about. There are great, what do they call? I forget what they're called, but there's like spaulding gray, for example. You've heard it. Have you heard a spaulding gray? Okay. Mike Daisy is a more contemporary person who does that kind of thing. I mean, people who do, you know, their lives are, you know, their lives are the subject, the main subject of the thing, which is a very beautiful form, I think. There's nothing wrong with that. There's also naval gazing, which you're allowed to do. If that, you know what I'm saying? Where you just like kind of into your own thing all the time. That's okay too. If it is your writing practice, it will change. You know, so I would say the thing is what kind of thing do you think you want to do? Something like comedy. A play, a movie, a teleplay. What are you thinking? I'm really, so I'm going, I'm getting an MFA next year in drama, Turkey. And, Okay, where? At Columbia. Okay, great. And in talking about that to people, everyone's asked like, Oh, so you must love theater. What's your favorite theater? And I actually don't love a lot of theater. I think I love like the potential for theater as a space for like live human stuff to go down. And I feel like a lot of the theater I've seen is very like dead inside and no humanity exists within it. So I want to, I want to create, I'm like going into this program sort of as like an act of faith that like in the theater, which is based on like very little empirical stuff that I've enjoyed is possible. So I guess I'd want to create something that like somehow speaks to that, speaks to like my belief in the theater as a space that could do the thing that I see a lot of theater failing to do. So you have, you want to write a theater piece and you want it to be some comedy thing. Like improvised spontaneous sort of I don't know. Like I would, you know, I think how long has it been since you finished your class? Like three weeks. Great. Okay. I would say make sure, make sure you have your writing practice every day. How long do you write in your journal? How many minutes do you put on your timer? What do you say? I don't have a timer. It's probably like 30 minutes to an hour. Okay. 30 minutes. Okay. You can make it, you can have it 30 minutes twice a day. Can you do that? Okay. Instead of a big hour where your mind can wander a lot, give yourself 30 minutes twice a day. At the end of every other day. Okay. Ask yourself, hey, self, what's the story? You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah. What's the story I want to tell? You know what I mean? But you're going to be doing two things. You're going to be putting the time in, which is crucial to getting any work done. And you're going to keep that third ear, third eye, eye, ear open to kind of have a vision about where am I going? What am I putting out here? Okay. That's going to be your writing practice. I would say for right now, don't worry about changing theater forever or writing something that's going to all bring us back from the dead. Or anything like that. Those are those are big, great things that one day, hopefully you will, you know, manifest for yourself. But I would say just put the time in and keep your eyes open for what is it that I'm trying to write? I think, you know. Okay. But definitely keep put the time in. That's the most important thing. And buy a timer. They're really cheap. And it's not your phone. Okay. Okay. Thanks for coming back. Thanks. Thanks so much. Thanks, Isaiah. All right. We've got about eight minutes left. And we're going to go to Bronwyn. Bronwyn, are you with us? Yes. Hi. Hi. Hi. First of all, I'm so sorry that I, yeah, that I ended up coming late. I have a lot of work stuff going on now, unfortunately. But so, but I'm so glad to be here. And so honored to get to learn from everybody here and from you, Susan Lurie. This is really this immense. This is incredible. And I guess just my question was that, so in this time of COVID, I've especially been feeling this, and I'm not totally sure where this pressure comes from, internal or external. It's obviously a mix of both to be writing work that's specifically COVID related in some way. And, and, but the reality was that I was before COVID, I was working in for years for almost seven years. I've been working on this opera based off of this, this fabulous character in the book of judges that's like, that's a daughter who gets sacrificed by her dad. And it's very like, if it's not inspired. And it's like, and it was in this like apocalyptic punk opera, you know, where basically like, you know, fuck the man, men do whatever they please, whatever, you know, it's like terrible. And like, if only there was a militia of women, they would take over, haha, whatever, you know, like, but it was, but it was all felt very extremely relevant. And the fact of the matter is that I was working on it for like seven years because sadly to say I could, there was no shortage of material around the brutality is against women globally, almost endless, endless material that fed into it. And for some, and basically since COVID hit and since the quarantine hit, I have been feeling this like horrible feeling that like somehow that work isn't relevant now. And so I guess my question is like, you know, how do you sort of, in some ways like, how do we deal with the fact that maybe people need sort of COVID related or direct COVID response art right now? And how do we sort of resolve maybe that feeling with the pieces we maybe, I don't know, maybe the pieces we were writing that maybe on some of what we feel are, I don't know, we're only relevant in the world before COVID. And also apologies if a question like this was already asked. No, a question like this has never been asked. I don't think, well, but the relevance of work is a really important question, Bramona. And it's great that you're asking it. So let's see, how do we do this like a math problem? So if there were never a shortage of stories or things concerning violence against women, that's what you, right? Before, say January 1st or whenever we all start saying, COVID, COVID, COVID, March the 1st or whenever, you mean that there, that all those cases have stopped? Right? Right? The thing, yeah, so I would say that there are still, and I have read things and I've just been passing that, for example, cases of domestic violence have gone up. That's what I have read. So, and not to reduce your piece to a piece about domestic violence, but I'm just saying there, I think my opinion is more than ever, we are going to, we need, and we will always need, and we're going to need, plays that help us unravel the tangle of our humanity. COVID, no COVID. You know what I'm saying? I would, I anticipate a great wealth of COVID-related plays or shows or novels or wherever we come back and that kind of makes me go, we've all lived through it. Now we're going to have to go and pay to see some people explain it to us. Oh, you know, that's going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting. It's going to be an interesting sort of contract that we're all agreeing in. Let's go, let me go see your COVID play if you see mine and I'll read her COVID novel as she reads his and, you know, and yeah, so that's interesting. I would say, not knowing much about your work except for what you said, please write it. Please, please write it because that's the kind of work that I want to see, because I bet you that's going to tell me everything I need to know about what happened in COVID. Because I bet some of most of the stuff that happens in your opera is the reason why we're here. And people getting together to talk about and deal with the stuff that's in your opera might help us untangle some of the mess here. So to say we only need plays and novels that tell us about what we've all experienced, we might need some, we will need some, but now everybody we got to walk lockstep and if we're not writing about COVID then we're not relevant. You know? Yeah. It's only one of the things that we're going through right now. There's also climate change. Hello, you know, but the the grasping and the, I mean, you can hear them almost the vultures and the maggots swimming around the body of COVID. Now we're going to make a piece about it and feed it back to people. That's, it's very, it's going to be very interesting. You know, we'll all, we should all do at least one COVID something. You know, you can do it on the side in your spare time. Right. You know, so. Thank you. That's my rant. That's my soapbox. There I was on the soapbox. Okay. Quick, another question. I can get off my soapbox. Quick, quick. Thank you. Thank you. We have one more question. We have one more minute. Crystal, are you unmuted? It's my button today. Oh, there we go. Hi. Hey, Crystal. How you doing, girl? I'm doing okay. I'm doing all right. So my question is I'm worried. I'm right now. I'm juggling two projects and was, you know, my father passed away and stuff. And the funeral was last week. And so what I've been doing is I've been writing a play called The Father Chronicles, which is kind of like the dining room where it has like just a bunch of vignettes and monologues relationships, not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, but they're all different scenario setups. I guess my question is how do I tread carefully because it is so fresh. It's very fresh. And I can tell I've had my own complexities with my relationship with my father, but like now I'm digging in and I'm doing things like you said, like, yeah, I use truth but also use, you know, fabrication. But as I'm writing more, I'm kind of realizing more is coming out from personal experience than thought. So what I do to at least be in an emotionally safe place as I do those things. Right. You might have to, you know, if you really want to write about the subject you want to write about, you know, your dad and your relationship with your dad, you might have to go to or less like to go. But again, like we talked with Catherine, the scary, you're going to the scary place, right? So the one of the tools in the, in the, where the warrior has to go to the scary place, the timer, again, you're going to, you're going to spend, you know, 10 minutes in the scary place, right? 10 minutes in the uncomfortable place, 10 minutes in the, in the emotionally, gosh, that feels awful place, right? Yeah. And then you can come out of it and do other things. You don't have to dive in, water over your head, swim around, you know, that's, I don't think that's the best way to work because of what you've said. Okay. I think little dips, little trips, gently, go gently. Does that make sense? That makes total sense. Sorry, your dad just called. Thank you. All right, sweetheart. I know you're dealing with a lot. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I want to say one thing about the COVID thing. If anybody feels moved to write a COVID please, please, please write, you know, go for it, of course. If anybody feels moved not to write a COVID piece, don't, you know what I'm saying? If you feel moved to do something, oh my gosh, I have two months off from work or where I get to work from home and suddenly I got a lot of time or whatever and I've always wanted to, you know, fill in the blank. That is what this time is going to mean for you, okay? It's not the only thing that's going on. It is revealing. As you know, if any of you glance at the news, it is revealing so many things about what our world is really like, right? So allow yourself to just be one with the world and not think you have to write something that's going to explain the pandemic to everybody, you know? So if you feel moved to write something, write something. If you feel moved not to, don't. If you, but don't feel, you know, like, don't feel that if you don't or the work that you're working on right now, this is a strand bookmark, by the way, but the work you're working on right now is no longer relevant. Ha! You have to burn it because it's only about this right now, you know what I'm saying? I mean, that's a disservice to yourself and your work and your strand bookmark, okay? So just so you know, I mean, do your thing, but don't feel, yeah, do what you feel like you need to do, okay? Okay, and tomorrow we have a very special guest. Oh, we do. Oh my goodness, tomorrow. Yeah, I want to tell him. I mean, you've probably seen it on the website. Tomorrow Tony Kushner is going to be in the house and that is going to be so exciting. He's one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite people and I just love hanging out with him. So please do drop in. Yeah. Yeah, please come. Come on down. If you want to sign up, you can sign up by 3 p.m. Eastern every single day on the public theater website to be inside of the Zoom or you can always watch on HowlRound.tv. Yeah, we're so excited to have you all. We're so excited to have Tony Kushner and as always, we're so excited to have SLP. Thank you Audrey. Okay, bye. See you tomorrow. Bye.