How did you get interested in Louise Cloud? Well, I got interested. I was doing my masters at University of San Francisco masters in writing. And one of the sections was on using primary sources. And at that point, I had no idea what a primary source was. It is original writing in its original form. And so that was my project. And I decided that my character, everybody was, oh, I'm going to do so-and-so and this kind of thing. And I decided, as a new California resident, that I would want, first of all, I would choose a writer, because that was my path. I would choose a writer, a woman, because I would be able to identify well with a woman. And because we were new in California, I thought the way to begin to grasp state history would be with the gold rush. So I need a woman in the gold rush who wrote. I must have put it out there, because. But then I learned about the gold rush that for every 90 men, there might be 110 women, sorry, in the beginning. So I just was going online and looking everywhere and going to libraries and that kind of thing. I went to the Livermore Public Library. We were living in Pleasanton at the time. And just going through the gold rush books and that sort of thing. And then I went to the reference desk. And I told the reference librarian what I was doing. And she kind of thought for a while. And then she said, well, there was that Shirley woman, that Shirley woman I'm thinking. She said, yeah, there was that woman who wrote those letters. That's how it began. I think I checked out my first book from that library. And then reading the letters. So I felt that I had it, because I've got the letters. It's the gold rush. I've got Dame Shirley. And so I began reading. And what interested me was her descriptions of the Feather River Canyon. She was awed by the beauty, by the magnificence, by the wild grandeur, as she called it. And I was a little suspicious. Hadn't been very many exciting places in California's amazing landforms. And I thought the way to begin this is to see if she's got it right with her descriptions of the Feather River Canyon. So we loaded our two sons in the car and we went up to the canyon. And as we came in from north of Chico, it just was dramatic. It was amazing. And I realized she had it right. She was telling the truth. And so I felt that I could trust her version of her descriptions of what she saw. And for me, that was it. That was the good housekeeping seal that I was looking for. I remember she describes the very perilous journey on a mule down these precipitous trails where you could easily fall off. Or the mule could as you're going down into the canyon. Yes. Hair-raising. Yeah, that was a five mile ride on muleback into the canyon and it was steep. We've been out there two or three times from the, seeing where it is from the top and then at the bottom you can look up. It's still marked because that was the trail that was in and out for everyone. And it was incredibly steep. Five miles to get down to the river and they did that in an afternoon. It took them, I think, four hours and they got down to Rich Bar by evening, early evening. And she said the miners were astounded and she said, how did she put that about herself? I myself am very vain of my having made this feat and so she was very proud of herself that she did that. And there she was. Where did the pen name Dame Shirley come from? That probably came from a couple of places. The California State Library has the letters that were found after her death by a historian who did one of the first publications. Not the one that Kip showed you but the next one that really became the classic edition that gets passed around and you can still find it. She, so those letters in the State Library are from friends and family, her mother and her girlfriends and that kind of thing. And one of them was from her mother and it was Dear Shirley. And so I learned that that was a nickname which is very likely. Nicknames were very popular as now. And then Dame, I think, was her conscious choice of giving herself a title that would make her sound legitimate, that she was authoritative, that she was educated, she was very well educated. And so I think she put those two together and that's how she came up with Dame Shirley. She was writing ostensibly to her sister Mary back in the East but she surely, it's so literate, so eloquent, so articulate, she must have had publication in mind, don't you think? I do think that. In her early life, she lost both of her parents before she was 18. So that was a very difficult thing and she was the oldest of seven children. So as the oldest, she was sort of a mother figure, especially to the younger ones. She happened to meet a very prominent American diplomat, man of letters, they called him, on a stagecoach ride coming back from her aunt and uncle in Vermont. It was a two-day stagecoach ride and he was impressed by her knowledge of things and of course she was impressed by what he knew. He recited some poetry and they got along splendidly and then he looked her up in Amherst and they began a correspondence that lasted seven years and until his death in fact. And he encouraged her, first of all, to write as a source of comfort during times of distress and then as their correspondence continued, he suggested who she should read, including the European women, Madame de Savignier, the French woman who was at the court of Louis XIV. I've learned a lot of history along the way myself and also Madame de Stahl and others. And he said several times. In fact, he'd done some essays on these women and he sent Louise's things. He sent her copies of his poetry. He sent her an essay that he wrote about Madame de Stahl and so forth. So I think that she took it all to heart and she clearly wanted to write. So I believe that she probably followed the structure. I have not yet read the letters of Madame de Stahl. I've got about three books on my desk right now for that. But I think that that was both her inspiration and possibly even the guidance for the structure. Now the epistolary style which she wrote in Dear Mary and you know I'm a little fissile seed in my wandering and you remember how I wasn't good at art and all those things, they give us a window. They tell us about Louise while she is writing to her sister describing what she is seeing. So you have that two way disclosure and that of course is another remarkable thing so that we do get to know Louise as we go along. Before we hear more about the real Louise, I'd love to get your impression, show you about her.  What were your thoughts about that? Well as you said I didn't know anything about Louise Clap. Peter Sellers though gave me some of the excerpts that he had extracted from her letters that he was considering for the libretto and we were in rehearsals for a piece on Simon Veil actually. And yeah I just read them in the evening and I said well she's very bright, she's very funny, she's very open and receptive to every individual that she's encountered and also the environment that she entered. And so I was super curious how Peter was going to flesh out the rest of the story given that she was already such a rich character. You touched on something that's interesting to me that she's very open, she's not judgmental terribly but she's extremely observant. She was critical though. I mean I don't think she shied away from really criticizing things that she didn't agree with or simply didn't understand from the minors themselves to the mob mentality to the Indians that the Native Americans that she was encountering. I mean she's coming out of this Victorian era of wearing a lot of clothing and then being exposed to people who wore nothing at all. I mean that was very shocking. I think I don't know if it's distressing to her but she was disapproving and shared it and shared it. I mean that, yeah. She was also, it seems to me very self-deprecating. Although her language is eloquent, she's not grand herself. No, it was sort of a alter ego I guess that she took on but and she did admit, I loved in the early letters she admitted, I'm not a great artist so I have to describe, I'm just paraphrasing, I have to describe this all with my words because I don't know how to draw. Oh, if only I knew how to draw. You know, I wouldn't have to waste words trying to describe it to you and anyway, how lucky are we, right? Would you talk about her relationship with her husband, Marlene, can you talk a little bit about that Fayette? What was that relationship like? Yeah, I will. So when this mentor of hers, he passed away in 1847 and she married a year later, she married a young man from, I think he was from Northampton which is near Amherst. He had had a, what do I wanna say, worked with his uncle who was a doctor and internship I'm looking for. So he had an internship and no doubt medical school such as it was in that time and so he was ready to be a doctor. They probably met at Amherst, he had friends who went there and so they got married in September of 1848 and then somewhere along the line it was December of 1848 when President Polk announced that the gold talk in California was real, that there was gold there and people were getting it. So I kind of assumed that maybe they decided they would go. I have the feeling that in the back of Louise's mind this would be the event that she could write about since it was just now getting started and so I also wonder because of the things she wrote about her husband having a hard time making money or keeping money I think and so she put him down a few times. So I have a feeling that for her to get to California it would be good to have an escort, it would be good to have a husband and then that would sort of make everything easier for her and so they married and when they came to California they came with two of her three younger sisters and someone in Fayette's family. So it was kind of a family group, they came on a merchant ship, so they paid passage and they left in about September of 1849 and arrived in San Francisco in January of 1850. And then- A long trip. Yeah, a long trip, a long trip. Sadly- Around the horn, they came around the horn. Yeah, they came around the horn which means that she had to have stopped maybe in Santiago and other places and I wish we had some record of that because Louise could have done an amazing job of describing South American cities to us. So they were in San Francisco for one year. Fayette was practicing medicine but he didn't like the climate in San Francisco. It was either too cold or too windy or not warm and sunny enough.  Which was the dream. So he did persuade Louise that he should go up and see if it would be a safe environment for her. His friends told him go to Rich Bar because it's barely been discovered and there's only one doctor there right now. So that is how that played out. And they separated, he went first. So she met him in Marysville and then was going to meet up again at Bidwells Bar which is now under the Orville Dam. And that's she, so her first letter describes that springless, horrific wagon that they bounced their way through the rocky Northern California Valley and got to Bidwells Bar and then they met up and got on mule back in a way they went. And that's where we meet Ned Peters, this former slave who is driving this wagon. Can you talk a little bit about their relationship and then I want to get Julia to chime in on that as well. Yeah, so they hired him which gives you also a sense of Louise's background and what she was accustomed to or decided she was going to stay accustomed to. He became their cook at Rich Bar and I think she got to know him well. He was a good cook, she learned about his background and then of course saw the treatment that he received which finally drove him out of camp. So she was very sympathetic. He was a violinist, right as well? Pardon me? She was a violinist, she called him Ned Paganini and so she didn't say too much about how often he played, but that had to be a wonderful thing and she I think was aware of classical music and composers and that sort of thing. So she liked being able to tell that about him which was, you know, that's quite an accomplishment for anyone. And well, let's ask Julia about this first. In the production Peter has kind of given us a hint that the relationship between Ned and Shirley, there's an affection there that Fayette resents quite obviously, can you talk about that? It's an opera, I mean. Right. Can you talk a little bit about how that developed in the process of, there's nothing in the libretto that suggests this. No, I mean Peter admits he wanted to create some love dynamics and because it is an opera. So, I mean there was clearly a lot of affection that Louise had for Ned and also a respect for him. I mean she, I love that there's several men that she talks about in the letters who either were great orators or very well read and it's like she characterizes some of these individuals in the most wonderful, warm way. And Ned, I think she respected very much because of his culinary expertise and because of his beautiful, you know, his violin playing, which actually isn't in the opera. We don't, John decided he didn't want to allude to playing the violin because he didn't want to have Devon play the violin on stage. So, on the administrative side, we breathe the great sigh of relief when we found out that Ned didn't have to play the violin on stage. Right, it's hard to find anyone to play the violin well and let alone a baritone. And miming it, of course, never quite works. No, no, it's horrible, it's horrible. Anyway, so yeah, that's, you know. So there's, certainly she describes him in her letters with a great deal of admiration. I think she expressed a terrible regret when he left, but there's no hint of any kind of love triangle there that you would detect. No, there's no hint. There's no hint of any love triangle or even almost love in the Shirley letters. So we're left to wonder about that. Before we go on, I've got a little one minute video clip of Julia's first scene, so let's watch that. I have not seen, and I hope I don't get mad at you for playing it. Oh, it's great. I can't, I can't. God, I'm already closing my ears, okay. Into my sword of style, of the rich most men in this country, I'm in the hammock, rubbing the foam gold. Some say that I ought to be put into a straight jacket. Some say I was undoubtedly a man of such a name. There's a little tantalization for you there. We have several performances left if you want to. Seeing the elephant, I had not known that expression before, reading it in Dame Shirley, but I guess it was a fairly common one during her time. Yes, when I was Associate Editor of California History, of course it came up in so many things, and finally I thought, I need to know what that means. And as a good editor, you should know what you're at. And so during the 19th century, people were beginning to travel to Europe and in more exotic places. You know, there was kind of a sort of a metaphysical draw for many Europeans to go to India, in fact, and other places. And seeing the elephant, you would see elephants in India, Southeast Asia, and so forth. And then when circus became kind of a mainstream recreational thing in America, there were elephants, there were tigers. And so people would say, if they'd gone to the circus, I've seen the elephant. And it became the sort of icon for seeing something very unusual that not everybody would see. And so that's how it came into mainstream. When people talked about going to the gold rush or coming back, I have seen the elephant. In fact, I ran across a book I haven't read yet about women in the gold rush called They Saw the Elephant. So obviously, what's an expression in common use? Julia, what's it like to actually sing Dame Shirley's language to the notes of John Adams? Does it sing itself well, do you think? I mean, John demands that his singers, or at least I have found, demands that I be very concentrated and very clear. And the goal always is about communicating as directly as possible and being as articulate as possible, which is wonderful because actually I don't have time to think about how people are receiving me and my voice. There's no time. It's just a quick fire parlando. And how did you get connected with John? He, as we will attest, insisted that you be engaged to create this role. How did the two of you know each other? I met him in October of 2014, and I had a 30, 40 minute meeting with him to talk about me singing El Nino, actually. And it's his oratory about the Christmas. Yes, just one of the greatest pieces of music of all time. And yeah, I sang repertoire from Messia to Oscar Brown to some Josephine Baker tunes. And then we talked for a while. And just had a very easy exchange. I mean, I think we always understood each other. And yeah, then within the week, his managers called mine and said, would she like to record Dr. Atomic with BBC? Would she like to sing El Nino? And also, would she like to be the lead in this new opera? It all came at once. Wow. Would you like to spend the next three years with John Adams? Essentially. And all the other thing I said to my manager was, I'm going to be Adamsed out, I think. But I'm so glad that I've, over the course of these past 12 months, been able to get immersed in his repertoire and these three large pieces, which have vastly different musical languages. But I do feel are reflective of the material. And you do Kitty Oppenheimer again next summer. This would be the first time on stage when you did it. Correct, yeah. I'd be curious if, since you know that role now, having recorded it, how do these two compare? Just in terms of musically, as dramatically? Yeah. Well, they're both very bright. Louise Clap, though, I mean, she's speaking for her. These are Louise Clap's words. Peter selected poetry to represent Kitty Oppenheimer in this opera. Muriel Rekeiser. Exactly. And fantastic poet. One thing that I'll say for both Muriel and for Louise, talking about them so casually here. They don't compartmentalize or abandon any part of themselves. It's like all of their politics, their philosophy, their passion, their spirituality, that is fully incorporated into every piece. So it's not organized really neatly. And it's a very fluid, deep, rolling kind of experience. And as a singer, it's super satisfying to have that very quick metabolized material to just gnaw on. So you're just a whole person there. Absolutely, absolutely. We want to eventually give the audience a chance to ask questions of you. But before we do that, let's talk about the rest of the Dame Shirley story. What happens after she leaves the gold camps? Well, they left because it was going to be two things. It was going to be a very rough winter. It was predicted to be very snowy. If they didn't get out right away in the fall, they would be stuck there. And other miners had already left. The place was abandoned. And it was littered. And it was just what we don't like to see at a campground today. So they got back to San Francisco in, so basically January of 1853. And again, I think we have a sense that this is not a marriage that they're going to work on. And so by 1854, as the San Francisco public school system was getting organized, Louise would make a perfect teacher. So she became one of the early school teachers in San Francisco. And that was her career. Her husband Fayette, after they got a divorce. We don't know when he left for Hawaii, but he went to Hawaii. And then just shortly after that, the Civil War broke out. And he became a Civil War physician, contracted something, although he married and he had children. So again, for me, that's a clue that he wanted to be a family man, that that was his life plan. So Louise stayed in San Francisco. She became friends with a couple of her students, particularly who were writers. And then when she retired in 1878, she went to New York. Her two sisters who came to California both had a tragic end. One of them died on the ship. The youngest of the two died on the ship. The other one had one daughter in San Francisco. And giving birth to her second daughter died in childbirth. But the niece who survived was Genevieve Stebbins. And she got into an artistic movement called the DelSart Movement, which at the turn of the century was kind of an early gymnasium movement that had begun in Europe. And Genevieve was doing things in New York. I don't know what kind of theater. But so Louise and Genevieve were in New York together. And also Louise had very close friends who had been in San Francisco. She became an Episcopalian while she was here. And that friend, Ferdinand Euer and his wife, they were lifelong friends in California. She stayed with them for a while. She apparently gave some public lectures on art, architecture, and literature. There are copies of her notebooks that show that she intended to do that. And also she wrote a critical article for a woman's college in Canada. She wrote, that's a story I can't get into, but it'll come out in print one of these days. There's an article there somewhere, right? Yes, I hope to do a fuller biography, because I know so much more now. So she stayed in New York until I think she was quite elderly and not very strong, and then ended up in New Jersey where she had been born, living with the nieces of Bret Hart. And that's a side story, because in California circles, there was said to be, although I think it was a created thing, there was said to be some competitiveness between the two. He, of course, was a writer of short stories and poetry, and then he was the editor of the Overland Monthly, and she never had anything published in there, so her students who were loyal said, you know, it's because he knows that, you know, he used your stuff and he doesn't want you, he doesn't want you in the limelight anymore. He famously wrote about the gold rush. Yes, yeah, and I've looked at that and thought, did he plagiarize or didn't he? Well, the article that she wrote for the Canadian Women's Magazine, it's a discussion of plagiarism. And she did bring Bret Hart up and she said, well, you know, it's kind of the thing, can we put a trademark on language? You know, if you're describing the gold rush, if you're describing some of these scenes, they were fairly specific. If there was a woman there, you know, things, there were certain specific themes and she basically gave him a pass and just said it doesn't matter. She never said, I forgive him, but she said who knows and ideas, creative ideas come from everywhere and you know, let's let it go basically. And she did that in the, I think the early 1880s when she was back in New York. So that's how she wrapped that up. And I don't know that it was a make nice, but she ended up being taken care of by his nieces for the rest of her life. And it was in that home in the attic.  And 15 years later in 1922, historian who was a mining historian went back to that house and amazingly enough in the attic was this photograph collection, were her mentors letters that she had saved, were her friends letters. That's what we have of Louise Clap. You know, those things that were saved that someone had the amazing idea to go look. And 15 years later, you know, what do we do with our attics?  So it's quite remarkable that we have what we know about her. And there's a photo that's on the cover of the program magazine, which may or may not be of her. Is that right? Yes, I think I look at that and I tried to imagine if that is Louise at the Feather River. It's certainly a woman dressed warmly. She's got a good warm cap on and a warm jacket with I think lamb's wool cuffs around it.  We don't know for sure. That picture is in the California State Library and there's no one wrote on the back who it is and when it was taken. Always label your photographs I used to nag on. That's right, that's right. But we could trace some things back to the family. Her uncle on her mother's side was mayor of New York for one term I think. And so his sketch shows up in biographical dictionaries. And also her niece, there are pictures of her niece, the actress, the dancer. And you can see familiar characteristics. I do anyway, I'm not a forensic person, but you can look at the thick eyebrows that the uncle had and this young woman at the river had and the niece. And also the full lips and straight nose. So you look at those things and I think if we ever have an opportunity, if I have more time or anybody does to let's look farther into photo collections, I do think we will know when we find her. I get goosebumps just thinking about it because I think I will know. She kept copies of her letters which is how they got published. What's happened to them, do we know? Those letters are also at the State Library. Oh really, the original. Her handwriting. None of her letters. In her handwriting we have her art lectures, her literature lectures and that kind of thing. So we know her handwriting. And the letters that we have are her collection of Alexander Hill Everett's letters to her which are filled with amazing literature and history of just a fabulous thing. This is this mentor of hers. Yeah, the mentor of hers. And then the photographs. So we don't have anything Louise has written. So we don't know if we could go to Amherst. We might dig around and find things. There was a man I contacted, James Smith, interestingly enough. Like me, he wasn't the Smith relative of Louise's but he did Amherst genealogy. So he's pulled the family together and went as far as he could with it. So there are ways of continuing this story. It's a matter of having time. Who knows what the future may bring. Maybe this opera will sort of spur more investigation. Let me ask the same two questions of both of you which are what's your favorite letter of the 23? And if we could talk to Louise, like we could Skype her in right now, what would you want to ask her? I'll go first. Well, because nature is what brought me to believe in the Shirley letters and following that sense of her wonder at nature. It just thrills me that she described it the way she does. Her last letter when she knew that they were hurrying to leave and she said it would be madness to linger longer. She did a ritual closing thing. And I don't know whether this was an intentional literary device or quite what. But the last letter, she writes that she went out and stood in the moonlight and said farewell to the river and described this place where I have been so contented. Here, you writing to her sister, you think it was such a crude, amazing place to be but I have found peace here and I go from here for a troubled and uncertain future. And that was how she concluded 15 months in a gold mining camp. Julie, is there a letter that sticks in your mind or at least a passage from all these writings of hers?  I mean, there's so many sections throughout that. I mean, there's a lot of humor that Peter and John decided to set and highlight. Along with these then moments of being shaken by really stark reality. And that occurs throughout every one of her letters and kind of really surprising moments. Yeah, there's anyway. I don't know. I guess I don't have a favorite letter. She does quite vividly describe the violence and the racism that she sees. She does. And there's just so many wonderful passages. I really can't. It is hard. If you could ask her, there's a question you could ask her. Like, why did you say this or is there anything that you would love to know if you could talk to her? Yeah, she spent so much time describing everyone else. And she didn't really spend a lot of time talking about herself. And I guess I'd want to know if she just wanted to how she would like to characterize herself. Because in a way, I mean, I guess in a way, she chose this alter ego of Dame Shirley, this brilliant, brilliant observer who wasn't an activist, per se. So I'm kind of curious, actually, what was different between the Louise clap that she felt she truly was versus the woman who she wanted to project? It's fascinating to me that she uses this eloquence and this literary flair in these brutal surroundings. And part of me thinks that she did that as a way of kind of maintaining her sanity, to sort of grasping onto civilization that she had known before. What would you ask her if you could? I would ask her briefly, give us some hints about the marriage. Because I'd like to know what went wrong or not my business, of course, but I would be curious about that. But my other question would be, were you lonely? Were you lonely there? Because there weren't many other women. Of course, she had the role of writing. The express man would come once a month and take her letters away and get them mailed and that sort of thing. She kept copies, obviously. But I wonder if it was a lonely life among the men and herself. There was really no one, there were no other women, except briefly, the 4th of July scene, there were some other women. And she noted their fashions and that kind of thing. But basically, she was a solitary woman. And that may be part of the answer, that I think she sort of led a solitary life. But I would be interested in that. You have a kind of a musical moment where she goes on about that. It can help me with the language. No balls, no visiting, no calling, no dinners. No charades. And no new books. That was the other scene. No little tea drinkings, and no church, no walks, no strolling about town, that kind of thing. Because it was also unsafe for her to be out a lot on her own. It was just a reality. Probably unsafe in general, but especially to be alone. All right, I think we need to let our audience ask some questions here. I'll try to repeat it just in case you can't hear it. Who has a question for either of these interesting ladies? Yes, go ahead. How long was named Shirley there in the Gold Country? She was there from August of 1851 until November of 1852, so basically about 14 months. Including one long winter? Yes, including the very long winters, long, cold winters. So it's not surprising they got out before the next winter came along. Well, Fayette had been somewhere treating a patient or doing something, and so she was worried, because the postman said, I'm leaving. Whoever's coming with me is coming with me, but I'm not waiting around. So there was that tension about leaving that winter. Anybody else? Another question? Yes, go ahead. Two parts. The first is to say thank you to both of you. I taught California literature and used, of course, your book. And I saw you performing in concert a year and a half or so ago, and so I'm a fan of both. I have a question. There's another California girl I'm really fond of. Her name is Rumona. The woman who created her is, I think, is from Amherst. She was great childhood friends with Emily Dickinson of all people. Might their paths have crossed in any way, do you think, Louise's as it may be as a young girl and Helen Hunt Jackson? That's a very interesting question.  They were coming back from Italy during a storm. The ship hit the shoals or something like that, and they went down. And interestingly enough, and I think that the climate in New England or Boston, what have you, was public lectures. That's how people got their ideas, knew who to read, knew who was kind of leading ideas. And I know that Louise was interested in that. I think that's where you get the hints of transcendentalism in that last letter. In the 1922 edition that you showed of that, I believe that is where there is a poem that Louise wrote about losing Helen Hunt Jackson. She talked about that death was a theme for Louise. I've seen it in other places that are in print, so it's easy to see that. And just coming to California and getting that news, because Helen Hunt Jackson, I think it was 1848 or 1849 when she died. And then Louise lost her younger sister on that ship. And she wrote about that, just kind of the young deaths and losing you and that kind of thing. So other than that, all I could say is she might have done, she might have read and probably did read Helen Hunt Jackson and may have listened to her in talks and that sort of thing. And that's as far as we know right now. Who else? In the back there? Yes. There's a microphone coming around. Thank you, Michelle, for your microphone, Judy, here. Yes, I just have a question for the opera, because one of the scenes in the beginning of the letters is describing one of the funerals of the woman who dies. And it's a very stark scene and one of the things it gets me in that reading that letter is that her young daughter is laughing while they're over there in the house for the funeral. Do you remember that letter? Yes, that was almost as soon as Louise arrived at the camp. So that had to be startling. The woman was Nancy Bailey, and in real life, she and her husband were the proprietors of the Humboldt. And I think it seems as though she died of a ruptured appendix. I think there was peritoneus or however you say that word. And Louise was very touched. She wrote about the description of taking the casket up on the hillside, Dame Shirley. Nancy Bailey was buried on the hillside. There is a headstone there. You shouldn't go up there now, because I don't think it's safe because of gross and gold mining and that sort of thing. There is a headstone there. But afterwards, Louise was just so struck that Nancy's little girl didn't get it. And of course she didn't. She was three probably. And it wouldn't sink in for a long time. But it's clear that Louise, that took her back into her own past and probably seeing her younger sisters and so forth. Very poignant, very, very compassionate, sad. That scene is not in the opera. No. There are sort of a lot of things in the letters that there's plenty of room for another opera and all that material. Anybody else with a question? Let's go over here. A partial inspiration for Wallace Stegner in Angle of Repose. Yeah, Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, which has been turned into an opera we performed at San Francisco Opera in 1976. Is there any connection there that you don't know? I don't think there is. I've just been reading that. Someone else suggested that to me. And I think that he takes that strictly from his own family letters. It may be fictionalized or novelized family biography. He talked about the new Almond and Mines in San Jose. But they were so different from the Gold Rush. And I haven't finished it. But I so far have not seen any sense that he built a portrait around her. I recall that the novel switches back and forth from the Gold Rush era to the 1970s. There's kind of a dual-time thing going on there. Angle of Repose refers to the slant at which a rock will rest rather than sliding down the hill. Yeah, interesting. Yes, go ahead. So I was in the mob scene. Drunken nightmare in the mob scene. And there's just such a sense of outrage of what had happened. And yet, at the end, a den of may is waxing eloquently about the grandeur of the mountains, which isn't a modern sensitivity of how to deal with something so horrible and tragic. So I was wondering, did she say anything critical in her letters about what actually happened? She does describe, for example, the whipping of what she calls spaniards. That's her term for the South Americans. Expresses her shock. In fact, you have a language, a line, about who could believe that in the 19th century that men could be beaten like dogs. That's straight out of the letters.  And so, and actually, I find that the last epilogue, it's just about one's ability to continue shifting perspective, even in times when, well, instead of getting stuck in a moment, you're actually able to step back, look, and gaze everywhere. So it is one way to deal with trauma. No, it's not, again, the activist way. In that way, I know it's some people who said she's disappointing, but I don't know if we could have taken, if historians can look at her writing with such respect if she had been so directly involved. That role of the observer is very critical. There's a certain amount of port of license we should point out that Louise Clapp was not a witness to the hanging of horsefaces of Ovia and probably didn't even know about it. I think she did. She might not have witnessed it. I've forgotten that detail. But all the violence, that wasn't the only hanging. There was someone else who, they advised him. I think he was accused of stealing gold. And he was advised to plead innocent. And this is the vigilante justice where the mob ruled. And he said it doesn't make any difference whether I plead innocent or guilty. I'm being hung anyway. And Louise's response through those letters and through that violence, she was shocked. As you said, she could not believe how men could treat each other. And it was horrifying to her to see all that violence. That comes through in the letters. And she said in the letters also that I promise you I would give you a true and faithful accounting of what I've seen. And I hate to do this, but this is what we see. Yeah, I'm just pulling a couple. Justice at the hands of a mob, however respectable, is at best a fearful thing. And she says, her lustrous skies gaze upon such barbarous deeds. So she does talk about it quite a lot. I mean, it's not, no, it's not in every moment, but yeah. I think trying to cling to civilization in the midst of all this brutality must have been a priority for her. Yeah, things that she had never seen before, obviously, and wouldn't go back to ever again. I saw a hand on the aisle back there. Yes, sir, go ahead. I had planned on seeing this opera. And last Thursday I saw Joshua Cosman's review in The Chronicle, and I was just surprised by it. And again, I haven't seen the opera yet. I'm sure many in the room have. But I was just wondering if you'd seen it and what your reaction to it was, if any. I always want to get a question like that. I left a quote, Sir John Pritchard, who was our music director, back in the 1980s. And I was doing an interview with him like this. He's an Englishman, of course. And I said, John, do you read reviews? And he said, oh, yes. When I was a young man, I won't try to do his accent. But he said, I would rush out early in the morning and get the newspaper. And I'd be devastated. And I learned that the thing to do was to wait a month. And if you read the review a month later, and it's, oh, isn't that funny? You get a certain perspective on it. So I would suggest maybe to wait a month and read that review again. Julie, do you ever read reviews? Do you pay any attention? I read every review. And part of it is because it lets me know where I'm most sensitive and the things I need to resolve within myself before the next performance. I guess you can perceive whatever your synthesis is of the opera or of John's music. I mean, I can't speak for Droswit Kosman. But I do feel that one thing that I was a little perturbed by is that he was discouraging of people to come see this. And I feel that there is a responsibility for those who are writing about the arts right now and particularly that whatever your feeling is of the piece, it's like just still try to get people into the hall to experience it. And then just whatever your reaction is. But there is a very violent response to this piece. He had a very violent response to the piece. And it was a very violent time. And maybe I don't know what chords that struck in him that were so disarming and infuriating for him. But it was very strong language. It really was. But he did enjoy the performance anyway. There are lots of other reviews that have been a variety of points. When I read that, I was disappointed. I was very disappointed. And I forgotten the phrase he used to describe Dame Shirley's name. And he used some, like, why would anybody write with such a corny name or something like that? And I realized then he knew nothing about 19th century literature or San Francisco. Anybody who wrote. We all recognize Mark Twain. But anybody who wrote, you know, John Rollins was yellow bird. And Stephen Massad was James Pipesville. Everybody had a name. That's just how you did. And so I thought, well, he doesn't have the full background of this. And then for myself, I thought, well, this is interesting. So when I go, we're going to go to the very final matinee performance. And I'll see what I think. Now I know what he thinks. That doesn't tell me what I have to think. It tells me I will look and kind of bounce that off and see how I respond to it. So in a way, I thought it was kind of valuable, even though it was negative. So I just turned it around. And if he'd said it was wonderful, then OK, you go.  So that was my take. I'm kind of ignoring the side of the room. Does anybody over here that I've neglected? Sir, go ahead. Yeah, we close on December 10th, rather. And then it will eventually go to Amsterdam, the Netherlands operas, a partner in this. And then it then goes to Dallas, not I think until 2020. Pardon? Did I say something wrong? 2021, is it? And there is another potential European partner who has not been officially confirmed yet. But as with the other operas of John Adams, I'm sure that other companies will leap in. When we did Dr. Atomic, it was a single company commission. We didn't have any partners. But that's gone all over the place. So that will probably happen with this as well. Other questions? Yes, ma'am. I hope you all heard that question. Wonderful question. How do you approach learning John Adams' music? It's very organized and disciplined. So I take the rhythm and the text and learn that separately. I mean, I really kind of do this with all material, but it's particularly important for Adams. And try to get that as fluid, open, easy in my mouth as body as possible. I learned then the melodies, which are all so fantastic. I mean, John really writes great tunes.  I mean, the range of my role is from a low F-sharp to a high D-flat, which is crazy extreme. Actually, I don't know any other role in the operatic repertoire that's that wide. So I really take my time just processing each of those things separately. And then I just kind of layer them on. I mean, my boyfriend is here. And he sees me as I'm working on these things. And I will go from phases of, oh, this is so wonderful to impossible, impossible material.  And I'm furious at you, Peter Sellers. I mean, it's really a furious, very wild go round with the material. But when you piece it all together, I've found that I've done some of my best singing with John Adams' music because I've had to really just find my voice and see how it resonates in my body and to make all the pitches easy and natural. Yeah, that's great. There's no, if you try to falsify a moment of this, it just, or put on any veil at all in the sound or in the delivery, it's just done. There's no, you can't receive, actually, what John's written. You wouldn't consider yourself a new music specialist, is there?  No, I mean, I just do what speaks to me. So you're not expecting to concentrate on new pieces exclusively going forward. Obviously, you'll get asked because you've done them so well. Is there another question before we wrap it up here? Yes, ma'am. I wonder what the language of the, wasn't all of the libretto from the book itself? All of mine is. There's also poetry. There's Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass. There's some wonderful Chilean poet that is all about this. Alfonso Estorne. So almost everything that the character Josef Zagovia says, mostly in Spanish, is the poetry of this wonderful Argentinian poet. So was that kind of language very different from the type of language you're used to singing? Still English. I mean, so much of what I sing, so much of the repertoire in general is poetic. So I mean, I think this is pretty clear narrative, actually. Yeah, not a lot of metaphors, really. There are a lot of minor songs that are the texts of the. I mean, the chorus sings, and a lot of what the character Joe Cannon sings of, from minor songs. And they're kind of earthy and kind of anti-poetic. And some ancient Chinese. Yes, the character Asing, what she sings, a lot of it is Chinese poetry from the gold rush translated into English. One more question, and we'll wrap it up. I mean, it's kind of, excuse me, I find it really helpful to work on a lot of different kinds of repertoire at one time, because it keeps, well, one, it keeps my mind activated. And it keeps my voice very facile. So I don't know what the differences are. I think it'll be interesting now. Actually, going, I just gave a masterclass today at the conservatory. And going through some Mozart recitative, and I just kept saying, closer to speech, please, closer to speech, you're just speaking on pitch. Otherwise, you get this weird removed. It's like, instead of just, it's like you're playing an opera singer, instead of just being one. That's what I found myself saying today. There's this artificiality that falseness there. When really, you just want a human expression. So I don't know if I answered that question at all, but. I would guess that the agility that's required for a like a Handel roll or a Boccata roll helps, it translates to doing modern music, which is. Interestingly, though, like the coloratura in all of the melismatic work that's in Dr. Atomic, there isn't any in this for me. But that is some of the most difficult melismatic material that I've ever worked on. And he helped me, John helped me get better at it. So that's nice. We've sort of given these ladies the amount of time that we promised them, and I think it's time to thank them very much for being here, Marlene and Julia. Thank you all for coming.


I always forget something. OK, I'm ready. Are you ready? Yes. Great. All my talks start with a content warning. There's two for you and one for me. The two for you are this talk involves discussion of terminal illness and death and the emotions that surround those things, specifically loneliness and guilt through the lens of end-of-life care. If that's a heavy subject for you and you need to step out, I totally get it. You will not offend me. It will not hurt my feelings. If you need to do something to give you a bit of emotional distance, look at your phone, jot in a notebook, cross stitch, I'm totally into it. I've been there, too. The second content warning for you is that I do have two videos in this talk. One of them has audio. It is captioned. It's kind of dark for lots of reasons, but it's there. And if something goes wrong with the video, the captions can help us with the content. And then the second video later doesn't have audio. But if you experience any kind of motion-related nausea or discomfort, I'll give you a heads up before those videos start. They're only about 30 seconds each. And I'll be talking through them as well. The content warning for me is, please don't fall off the stage. I pace when I talk. It's how I kind of deal with the anxiety of being on the stage. So you see me getting perilously close to the edge. Just throw your arms out. No, Jeremy. OK. So please take care of yourself. Do what you need to do. I want you to be safe. I want you to get something out of this.  Cool? Start with a thank yous, first and foremost, to Brenna. She's sitting here in the front row. I'm going to talk about her a lot. Thank you, Bren, for so many things. And thank you to the organizers. Conferences are really hard. Brenna and I, along with a couple other folks, organize a conference in Seattle. I'll talk about a little bit so we get how hard this is. And they've done an amazing job. And again, thank you to all of you who've stuck through and come to this very last session. I want to tell you a story. I took this photo in July in Bermuda. I was with Bren, and I want to tell you the story of how we got there. We were in Bermuda to fulfill Barbara's last wishes, which was to have her ashes spread in Bermuda, where she had lived most of her adult life. So I'm here to tell you that story. I'm here to tell you about my family, essentially, about making things that matter, about holiday gifts. I'm going to tell you a story about fighting when you're going to lose. There's no other option you're going to lose. And I want to tell you a story about a $5 computer, which is my prop for this talk, which I left in my backpack. So it's OK. First, before we get going, I want to talk about this word. I have a speech impediment, which is why I started public speaking.  This word is really hard for me. And it's really important in this discussion, but that consonant with that hard I after it like that, man, it messes me up every time. So saying it the first time is the hardest. It's like a roadblock. I figured out how to get around it. So I'm going to count to three, and I need us all to kind of like say it together. That'll help me, OK? So one, two, three. Dignity. I couldn't do it. Dignity. Dignity. Dignity. There it is. OK. We're going to talk about this word a lot, so I'll probably struggle with it. Here's an agenda, because if I don't have an agenda, I will just ramble. We're going to meet some people. We're going to talk about loneliness in guilt, experiencing loneliness and guilt through the lens of caring for someone who is terminally ill. We're going to talk about the difference between soothing and solving. We're going to talk about how to build the right thing, more specifically how to know what to build when it's time to build something, and then measuring the impact of what you build. And we're going to close with a short discussion on what do you do when you lose the fight? So let's meet some people. First there's me. My name is Jeremy. You know that. You probably saw it on a website. I'm a programmer. I'm a teacher. I live in Seattle. I really like tattoos and records. If you want to come talk to me later, I always want to talk about tattoos and records. I help run a little conference you probably haven't heard of, or this crowd you might have. It's called open source and feelings, and it's exactly what it says on the tin. I'm the least important person in this story. I'm just the person privileged enough to tell it. This is Bren. She's more important. She's a software engineer, specializing in build and delivery engineering. She's a crafter. She's a runner. She's a gamer. And most importantly, she is the kindest person I've ever known. She's also my girlfriend. My partner, my best friend. We've been live, laugh, loving together for four years and going, and she's here today in New Orleans. She's sitting in the front row. Hi, Bren. Yeah, Bren deserves a round of applause. She lives with this. This is Barbara, Bren's grandmother. She passed away in May, but she remains the most important person in this story. She's our central character. This is where our first video is. It's awkward to me to be the one telling Barbara's story when her relationship with Bren is obviously much stronger and much more significant. And so when we talked about this, wanting to give Bren a voice in this presentation, we settled on a video to do so. So this is Bren talking about what made Barbara such a special person. And again, like when we tested this earlier, we had to really crank the audio up. So let's prepare. And it's about 30 seconds long. Let's see if it works. She was an amazingly strong woman. She was an amazingly intelligent woman. And she was independent, headstrong. And yeah, she was a badass. Badass. I can also describe my grandmother as a badass, since I don't know if that's a comment trait of grandmothers, but I want to believe it is. And it's a shame that video's so dark because in Bren's lap is our adorable Chihuahua Rosa. And that was my opportunity to share her with you. So if you want to see pictures of Rosa later, please come do it. But yeah, Barbara was a badass. And it's worth talking about. This is what makes Barbara a badass. She was born and raised in the Eastern United States. And on the playground, she spent most of her days. I'm not going to do that to you. She grew up in New Jersey and emigrated to Bermuda in the 1960s. She emigrated after a bitter divorce. And the thing that drove her away was this desire to have her own career, to kind of be in charge of her own destiny. And that was something her ex-husband adamantly opposed. And frankly, the rest of her family opposed. So she lived and worked in Bermuda until her retirement in 1991. She worked primarily in the banking and hospitality industries and earned the title Manager S, which is amazing, Manager S. She was joined in Bermuda a few years after emigrating by her daughter. And then some time after that, Brenna was born. Brenna describes Barbara as her role model, as her tireless cheerleader, as her best friend, her second mom. And Barbara is responsible for instilling in Bren a belief that success and empathy are not exclusive concepts, that she could achieve anything she desired with hard work, dedication, kindness, perseverance. And it was Barbara's career working with computers and frankly managing teams of men that inspired Bren to go into engineering herself. Bren eventually emigrated to the United States and settled in Seattle, which worked out really well for me. And after retiring, Barbara followed because as she aged, she needed more help getting by with day-to-day living. So Brenna arranged for her to settle in Seattle eventually and enter an assisted living facility and they began this routine of daily phone calls and visits. These women, these amazingly strong women followed each other across continents and decades, each supporting each other in kind as the situation demanded, each determined to be there for each other. On December 12th, 2012, Barbara suffered a series of ischemic strokes. That's when a blood clot somewhere in a body, usually the leg, separates and travels a circulatory system landing in the brain. The result was a complete loss of her ability to speak. Complete loss of sensation and control in the right side of her body, leaving her bedbound. She could sit in a wheelchair but didn't have the strength to move it herself and so she was really spending most of her time in bed. She lost her independence, essentially overnight. After the stroke, Barbara needed 24-hour care. So Bren arranged for her to enter a facility that could provide that care, a nursing home. And that's where Barbara lived for four and a half years. Bren visited and those visits were hard. Some days, the connection between brain and body were strong and Barbara could speak a little and was with Bren and it was a little bit like old times. They could talk and laugh and catch up. More often, Barbara was frustrated, angry, at her inability to get her body to cooperate, to vocalize the things she was thinking and feeling and they made it work. They developed a surprisingly elaborate system of gestures and pointed looks and communicated volumes with just expressions. It's the kind of communication that you have to grow up with someone to have. Some visits were really bad. Once a month, maybe once a quarter, Bren would find Barbara agitated and confused. She would have woken up having forgotten why she was there, where she was, why she couldn't move, why she couldn't speak. She was terrified and lost and it wasn't until Bren would arrive that she would calm down and Bren would have the extremely unfortunate job of explaining to Barbara what had happened, where she was, why she was there and how long it had been. Brent never sugar-coated. She always told her the truth and I immensely respect that and it wasn't to hurt her or to scare her, it was to be honest and whole with the person she loved most. But it was picking a scab. Once I entered the picture, I began visiting as well. I usually visited once a week, typically for an hour or maybe two and over time a pattern emerged. We are creatures of habit. Patterns were like this, I make really good coffee. It's one of my special skills. You wanna be my friend, you wanna live in Seattle, you wanna come to brunch, I make great coffee. Bren is an accomplished baker and so we would make coffee, put it in her special china that we rescued from storage and take her some scones or maybe a pie. She really liked pie and we would sit and talk. We would talk about the weather, we would talk about work because Americans love to talk about work and we'd talk about anything we could think of in an attempt to engage her, to draw her out, to make her feel connected to us. But eventually, without fail, no matter what, we pull out our phones. We pull out our phones to show her photos. It was the best we could do to give her a sense of what our life was like, of what our bus ride looked like, about what our office looked like, about what our home looked like. And we'd get in the habit of actually taking more pictures just so we'd have something to share with her when we visited. Bren was also really good at talking with her, asking her questions to draw her out. Typically, these are yes, no questions because that's what Barbara could manage most of the time but I always respected that effort, that's hard. And after about an hour, we'd clean up, give her a hug, tell her we loved her, and say goodbye. In doing research for this talk, I came across so many stories like Brenna and Barbara's. This one stood out to me. Dr. Ranjana Shrivastava wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about a friend of theirs who also suffered a stroke, very similar to Barbara's. And after the stroke, Dr. Shrivastava started keeping a journal in which they described both the objective observation of their friend's decline and eventual death and the subjective experience of watching someone you care about die. This quote resonated with me because it felt immediately accessible. There were those times in Barbara's room that I couldn't handle the weight of the visit. I couldn't handle the frustration or the difficulty. And so I'd pull out my phone and I'd read Twitter for a couple of minutes. I think we've all been there, probably not quite so dramatically, but these are excellent escape devices. He also said this, it's something impossible to watch someone you care about slowly lose their connection to what makes them human. It's something else to watch someone you love go through that. And so this is what I wanna talk about. It seems unkind to leave and painful to stay. Strokes are cruel. They rob us of our essential humanity, our dignity as people. They take away our agency and control over our environment. But they also impose upon the people we love an impossible burden. On Barb's side is monotony, loss of agency, disconnection, and a widening gulf between her and the rest of the world. On Bryn's side is this unshakable feeling that she can't do enough for Barbara. That there's always something more she should be doing. A feeling frustration or boredom during a visit and then being really angry at herself for feeling that. It was a spiral. Sorry, the connecting emotion there is isolation, loneliness. On Barbara's side, because of this literal disconnection on Bryn's side for feeling like she's alone in managing this impossible situation. More research. This is the last research, I promise. Dr. Liat-Grenach, writing for the Huffington Post, talks a lot about loneliness. Now Dr. Grenach is a psychologist that studies the physiological effects of grief. And in this article, which I provided a bitly link, they recount a study that reviewed about 40 years worth of research on loneliness. It was called Loneliness in Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality. That's a title for you, published in March of 2015 in Perspectives in Psychological Medicine. Let's talk about this study a little bit. So this was a review of academic research on loneliness. And in controlling for all possible confounds, Dr. Grenach showed social isolation, measured social isolation corresponds to a 30-ish percent increase in your likelihood for mortality. Put more simply, you're much more likely to die if you're lonely. Die from what is one of those confounding factors for which you can control. Dr. Grenach recounts three really remarkable things about this study. One is the scope. As I said, this was a very, this was a review of a large body of work, 70 scientific publications covering about 3 million participants over a couple of decades, years and years of follow-up. The second is who is affected? Young people are more likely affected by this, more likely to have an increase in their mortality, they're likely mortality because of loneliness. Okay, but young is defined as 65 and under. So most of us. But this is the real meat of it. We found no differences between measures of objective and subjective social isolation. What does that mean? It means that feeling lonely, feeling isolated is as dangerous to your health as being objectively observed as lonely. Now I don't know how you objectively observe someone as lonely, that just sounds mean to me, but I've certainly felt lonely. I know what that feels like. And to know that there is this demonstrable increase in risk related to that, it left me feeling like I need to do something.  Brent fretted being away from Barbara. Yes, because of medical concerns. Is she healthy, is she okay? But more so because of these ideas of loneliness and isolation, losing what remained of herself over time. Grandmoms struggled to get through each day as well. And we began to feel this progressive heaviness in our visits, like we were in this purgatory waiting for the inevitable. I was frustrated because I can't fix this. I'm an engineer, I want to fix things, right? I wanna like document it, test it, fix it, and then publish that fix, so no one else has to go through this ever again. That's what I want to do, but I can't. All I can do, maybe just maybe, is make it a little bit better. I didn't know how, but I thought about it for a long time. And I had something, an observation that eventually became an idea, and I would like to take you through my thinking here because all my ideas start the same way. Imagine I'm at lunch, that's probably not hard to imagine. Imagine I'm having a taco at lunch, that's probably not hard to imagine. Now this taco is excellent, this taco is beautiful, this taco is perfect. This is like the prototypical taco by which all other tacos must be judged. I really wanna tell Bren about this taco. She'd be mad at me if I didn't tell her about this taco, like it's that good, what do I do? What do I do? This is the audience participation part, what do I do? Yeah, I pull out my phone, I take a picture, I digitize my taco, and through the magic of the internet I send it to Bren. And then a few seconds later, she is ecstatic that I have shared with her the perfect taco. That's me, that's us. That's how we do it in 2017. That's me and my family, we text. We don't Facebook, none of us have figured out how Snapchat works. We text. We're never gonna call each other. The fact that this makes phone calls is completely incidental, could be removed from the device and I wouldn't know. We text. That's great, that's how we talk. But how does that help Barbara? What if Barbara could get our texts, right? Like what if she could be a part of this? And that was it. That was it. What if there was a way for Barbara to be added to our con conversations? For her to consume this stream of information that we exchange every day. What if I could tag her in a conversation just like I would anybody else in the family? My mind began to race with possibilities and this probably, if you know me, this doesn't surprise you. I'm always gonna go way overboard. I'm dramatic. My first thought was, I'm gonna build an Elixir Phoenix app. I'm gonna pull it in the cloud and it will handle a million, billion concurrent connections. Because we have a really big family. There's three of us. Okay, so I'll use Electron and probably React because that's what you do. And I'll build something that could be compiled and installed on every platform. We'll put it on our toaster, it'll be great. I'll build a laser, right? I will build a laser so powerful that I will carve my taco text into the face of the moon. And then every time she looks outside at night, she'll be reminded of us. Bolstered by these thoughts, but also kind of intimidated. I do what I always do. I turn to you. The Ruby community. My people. I turn to friends. I turn to blog posts. I turn to conference talks to help me understand how to turn this idea into something actionable. And this is what you had to say. John Highland is an engineer at New Relic in Portland. He is a wonderful person. And this is the advice he will give you on just about anything. You wanna buy a car, just be boring.  What it means is be awesome by being boring. Use tools that you understand well that solve the boring problems so you can focus on bringing value to your users. That's marketing speak, bringing value to your users, but it really meant something to me this time. For the first time. Just be boring. He also says this, which I think about every single time I type Rails new. But it made sense, right? If I'm building something for Bryn's grandma, I may as well use my grandpa's framework, right? What he's saying here is that Rails is a known quantity. It's well understood. It's documented. It's stable. There's a big community out there that can help me if I get stuck. Makes sense. So I'm gonna use Ruby. I'm gonna use Rails. And that informed so many other choices for me, right? Like Rails is probably gonna output something restful. So I need something in terms of a UI device that can consume a restful interface. And that's probably a browser. Well, if it's a browser, I'm gonna build HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And that's cool. I really like those things. So it informed all these other choices. I'm gonna put it somewhere that has like a runtime that Rails can be a part of. So go get a digital ocean droplet, right? Cause that's what we do. I love you, Dio. That's cool. I felt good. I knew how I was gonna build it. What I didn't know is how to make a text message show up in a browser. I had seen it, right? Like I'd gotten all kinds of marketing text messages that had their origins in browsers, but I didn't know how to do it. But I knew someone who did. I met Greg at Steel City Ruby in its first year. Anybody ever go to a Steel City Ruby in Pittsburgh? All right, somebody right on. I helped organize that. I showed up to a couple meetings. Greg is a developer, an engineer, and a developer advocate at Twilio. They're a company who specializes in telecom integration with modern applications. And he has a really smart dog, really cute, really smart.  He did this so that the dog would turn off the lamp at night and he didn't have to get out of bed to do it. Brilliant. Less brilliant when the dog would turn the light on at 3 a.m. wanting a treat. So he said, what else can I do with this? I have a dog that knows how to step on a button. Well, what if I hook this button to our Arduino and our Arduino has a webcam and the webcam sends me a text. So now he has a dog that steps on a button to get a treat and he gets an MMS. And I thought if Greg can teach his dog to send text, he can probably teach me. And he could. As a really helpful article, it had the bones of what would eventually be my solution. He's a really nice guy. So now I had a framework. I knew what I was gonna do. I was gonna use tools I understood, focused on solving my problem. It turns out that MMS is just a data format and I'm an engineer and making data formats talk to each other is kinda what I do all day, every day. So the third piece of this I struggled with a little bit was, so how does this help grandma? I'm getting lost in this engineering hole. How does this help her? So I'm a front-end engineer. I did a user study. User studies are really fun anyway, but they're extra fun when they're somebody you love. Barbara had some challenges. She had extremely limited mobility. Not just the fact that her right side was largely paralyzed, but she had low dexterity with her remaining hand, so holding a device wasn't really gonna work. Short-term memory impairment, some dementia, made learning curves just impossibly steep. She was largely disconnected from the world around her. It was hard sometimes to get her to be interested in things or to hold her attention. And she had a lot of difficulty speaking, which how many people were thinking like a voice augmented UI, like a Alexa something or other, right? Like I thought about it. I thought like that would be, but it's right out the window here, right? There's a whole segment of the pop population for whom voice UIs will never be accessible. That's depressing. So what did Barbara have going for her? She had really good eyesight for her age. And better than mine, actually. I wore corrective lenses and she did not. That's great. And she also hated her television. And that was great. She hated network TV especially, and I don't know how much time you've spent in American hospitals, but there are so many TVs. And then it seems like every one of them is turned to a news channel. And that just sounds like making a bad situation so much worse. That last one is important because I was planning on replacing her television. Enhancing. I was planning on enhancing her television with this. Who knows what this is? Somebody's gotta know. What is it, man? Yeah, it's a Pi Zero, which is like the little cousin of the Raspberry Pi. It's a $5 computer. It's got a one gigahertz single core processor, 512 megs of RAM, two micro USB connections, a mini HDMI, $5. It's got more processing power than the laptop I took to college. They're amazing. You can do all kinds of stuff with them. And it turns out with a little bit of coercion, they'll happily run a browser. The new models, the Model Bs, actually have BLE and Wi-Fi right on board. So they're like ready. They're marketed for IoT stuff. And that made sense for me because I was building an IoT device. So my goal was to replace her network television with a constantly connected, self-updating message streaming service composed primarily of taco pictures. Here's how it works. This is a little washed out, but the arrows are really the most important part. We're gonna start with this blue arrow on the bottom left where it says phone. That's me. I'm gonna send an MMS to Twilio, a phone number I bought from Twilio. They're $1. Twilio's gonna receive that bundle of MMS data and restructure it as an HTTP post, which it's gonna post over to my web server. Hello, GMOM, that's the second marshmallow blob. That's running in DigitalOcean's cloud on one of their smallest itty-bitty-est droplets. And then once it gets that post, it's gonna restructure it into a JSON blob because transforming data formats is what I do all day. And stream it over a web socket to that pi zero, which I duct-tape to the back of her TV and it's gonna show her the text. Now, because it's a web socket, this red arrow, and it's two-way communication, so I can send a little note back to the web server, which will send a little note back to Twilio, which will send a little note back to my phone that says, hey, grandma, I've got your text.  That K, right? A little thumbs up, yeah. Here it is for realsies. This is the screen in her room, and again, sorry, it's so dark. This handsome couple on your left is Brent and I at an arcade in Oregon. And this is what it would do. Brent snapped this photo with her phone, said we went to an arcade and hit send, and it showed up in her room like this. Oh, I'm sorry, this is the second video. Gosh, she said something. So, Barbara's in my phone like anybody else. This is just the iOS Messages app. There's nothing special about this. I'm gonna type her a little note. I'm gonna say, hi, G-mom, at Seagull. Seagull is a Linux conference in Seattle. I gave this talk last month, telling your story. The kind of text that I would send her. And I just hit send. I'm a great hand model. And then very quickly, I get a 200 okay, because I'm a developer and I think in HTTP status codes. And then we go back to the screen and a couple of seconds later, there's the text. There's a couple of things going on here that are worth mentioning that go back to that user study. There was no photo in that text. It was an SMS versus an MMS. So the system knew how to handle both. And in the absence of an attached photo data, it showed this very hands on picture of me. So she would like have something to hold on to about who was talking to her. I read a lot about typography and looked at different ways to make things more readable for her. And this is kind of where we landed. This is a font face called Charter. It's available for free. It's really high readability. It was created around the same time as Helvetica was and it was a really interesting history if typography is something you find interesting. Bryn did this really cool thing with her where she created things at different type sizes and held them around the room and got her to talk about what she could see and what she couldn't. And so that helped us tune the interface a little bit to her capabilities. A couple other interesting things about the system. It was a responsive layout, like responsive design, but not because we would be looking at it on any other kind of device, but because MMSs come in a variety of shapes. You can take tall pictures. You can take wide pictures. I really like taking square pictures because I'm difficult. And I had to build a system that knew how to display those and I just leaned on what I knew about responsive design to do it. The system was smart enough to reject Rando's. If you got grandma's phone number, you couldn't send her mean messages. There was an approved list and that was managed both at the Twilio level and at the web server level because I thought some people are malicious and know how to format a post request, right? So there was an accepted sender list and that was all checked before anything got streamed over the web socket. Web sockets are amazing. They might get displaced by server-scent events. I kinda hope they don't because especially in Rails 5, Action Cable made it so approachable to building with Web sockets. Add a little vanilla JS object sitting on the front that responded to those messages and knew how and then injected the new message into a queue and a separate object built from that. It was nice. It was really nice. In terms of things I learned how to do HTTP2, right? Like built a little IngenX web config that did HTTP2. It's really hard. You have to go to the config file, find where it says HTTP and put a two after it. That's about 80% of the work to switch to HTTP2 so if you haven't, please look into it. It makes everything better. Everything better. I also compiled or created my own SSL certificates using Let's Encrypt and the instructions and documentation available from them were really great. So I've got this little DO droplet that generates fresh certificates every three months and installs them and then sends me an email and lets me know that it's okay. Just in case someone's snooping on my text that are publicly available. It's amazingly stable with my client connection of one. The thing that would disconnect that Web socket as it turns out after observing for a while was her DHCP lease expiring. So wrote a cron job to reboot the pie once a day so she would get a fresh DHCP lease. But really the most important part is that it was tuned to her capabilities, right? Like we built that interface for her and it worked. So this little system, I gotta go faster I'm almost out of time. This little system from Twilio, a phone number, a Rails API, 50 lines of JavaScript, made things better. It made things better for Barbara. It made things better for us. It kept her in the forefront of our thoughts, gave us a way to feel connected we didn't have before. And when we were thinking of her, maybe there was a cute dog on the bus, maybe we were just stressed out at work. Bryn could send her something, I could send her something. And we'd get that little 200 okay and feel like maybe we made her day a little bit better. This is probably confirmation bias, but I believe that her cognition improved a little bit after receiving the device. It was her Christmas gift this past year, which means she got it in January because it's software. And she was excited. It took a little bit for us to demonstrate what was going on. This is the first photo we took. My arm, I'm sticking my arm out. We took a selfie, I sent it to her. Hi, Grandma, we love you. And when that photo popped up on her screen, the look on her face was, oh, she was happy. In her pre-stroke life, she loved little notes. She was the one that would always put a little note in your lunchbox, send you something when she was thinking about you. And this was like rekindling, reconnecting to that past. It's so much better than network television. So much better. Okay, let's wrap up. In May of this year, Barbara suffered another series of strokes. We were with her both when the stroke occurred and when she passed, about a week later. And she left behind this legacy of determination, kindness, grit, all traits that her granddaughter embodies. But now that she's gone, I don't know what to do with this thing. I mean, obviously I wrote a talk about it, but it's obsolete, right? Like so many other things I've made, it's deprecated. And that's okay. It's still the best thing I've ever shipped. In 15 years of professionally making software, like this is the best thing I've ever shipped. I'm hoping that maybe just maybe I can encourage you to do something similar. So I have a couple of closing thoughts. Right now, I guarantee it, someone you love has a problem you can help with. Maybe you can't solve it. Maybe it can't be solved, but it can definitely be soothed. You can make it better. We are uniquely positioned in time and space to do something about it. Some of us, I have no doubt, will solve huge population-threatening, world-changing problems. I have no doubt. Most of us will create a lot of financial value for others. There's an honor in that. Not enough of us will take a step back and build small things that make life better for people they love. And I want you to. Not everything needs to be a product. In fact, I don't think, I think most things shouldn't be a product. There is no ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism. And I love that I get to stand on a stage and say that. But we all gotta eat. That said, not everything needs to be a product. Worry less about whether your idea, your side project, your little love letter can be productized. I'll admit I was really surprised. I couldn't find something on the market that did this. I found some Wi-Fi-enabled photo frames, but nothing that gave us that sense of connection we crave, nothing that gave us a remote way to alter the contents of what the screen was showing. So I had to build it. When I tell people about this project, a really common response is you should kickstart that. Kickstart what? I still don't know. Being nice to your grandmother, you can't kickstart that. But if I had thought about building a product first, I never would have shipped anything. And if I had shipped something, it would not have been what she needed. It would not have been tuned for her. We're all individuals and not everything needs to be made generic. The nursing staff at Grandma's home were amazing. And we could learn a lot from people doing that work. They give so much of themselves to protect and bolster whatever humanity and agency their residents have. I didn't know how to weave that into the talk, but it's worth pointing out. There were a constant presence in her life and we're there with her when we couldn't be. And I'm extremely grateful. At some point, most of us are gonna face this kind of adversity. Perhaps it'll be us that has our agency removed. Perhaps it'll be someone we love, but we're all gonna need someone to step in for us. Do whatever you can to give relevance and dignity to the people in your life. Thank you. Oh, everything's open source, by the way, including the InginX config and all the articles I used about working with SSL and making digital ocean work with all of it. So I've used that InginX config and other projects. I'm really happy with it, so it's all there. Oh, that's a great question. The question was, what was on the screen between texts? So I forgot to mention this, we had a queue of messages and so it would cycle through the queue and we did a lot of UX study on what was the appropriate display rate for that and how many messages should be in the queue. And this is kind of dark, but some of her memory impairment helped here because messages were often fresh to her, especially if she had napped or slept. Like a message might be new again. And so we originally settled on about 40 messages, typically representing a week or so and about a minute each. It was, the question was like, did it support group texts? Could we CC her? It was technically possible, but I never figured out a good way to display a threaded message. Given that the device had to be so passive in terms of its consumption, we were really worried about overloading it with information. So I would love to solve that problem, but I don't know who else this project's for. Thank you so much.