Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I'm, Tim Sanford, is my honor to welcome the Lily Awards, once again, to Playwrights' Horizons. It feels really great that even though this award, which is the only really feel good award of this season, that you may have outgrown us, but you're still here. And you're going to come to our warm embrace every year as long as you want to be here. So let me introduce our host for the evening, I think, at Julia and Wendell. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Marsha Norman and Julia. Tonight, the Lilies are celebrating partnerships, friends who have worked together for years, like us. We are also here to announce that the Lily Awards Foundation is partnering with Space at Ryder Farm, Williamstown and Sundance, all of whom are working to make their programs more family-friendly, places where artists with kids are not excluded for any reason, financial or otherwise, beautiful places where artists and children can thrive. We have also begun a new partnership with Samuel French to honor a theater every year that has achieved parity. Also here to celebrate and announce the Count, a profound study initiated by Julia and conducted by the Lily Awards and the Dramatist Guild. We have counted all the productions in the American theaters over the past three years. We know which theaters are producing the work of women and which are not. And in July, we are going to name, name, but here's a happy spoiler alert. Thanks to the efforts of the Lilies and the Kilroyes and everybody working for parity in the American theater, we have moved this parity needle forward 10% since 2001. Tonight's band is part of the all-female jazz band Diva. We had intended to join with them to protest the 30 years of the all-male band Jazz at Lincoln Center. But just last week, Lincoln Center put out a statement saying that they had heard the call and they were finally instituting blind auditions. This has the Tony party to get to, and the rest of us have to get to the West Bank. So let's get this party started. Please welcome to the stage our MC for tonight, Lisa Fros. Each time I see a little girl of five or six or seven, I can't resist a joyous urge to smile and say, thank heaven for little girls. For little girls, get bigger and write plays. Plays, people, we write plays. Thank heaven for little girls. We grow up and also direct plays, design plays, produce plays, star in play, stage manage plays, compose music for plays and musicals, and, hello, we build motherfucking sets in the most delightful ways.  Thank heaven for little girls. We are gathered here to set aside that antiquated view that plays are just what little boys do. Welcome to Lily's Folly. I'm Jean Rosenthal, and I invented the art of lighting design. I'm not kidding, it didn't exist before me. Shows I designed include West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Cabaret, just to name a few. I'm Margo Jones. I co-directed the original production of The Glass Menagerie and founded the theater that launched America's regional theater movement. I'm Aleen Bernstein, a leading set and costume designer of the first half of the 20th century, and first woman admitted to the United Scenic Artists Union where I was sworn in as Brother Bernstein. Nell Nugent, I'm Liz McCann. As McCann Nugent, we dominated Broadway for a decade, winning five Tonys in five straight years. Good job. I am Susan Glassbell, one of the most celebrated playwrights of my generation, winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize and founder of the Provincetown Players, where I discovered Eugene O'Neill. British critics consider me a better writer. Any idea who wrote six commercial blockbuster hits for Broadway, including Gentleman Prefer Blancs, Gigi, and The Social Register? That would be me, Anita Loose. Things I did. Let's just say almost everything significant that ever happened off Broadway was either started or influenced. Tension must be paid to these great, goes to one of the greatest of the great ladies of the theater, Ms. Chita Rivera, and presenting her with Lili Award, four-time Tony Award winner, and a worshiper of great ladies, Terrence- Really a tough act to follow, wow.  It's a classic theater story. In 1954, Chita Rivera went with a friend to audition for the touring company of Call Me Madam, and ended up winning the role for herself. From there she went to Can Can and Guys and Dolls. If there was a crack dancing ensemble, she was in it. But then, on September 26, 1957, she created the role of Anita in West Side Story and became a star. This is embarrassing. There is no star like Chita. She's received the Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She won her first Tony for The Rink, and she is nominated for a third this Sunday for her masterclass of a performance in The Visit. Thanks to you, Terrence. Now, this part's a little more personal, so I want to look at you while I say it. I try to read it too, because I'm a terrible actor, and I can't remember what I wrote. Chita, thank you for teaching me that great acting is something done with the entire body, not just speaking the playwright's lines. And thank you for always setting the moral bar of excellence in theater. Discipline, respect for your scene partner, unending good humor, and above all, hard work. A bar so high that it's always there to challenge and inspire us, including the playwright.  It takes a life to become a legend.  And for the gift of that life, the first ever legendary Lily Award goes to Chita Rivera. But I get to hit it on your neck. Wow. I'm glad I hung around this long. And it's a long time, even though it doesn't feel like it, but I have had an absolutely blessed life. I've hung around with the best people. I've met and worked with the best people. Two of them are sitting on the stage right now. Graciela is my soul sister. Absolutely my soul sister. And Terrence, I don't think I've said an original word since I met you. Everything that comes out of my mouth is Terrence's. And I sing candor, and it's just a blessed life. And the visit is just something that I never, even though it was 14 years getting here, I never ever expected for it to be the piece that it is at the Lyceum Theater right now. Now, I wrote something and I'd like to read it. I prefer speaking from my heart, but this is from my heart on the paper. Thankfully, and this is so good. Times have changed since the great Lillian Hellman and other women achieve have barged through doors marked men only. Today, we have a sewing bee of women, not only in the arts, but also politics, medicine, and sports. They do not plead to be heard, but demand to be heard. Their persistence obviously pays off, judging from the awards received for their efforts. The Lillian Awards is to be commended for celebrating these contributions. For me to receive the legendary Lillian Award is an honor to be cherished. And I shall cherish it for the rest of my life, which I hope is another 81 years. Do you believe that? I don't believe it. There's nothing we can't do, gals. There's nothing we can't do. And everything still works, so all you have to do in the morning is just wake up, pick it up and put it down, and you've got plenty of time left. So all I can say now is let's go grab a beer and watch the Yankees. Let's see, ow. It's not the same for everybody. Mr. Rivera, it's just not the same. I want to say that for that opening number, I was very excited to use this top hat that I stole from the costume shop in my college 30 years ago and was saving apparently for tonight. And I just noticed right before the show started that it says inside, Mr. Rivera. So I believe we might be married. I would like to thank our Follies Girls in the opening number, Amanda Green, Charlene Woodard, Heidi Schreck and Issa Davis. Also, Georgia Stitt, who arranged that number, Lee Silverman, who staged it. This amazing band who played it. And the Ziegfeld Club and Laurie Sanderson, who lent, not only lent those incredible headdresses, their vintage headdresses from the actual Ziegfeld Follies, and they lent them from their collection. But this year, they have launched a new award, the Billy Burke Ziegfeld Award for Female Composers. Next, Lily, is going to be presented by the collaborator of this recipient. We are celebrating tonight a cellist and a composer who, since the 1970s, has brought jazz to the American theater. One of her most thrilling pieces was Running Man, which she wrote with Linda Twine and the celebrated poet Cornelius Edie. So please, to present this award, welcome Cornelius Edie to the stage. Deidra Murray has lived a life of pure passion. Come on.  I hope she isn't leaving. Deidra Murray has lived a life of pure passion and devotion to the cello and jazz. She has composed without ceasing and has performed all over the world, establishing the cello as an instrument for jazz and new world music. This is not a life that has put her in the spotlight, which she would probably hate anyway. But it puts her in our spotlight tonight. A brilliant woman at work every day. At the Whitney, in Holland, in Harlem, in Santa Fe, with the Manhattan Brass Quintet at the Walker Art Museum in Santa Fe, at the Japan Society in Switzerland at Bard College. Whenever they care about jazz, Deidra Murray has been there, writing for performers who love her and performing for audiences who are eager to hear what she hears. I was fortunate enough to write three pieces with her. One of them, Running Man, was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. This has been and also has been, personally, one of the grandest adventures in my life. One of the things that I think I hear over here sometimes is that African-American males and women don't always get along. You can't prove it by me. So, for her life, producing work of rigor and beauty for the path she has cleared for young women composers, wherever they are, for the terrors she has faced and the triumphs she has achieved. The Lely Award for Distinguished Musical Composition goes to my friend, Deidra Murray. Surprise, this is like crazy. It's funny when I was sitting here with my husband and I almost didn't come today, it was like, I'm serious. I was listening to the ladies play and I was saying, wow, they really sound great. Really, and you know, it's really weird. I spent my whole life as a musician in jazz and I remember many years ago I was a curator at this place called PS 122 and I saw theater for the first time and I said to myself, I think I could do that. And so, it's been really a long journey and I'm just really kind of surprised. Thank you so much and thank you, what a surprise. Thank you, thank you.  Luckily this year, once again, we did it. So please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage, Jordan Roth. One of the great perks of my gig is getting to give an award to my mother. And let it be known that Marcia Norman reported that I said yes faster than any other presenter as it should be. Among her 90 productions over almost 30 years, my mother has produced a record seven Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. Count them, seven. And she has been fiercely devoted to every single one of them. From finding the peace, to nurturing the writer, to assembling the perfect team, to courting the investors, to bringing in the audience sometimes one by one by the hand. She comes from the whatever it takes school of producing. She has two musicals on Broadway right now, Kinky Boots, and it should have been you. And on any given night, you can find her knocking on dressing room doors offering a hug, a shoulder, an ear, or even a dress for the Tonys. She also comes from the mothering school of producing. I actually think she invented that one. She runs a theater complex downtown where she hosts small musicals for the next generation and big happenings of sensory delight, fully supporting others' rights to get splashed during their theater experience even as she stands off to the side in the dry zone. Among the many awards and grants she gives her annual Creative Spirit Award. And then there are the many things she receives. Honorary trustee of Lincoln Center Theater, one of Crane's 100 most influential women in business, twice, a New York living landmark, a Broadway association visionary leader, and enough lifetime achievement awards to fill many glorious lifetimes. But the Lily Awards don't give out awards for any reason other than that the winner totally rocks. And so she does. Darrell Roth, you make it. No wait, there's more. You make it happen. You make great plays, great musicals. You inspire people and you do it all looking totally chic. So, for keeping the American theater safe for playwrights, for making musicals that run and run, and for being such a producing pro, the Lily Award for ongoing achievement in an astonishing lifetime goes to the great Darrell Roth. The thing I do the best is make great sums. Thank you, sweetie. I appreciate your beautiful words and I appreciate this honor and I appreciate your being here. I know you have 17 other things that you have to do tonight, so it's great that you came out for mom. To Marsha, Julia, Teresa, Lisa, and everyone at the Lily Awards, I thank you. I'm very honored to be included in this occasion and I'm inspired by all of you in the room. I'm sorry I sound so stuffy now, he just makes me cry. Hold on, that's classy. Okay, okay. Anyway, one of the most fulfilling things about producing is having the opportunity to use my passion to affect people's lives by the work that I choose to present. I've always been inspired by stories that make people feel something and that can change minds and attitudes and have audiences leave the theater maybe a little bit smarter, a little bit more, enlightened, empowered, and hopefully encouraged to do something based on what they might have just seen and experienced in the theater. I also look for plays that shed light on women's stories, those that encourage my daughter and my granddaughter's generations to find their own strength, truth, confidence, and understanding. How I learned to drive, wit, proof, love loss in what I wore and currently it should have been you which has a wonderful message about family, about love, and about accepting oneself. That one thought, accepting oneself, for who you are is a theme that I now realize looking back has been woven through my career and in part I thank my son. So as I process lifetime achievement and what it means to me, I recall an interview in which Vera Wang said, survival is not a small thing. I feel close to failure every day and these words resonated so deeply with me, not to be morbid, but in our world of theater we live with that constant sense of possibility, the imminent failure. But what it all comes back to, I think for all of us, is the passion. It's not about failure, what defines that word anyway. It's about how much you love what you do. We all live with that sense of potential risk, the fear, the what if, but if we keep going for the love of the thing itself, then that's it. I love theater, I love stories, I have great admiration for writers and creative people and the possibilities of what can be when we all work together. I'm grateful for this award and I appreciate that it might be given to me for perseverance or tenacity or loving what I do and if so, I graciously accept on those terms. It's even more special for me to share the ceremony with such remarkable women who have given so much of their talent and their gifts. I look forward to the amazing work I know they will continue to create. Onward and thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure, I welcome to the stage a woman who is a distinguished Lily Award winner herself, a champion of the work of women and for over 500 years, the artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club. Please welcome Lynn Meadow. Almost ended just there on that entrance. God, that would have been dramatic. You have 500 years. Well, for 499 of them, I've known Marcia Norman and maybe 450, Julia Jordan and Teresa and I just wanna say before I go on to present this, what this means to me personally and to all of us here, what you've done for women who toil in the theater and yearn to toil in the theater. This celebration is not like anything else and we all deserve it. Thank you so much for doing this. So this is great, 500 years, that's the theme. But it took me about a second after Joe Mantello gave me Lisa DeMors' new script that he was directing for Steppenwolf to decide to bring her beautiful play, Airline Highway, to MTC's Friedman Theater. If you haven't seen it, I really hope that you will go see it because there's nothing else like it on Broadway now. The moment I began to read this play, I was transported to New Orleans, to Airline Highway. This wondrous play saw me through a whole night in a neighborhood I never could have found on my own. It gave me a woman's life there, her neighbors, her friends, the community and the family that she created and then it took her life away. The play, like all celebrations that erupt in life spontaneously or not and are then gone. It's a treasure this play, like all things that we value but cannot pass along to another generation unless a writer, a great theater writer, puts them on paper and gives them to us in the theater. Lisa brought to life a work that will endure. It's a gorgeous, bluesy counterpoint sung by the residents of the Hummingbird Motel in a parking lot. It's a choir of 16 souls whose voices seldom get heard and are seldom seen on the stage. Lisa created that poetry and that music and I'm so proud they're singing every night on 47th Street and I'm really proud to present the Lillia Ward in playwriting to the brilliant Lisa D'Amour. Thank you so much, Lynn and Julia and Marcia and everyone who works to keep this amazing organization going. This is a true honor. Yesterday I was standing out in this vast meadow at Longwood Gardens just outside of Philadelphia with my collaborators, designer Mimi Lien and Katie Pearl who's a director, working on a giant site specific theater experiment and part of the play involves the audience sitting on a hill and watching this giant futuristic megaphone get lifted up a 60 foot tower and then plugged into the earth. And as I stood there kind of watching Katie direct actors on walkie-talkies and Mimi like out there in the distance working with rigors to make this epic feat happen, I thought, huh, we actually really know what we're doing. And then I also thought, one of my second thoughts I thought about tonight was like, how did I get here in the middle of this vast meadow? And I was really not sure who to thank tonight.  And what I decided to do was make a list. I work in traditional theater and then I work in the museum theater touring circuit and site specific theater. So I made a list of all of the heads of organizations that have made my work manifest. And it actually doesn't take that long to read. So I'm just gonna go ahead and read it because it's really interesting I think. And many of these people you'll know. So check this out. Oh, and this is kind of in the order of their appearance in my life over the course of like 20 years, okay. Julie Abert, Vicky Boone, Susan Zeter and David M. Cohen, Alyssa Adams, Carlo Cuesta, Polly Carl, Todd London, Kristen Martin, Susan Bernfield, Maria Stryer, Phillip Byther, Steve Boussa and Miriam Must, Cindy Garrig, Peter Brocius, Eleanor Savage, Moira Brennan, Loretta Greco and Lisa McNulty, Gene Wagner, Ruby Lerner, Deborah Simon, Tim Sanford, Ancha Ogle, Vallejo Gantor, Karen Farber, Deborah Singer, Aimee Hayes, Martha Lavey, Howard Shawwitz and Lynn Meadow. So if you listen to that list, 70% of those names are women. And the men who are on the list are all men who have been incredible champions of women's voices. So when I look at that list, I don't see a theater that is male dominated or that is driven by money or that is scrambling for an audience. I see a theater that's filled with bravery and risk and vitality and that's looking to the next frontier. So it was really incredible. And I know that a lot of you know the names on those lists. And I feel like the theater that I am trying to make and trying to live in is actually here in this room. So I thank you so much for this award. And I think we should all have great hope for the future. And on that theme of the future to present the Leah Ryan Prize, please welcome the Lily's Director of Outreach, Kuzy Cram. Hello. So my friend, Leah Ryan was an award winning playwright, an essayist, a gifted teacher and a writer of post-modern greeting cards. She was smart and she was cool and she was funny and she was a true woman of letters. Before her death from leukemia in 2008, Leah had not yet achieved everything that she wanted to as an artist. And when I spent time with her in her last weeks, one of the things she was most concerned about was all the writing that she hadn't gotten to yet. After her death, her family and friends created the Leah Ryan Prize to honor her memory and to encourage an emerging female playwright to keep writing at all costs. And for those of you out there who are feeling perpetually emerging or submerged in rejection, I encourage you to write your plays no matter what. Our time here is short but good stories are infinite. And I feel like we need some more infinite stories by women in the world. So, and as per Leah's specific request, the fund is expanding its mission this year and offering a 5,000 grant called the Vladimir named after her IV to a writer facing a serious illness through a partnership with the Authors League Fund. Leah was an incredibly generous person. She was very generous and kind and I feel like we should follow her example in that way too.  So, on behalf of Bukela Bru, can you come here?  So, on behalf of the board of the prize, I would like to introduce you to the wildly talented Bukela Bru. She is the winner of this year's 2015 Leah Ryan Prize for her astounding play. It is so good. It's called Miller Mississippi.  Well, if they say that, I really, really suggest you point them to Bu's play. It is a searing and honest play which examines the violent legacy of slavery and racism in the South in a family over a 30 year period. This play is so timely and important and I just really want someone to produce it because I personally want to see it. And I feel like there's a lot of producers in the room. So, I haven't, you know, this is good. We're gonna do a really starry reading tomorrow at 7 p.m. at primary stages as part of it. And Bu, I have a check for you which I left at home, but I'm gonna give that to you too. And Bu, we're so, so excited that you're the winner this year and it couldn't be for a more wonderful person and a more wonderful play. Thank you so, so much. I am beyond honored to receive such a special, special award. And thank you especially to the Leah Ryan board for women writers. I am a playwriting fellow at Juilliard and Leah was as well. And through Marcia Norman and through Chris Durang, I've had the privilege to learn about Leah's spirit and wit and talent and of course of her strength. Every single opportunity that I have had in my writing career has come from the support of women. Every single one of them. I was thinking about it today and it's accurate. Women are the reason I started writing and women are the reason I'm gonna continue writing. When I was studying acting in college, I played Arlene in Marcia Norman's beautiful play Getting Out. And as part of my actor's homework, I researched Marcia and her body of work and I became enamored and a little obsessed. And now as my friend, and as my teacher, I can honestly say that Marcia has gone above and beyond my expectations, the expectations of an 18 year old girl's crush, which is huge because 18 year old girls' crushes are like no joke. And this year when I brought in this play to Juilliard and before we read it out loud, I was spazzing and I was just going on and on about how much I hate myself and all this kind of stuff. And I said, I'm sorry I'm being so weird, I'm just really scared. And Marcia looked at me and she said, weird is good, scared is good, let's read it. And we read it and with Marcia's support, I'm a lot less scared of it. Still really weird, but she says good, so it's okay. Okay, one last thing. My mother woke up at 3 a.m. this morning to fly for Mississippi to be here right now. And my mother has flown from Mississippi to New York every single time any of my work is done. And my mother who is Southern born and bred did not flinch when I told her I wanted to move to New York and be in the theater. And a couple of years ago I was really sad and I called her and I was like, I think I'm just gonna throw in the towel and move to Mississippi and open a yoga studio and she said, she said no, no ma'am. She said, I did not raise you to quit. And I wanna say to all of you who are many of my dear friends and my teachers and my mentors and mothers and daughters and sisters, thank you all for raising me.  And Leah, I won't quit. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you so, so, so much. Thank you. And now we'll Shaquina Nefek come to the podium please. The 2004 met Arthur and stage door. She was like no one I'd ever met be just the beginning. Producer, writer, performer, director. She's got the best of taste, you know if you've met her. She's certainly not scared to offend her stage. Damn. Shaquina is a many splendored thing. Shaquina is a many splendored thing.  Shaquina is a many fender thing. Oh, Shaquina is a many splendored thing. I messed up the words but what happened? And then there was her vagina. Remember that one time, yeah. Kickstarted your vagina. And somehow found the time to give birth. To have an idea and build it. Eight thousands raised, you willed it. You said you saw a need and just filled it. But you're so much more to the rise of many splendored. Shaquina is a many splendored. Shaquina is a many splendored. That building and sustaining a loving and like-minded community is the greatest task and that our art is only as great as the person we become while doing it.  So we thought we'd give you a little rent money and the first billy award for working miracles here to $5,000, Shaquina and I. Shita Rivera. Long time ago, a mentor of mine said that at every great moment in your life you have to face the fear that you're gonna be exposed as a fraud. And last year when I sat right there and watched Rebecca win this award and I had just hit the deadline of raising the money for my vagina. She so eloquently put in song. I looked around this room and the stage of this incredible community of women making theater and music and I thought, this is the community that I wanna be a part of and the community I've wanted to be a part of my entire life and I would just wanna thank you and all the Lillie Award nominators for recognizing the work that I've been doing. Boo asked me when we sat down, like what is working miracles? I didn't know that was the name of my award. You make things up and it's great. Um, so Boo said, what is making miracles? What miracles do you make? And I said, well, I guess I've done a couple things in the last year that feel a little miraculous. And she said like what? I said, well, I started a theater company and got a vagina. And that's kind of a lot to do in a year. There are a million women I can thank. I'm gonna thank two and then I'm gonna say one more thing. First I wanna thank my mom who's here also flew out from across the country to be here. Trust me when I tell you it hasn't been easy. So thank you for being here and standing by me the whole time. And I also wanna thank someone who I don't think is here today, but Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company, who took a wild risk when she plucked me out of the queer Chicana performance art scene in LA and gave me the chance to produce and direct and write and perform and choreograph at her company. So big ups to Julie Boyd for that. And I just wanna say something like the elephant in the room about transgender representation in the American theater and in feminism overall. I think we've come to a really, really exciting moment in feminism where we're realizing that the definition of womanhood is so much broader than we might have once conceived it to be. And I encourage you all of you to reflect on the fact that while not every woman's experience is a transgender experience, but every trans woman's experience is a woman's experience. And to factor that in to your understanding of feminism. I also think that there's something really unique that trans feminism teaches us because to me it's not just about changing genders. I talked about in one woman's show, it's about transcending, just going beyond. And it's about crossing this border that feels very real and is very physical, but is ultimately imaginary. And something about trans feminism that I think is so cool is that it can teach us all to be better advocates for anyone who finds themselves challenging an imaginary line drawn in the sand that tells them they're less than someone else. And that goes way beyond gender. There are a lot of borders that people are working to cross and they deserve the right to do that. So, thank you. Really great. Okay, please welcome a wonderful playwright and actor and a friend of mine. Please welcome for the next, to present the next Lily Award, Heidi Shrek. I have to prepare the medal. Recognize Quincy Tyler Bernstein from her unforgettable performance in Lynn Nottage's play, Ruin. Or maybe you saw her in Sarah Rule's play about the vibrators or in the misanthrope at New York Theater Workshop. Maybe you know her from We Are Proud to Present by Jackie Civil's Jewelry or The Ladies and Mr. Burns by Anne Washburn and The Civilians. Or maybe you saw her incredible performance in my play, Grand Concourse, right here at Playwrights Horizons last year. Or maybe you saw her first performance on stage as she sang Sunrise Sunset to her grandparents in kindergarten. No, okay, well. Then you saw her at Williamstown or at the O'Neill or Sundance or Willie Mammoth or Berkeley Rep or the Mark Taper Forum. You get what I'm saying. Every playwright wants to work with Quincy Tyler Bernstein because QTB is an artist who inspires playwrights. And despite how much TV you've seen her in, she loves the theater best. Rosalyn Russell said that acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly. Quincy steps on stage with that force of bravery and vulnerability every time, without armor or tricks, challenging all of us to drop the mask. I call her Mighty Bernstein, The Truth Machine. We are all looking forward to the next time we see you on stage, Quincy. But tonight it is our incredible honor to give you the Lily Award in acting. This speech that I wrote seems so inadequate now. But I'm just gonna read it. This is so inspiring. It's such an honor to be on this stage with these incredible women in this theater, which is so very dear to me, surrounded by these incredible people for whom I have so much love and respect and admiration. Thank you to Julia and Marcia and Teresa and Lisa and everyone at the Lily Awards Foundation for this honor. Thank you, everyone who nominated me. I must admit, Julia, when she left me a somewhat urgent sounding voicemail several weeks ago, telling me that I needed to call her back right away. And I immediately assumed that an actress had dropped out of something and that you were calling me to do a reading, which I would have been happy to do, but I'm really happy to be here. I certainly wouldn't be standing here without my family. I wanna quit all of the time and they always encouraged me to keep going. My beautiful boyfriend, Rick, who's here with me. I just wanna say I wanna thank every single playwright I've ever worked with. Heidi, I love you. Truly from the bottom of my heart, you are the reason that I stand here in this moment. It is your genius and your vision and your faith in me that has landed me here. There are far too many playwrights to name, but Lynn Nottage and Anne Washburn and Lucas Nath and Kea Corthran and Jackie Zibley's Drury and Sarah Rule and David Achmi and Regina Taylor and Oni Faita Lampley, made you rest in peace. You all at some point in time have given me the opportunity to give breath and blood and life to your beautiful women and even Bart Simpson at one point in time. I've had the opportunity to play women much smarter and kinder and more patient and more generous and much stronger and far braver than I can ever hope to be in my own life. So I'm really lucky for those gifts. Thank you very much. I will treasure this. And not so fast, Heidi Shrek. I'd like to ask Stacy Midditch to come up on the stage, please. Hi. Hi, everybody. The Go Write a Play Award is just that. An award to a promising female playwright to go write a play. We need more good plays, especially plays by women telling the stories of women. Now in its third year, I am proud to report that we have an illustrious advisory council choosing the recipient, and our two past winners have had a productive year. Tanya Barfield, winner of the inaugural Go Write a Play Award, saw her play, Right Half Life, produced by the Women's Project this winter, directed by Lee Silverman. Anina Bieber, last year's winner, is putting the finishing touches on a draft of Suspending Disbelief, which is what she calls the play that I went and wrote. In addition to the $25,000 check that comes with the award, winners are entitled to a reading of their play at any stage of its development. They are also required to have lunch with me. At Orsa with the previous winners over the summer. The talk ranges from the challenges of writing and getting produced, to the challenges of raising kids and living in New York City while doing so, and whatever else you wanna talk about. This year it will be a table for four, and I'm excited to announce that the winner of the Go Write a Play Award is Heidi Schreck. I mean, obviously I didn't prepare speech, but I just wanna thank you. It's a huge honor, and I'm incredibly moved, and I can't wait to have lunch with you, and to write the play I'll do that too. But I just wanna take this moment actually to thank Maria Irene Fornes, who was the reason I started writing plays. And I know you're over there, and I just wanna say I love you. Okay. Next for yet another Unscheduled Award, I would like to invite to the stage Linda Chapman. What a great night. Really, what a fabulous night this is. I'm so happy to be here. Now, I've watched this special award go to any number of gentlemen over the last six years, five years, and many times I've said, well, why doesn't Jim Nicola get that award? He's a Miss Lily if I've ever seen one. Well, Jim, this is your year. Please, come on. Turn around. I'm gonna say a little bit about the award. For those of you who don't know, Miss Lily is given annually to the man in New York City Theater who's done the most that year to promote, celebrate, and produce the work of women. Oh, he broke the tiara. Jim hasn't just promoted women's work this year. He has without anybody, well, anybody nudging him or asking him to respect parody. He's done it all on his own. So he's some kind of a prototype man, right? Turns out that our record is 50-50, Jim. That's the whole, the whole, the whole career. So whatever the reason, however that came about, let's say we need more Jim Nicola's, please. Listen, Jim, I love you. We've been friends for over 25 years, colleagues for more than 20 years. What else can I say?  Well, I'm not someone who's accustomed to being up here. I'm much happier back there and cheering others on who do beautiful things every day. Wow, I think the first thing that comes to my mind like Linda said, this accomplishment we're being recognized for at the workshop is certainly to some degree a conscious action of trying to make the world a better place. But I think personally, internally, what comes to my mind is Cassandra, who when I first encountered her in college when I was reading my ancient Greek plays, something clicked for me. This is a teller of things that people don't want to hear and she's a woman. And some things rang for me, connected to my mother. So it internalized, and I think it has the voices of women, the perspective of women on the world's affairs that have been dominated by men for eons has always been powerful to me. So it has been only pleasure and truth in doing what I've gotten to do. And I have to say, I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet. So thank you for this wonderful thing. And my first official act being Miss Lily, if we might, is to make a Miss Lily. If we might do that, is that possible? Oh, yes, we might. Like Linda said, we have been friends and colleagues for many, many years and it has been really a remarkable collaboration. I can't think of another one like it that I know of. And all I can say is that the workshop, body of work, whatever it might be, would not be what it is without her. So thank you, Linda. I don't know what else to say. I think it's great. I know we all want to get this over with so we can go party. And, you know, I love this community. I love the theater. What else can I do? There's nothing else to be done. And I found the perfect partner in Jim. The presenter of our next Lily award is the amazing Antoni award-winning Lynn Arons. I'm terrified to give this award because I don't think it will be good enough for the recipient, but I will try. Graziella Danielle is not only a world-class choreographer and director, a 10-time Tony nominee and a member of the Hall of Fame, but she is a woman of the world. And I mean that in the truest sense. She was born in Argentina. She self-educated herself to dance. She left home, I think, 12 or 15 to go and dance in Paris and study and learn and grow. And in Paris, she fell madly, passionately in love, not with a guy, but with a musical called West Side Story. And she learned that there was something called storytelling in dance and in movement. And she was so fascinated that she hurried to New York, where she learned from the likes of Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Agnes DeMille. She absorbed this knowledge and all her passion and her joy was turned to storytelling. And over the past however many years, she has shared this amazing wealth of her own talents and all the things she has learned as a woman of the world. Being open to new ideas, original ideas, daring ideas, scary ideas, she goes for it all. And she gives it to us, the many collaborators that she has worked with who just want to work with her again and again and again. In fact, we all hate each other because we're jealous of Grazzi and of her time. And we just want her for ourselves. We all call her my Grazzi, but she's really my Grazzi. She, my husband made a card with large type. I'm not even using it. Giving you an idea of how often one wants to work with her, my partner sitting down here, Stephen Flaherty, and I have done six shows with her. And the very first Broadway show that we ever did was called Once on this Island. It was done on this site in the, whoa. I thought it was electrical wires, but it's worse. It's the lilies. We did Once on this Island right here before this was this glamorous, beautiful building that it is. It was a hovel. And it had a green room with a couch that I'll never forget, smelled like a wet dog, it was scary. And Grazzi and Stephen and I, I think this was in 1990, did a little show called Once on this Island here and fell madly in love with one another and just have vowed to work together as often as we possibly can over these years. The next show that we did with her was a little show called Ragtime, where her work was legendary, magnificent, beautiful choreography like I had never seen before. Just unbelievable. And most recently we did a little show called Cheetah Rivera, The Dancer's Life, which leads me to the theme of tonight, which is collaboration and partnership and people working together again and again who love one another. We love Grazzi so much. Grazzi loves Cheetah so much. Cheetah loves Grazzi and Grazzi loves me. And we love Terrence and we all, just keep on loving each other in this theatrical circle of collaboration and partnership with women, with men. I'm making this up. I'm so excited to be here for her. I love her so much. So, did I say enough? Yes. The Lily Award in choreography, but also in my opinion in true humanity and true grace and true woman of the world, Ness, goes to Graziella Danielle. And I will add one more thing. In the lobby, there's a little snippet of lyric on that wall where all these quotes from the shows are and it's a lyric from Once on this Island. And I think it applies to this one here. Life is why, hope is why, you are why. We tell the story. Thank you. Let me start by warming up. I say that I'm thrilled in receiving the Lily. It grossly understates what I really feel. Let me tell you why. I was brought up by three extraordinary women, my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt Lydia, my mother's sister. They inspired me to dream, to passionately love life and work and people and to always try to be the best of myself, a task which I still today find rather challenging. Thanks to them, I study in the theater to Cologne in Buenos Aires, just like Lynn. She knows my life better than I do actually. And thanks to them, I went to Europe to, you know, dancing ballet companies. So, West Side Story came over here. I was very, very lucky. Within two months, amazingly, I was dancing on Broadway. From that moment on to today, I have worked with and learned from great teachers, great choreographers, directors, dancers, actors, and most of all, from my very favorite woman in the theater, who adopted me as her sole sister, the one and only Cheetah. I, later on, when I started choreographing a director, I had the privilege to work with some of the most brilliant people. Where are you? Hi. In the theater, creative minds in the theater. So, my life has been extraordinary. So fulfilling professionally and personally with a loving husband. However, as it happens in life, I lost my three women. However, today, surrounded by the sisters, my sisters, in the arduous but magical work in the theater. I realize that you have given me a gift, which is I have the honor of receiving this award in the name of my three beloved muses, my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt, whom I know bless you and thank you as deeply as I do. God bless. I would like to introduce the presenter of the final Lilly Award, and it is me. But, before I do that, I have been asked to tell you that there is a donation envelope for the Lilly's in your program. I am going to tell you some reasons you might wanna donate to the Lilly's. I had somewhere in all my pieces of paper a clean version of this. I no longer have it, so I'm gonna do my best to explain to you to give, no, no, thank you. Thanks, that's great. Thank you, but thank you, not gonna help. But I am gonna tell you, as coherently as I can, my reasons why you might wanna support the Lilly Awards. Number one, the Lilly Awards are making common cause with women artists in other fields who are facing the exact same barriers to parody. Women in jazz, for instance. Women in architecture, you might remember a couple years ago how incredible it was when Denise Scott Brown was up here talking to us. That, those are incredible connections and they're building a movement in that way. The Lilly's is also creating models to show theaters and writing colonies how they might make their programs workable for writers who happen to have young children. Most importantly, the Lilly's is also connecting all the women in theater who are coming together to fight this fight, like, for instance, the fantastic Kilroy's. The Lilly's did a series of reading of Kilroy's plays this year. Most importantly, the Lilly's is finally moving the needle on parody. 10% might not sound like enough, but that percentage has not moved in years. It's finally moving thanks to the Count. The Count is the most effective tool we have ever had to finally sweep away the old wrong assumptions about why women don't get more opportunities in the theater. And Julia Jordan and all the women in the staff of the Lilly's and the Dramatist Guild have been doing the grinding work of compiling these eye-opening statistics that are finally moving that needle. And I'm gonna tell you my argument for why parody matters. Because I think sometimes we can't quite find the right arguments about parody even though we know we feel that it's the right thing. And that's because the argument for parody isn't actually about fairness because theater isn't about what's fair. We don't want to go to see a play just because it's someone's turn to write that play. We don't. We wanna see a play that will rock our socks. Thank you, we'll do something incredible to us. Yes, that's what we wanna see. We want opportunities in the theater to go to people who are most likely to create the world, the work that will set the audiences on fire. And how do we know who these people are? We do not. Nobody does. That is unknowable. But what we do know is that if almost all the plays are written from people who come from essentially the same perspective, that is not a recipe for theatrical dynamism. Is made out of difference. It's made when we set people of all different perspectives, all different characters spread across the stage in what my partner Madeline George has brilliantly described as a democracy of consciousness. The theater is not where we go to see ourselves, actually. If we want to see ourselves, we can stay home and look in the bathroom mirror. Theater is where we go to be with other people and to see other people who are different from us. Shows like Fund Home and Hamilton aren't lighting up audiences in spite of their non-mainstream perspectives. They're doing it because of their non-mainstream perspectives. That's why we support diversity. That's why we support parody because they make the theater better. Listen, producing is always a leap of faith. It's always a leap of faith and producing organizations always make choices that are based on all kinds of things like design requirements, scheduling, class, a cast size. Why don't we just add parody to that list of considerations? Why don't we just commit? Why, just commit to, we can do it in a five-year cycle so there's plenty of flexibility, but just do it because there's no good reason not to and there's a big reason in favor of it as Jim Nicola and Linda Chapman have shown us as Tim Sanford and Playwrights Horizons have shown us do it because it makes theater better. If you want to support an organization that's interested in that, you might want to send the lilies some money. Okay, now, our final award is the Playwright Awards. Goes to this goddess, this goddess of the theater, this gift to all playwrights. I know, as many of you know, that there are few things, there are few greater gifts you can have than having Didi O'Connell in your play. No. Didi received more nominations than anyone else has ever received, I believe, for this award. It does say that, yes, in the entire history of the awards. Didi O'Connell received more nominations than anyone else in the entire history of the awards. And why is that? Well, let me ask this question.  Raise your hand. How many people have ever seen Didi O'Connell in a reading? How many people, there's a third question here. How many people have ever seen it? How many people love Didi O'Connell? How about that? That, Didi, I give you the devoted service to playwrights award. That's check off. Check off, like, once we get it. I'm gonna talk really quickly and I'm gonna say everything I have to say but I'm gonna say it really fast because we can go. Thank you for this, from the bottom of my heart, getting the sweet and strong enforcement that this beautiful award embodies has made me think a lot about what I expected my life and work to feel like when I became the age that I am now. And I think, say, 30 years ago when I was considering it, I expected a lot less in terms of, than what I have gotten in terms of challenging, enriching roles to play and interesting, form-breaking, tough-minded, beautiful plays to play them in. And I really believe that this good stuff has happened to me because I have been lucky enough to be doing this work during an unprecedented renaissance in the work of women in the theater. I have been growing up during a creative explosion. I remember when it was rare to feel the weird shiver of recognition and understanding and access to feminine sensibilities in the theater and so seeing Joanne Acolytus' dress like an egg or Maria Irene Fornes' mud or Emily Mann's still life was a shock to the system to see the way Susan Lori Parks or Marlena Meyer or Connie Condon lay the words out on the page was a shock to the system to see a woman director was a shock. We are no longer so easily shocked, we expect to feel the impact of women on how stories are told, on who they are told about, on how we experience time, on how we learn lessons, on how it feels to be in our skin and maybe most of all on how we do this work at all. And that has been very good for me. And it is not just because of the work that I have been lucky enough to do by and with some pretty amazing women who many of whom are here right now, but also because many more men in the theater have been trained by women, have women as heroes and mentors and creative partners and the art form and all of us are enriched by that soup.  Lucky me. Come on, we'll see you at the party at the West Bank and we'll see you next year.


You may be wondering how to go about writing a speech. Now, writing a speech does have several components that go into it, and especially when it comes to exam writing, you need to get these components right, otherwise you're gonna lose marks. Now, what I thought would be helpful is to create a mind map, summarizing all of the components that go into speech writing, so that you can be really, really clear on what it takes to write a really top level answer when it comes to writing a speech in response to an argument or a question. Now, you might get in your questions for your exams a set statement such as climate change is not a big deal, so we're gonna use that as an example. And this question might ask, write a speech in which you argue for or against this view. Now, when it comes to putting together a speech, first of all, always remember that this is written for an audience. The intention is to address an audience. Now, this speech could be, for example, for parents that are in your school or for fellow students or indeed for an MP, for your local MP. Now, there are different ways to open your speech and I've put this here. And this depends, of course, on the audience that you are addressing. Now, if you're, for example, addressing a group of parents or a group of adults, you should always start off with, ladies and gentlemen, this is a really nice and generic opening for a group of people who are older and, of course, the formality of how you address them would be far more formal. However, less formal would be, for example, if this speech is intended for students. It shouldn't be informal, but perhaps a bit more conversational. It could also be a little bit more discussive rather than, for instance, if you're talking and addressing parents, so you would begin by saying, fellow students, because you are a student yourself. Also, for instance, if you are writing or rather you're writing a speech for your headmaster, headmistress, or someone in authority, you could begin with sir or madam name and surname. Or, of course, if you're writing a speech to be delivered to a member of parliament, you could start with honorable MP. And these are your openers depending on the audience. And, of course, do you remember, least formal would be if you're addressing fellow students. However, all these other people that you're addressing, the formality would be fairly high. Now, once you begin with this opening, you then begin with the first paragraph where you introduce the issue and you introduce your standpoint. So let's go back to our example of climate change is not a big deal, write a speech on whether you agree for or against this perspective. And let's argue that you disagree and you believe that actually climate change is a big deal and it's an important issue. So in your first paragraph, you would begin with, and I would suggest starting off with, there are some people who would say that the keywords, so let's say the keywords in this question would be climate change, not a big deal. So there are some people who would say that climate change is not a big deal, yet I would disagree. Then you restate the issue. Of course, you talk about why you disagree with this very briefly because this is just your opening, you're introducing this issue to your audience. And then you state your viewpoints or you disagree. Why do you disagree? Why do you think climate change is an issue or whatever keywords or whatever the statement is. And then you always make sure that consistently you have a direct address to your audience. To use pronouns such as you, such as we make your audience feel really included. Then after your first paragraph, in your second paragraph, you outline your first reason why you disagree or rather why you support your particular perspective or your particular side of the argument. So for example, going back to the example of climate change, the first reason is actually it's going to affect all of us.  This is affecting different parts of the world. Different countries are having very unseasonable weather. And that's an issue. So that could be the first issue and the first reason.  Now, of course, do remember that the question could be on anything. So the examiners do not expect you to be an expert on everything. You can make up the statistics. The reason why you were including these statistics is because you're showing an appreciation for the fact that when you are composing or creating an argument to make it more convincing for your audience, you want to use statistics to back up your argument. Make sure your statistics, of course, are realistic. Even if you're making it up to make it too crazy, don't say a thousand percent of people believe climate change is an issue. Make it more realistic. 75% of people who were polled in London believed climate change was a problem. And then, of course, you can also use hyperbole. If climate change, and if the climate change were to get worse, this would be a disaster for all of us. That is speaking and exaggeration. Then after your second paragraph, and your third paragraph, this is your second reason why you support your perspective. And then you can use rule of three. So, for example, rule of three means any three words that are somehow thematically linked. Ladies, gentlemen, and children, men, women, children, pots, plates, and pans, all of these are rules of three. They are words which are thematically linked. Now, you can use that as a way of persuading your audience. This is a persuasive device. And of course, another important persuasive device to use within your argument is the rhetorical question. Then after this third paragraph, in your fourth paragraph, you give your third reason for your perspective. And then you can also add an anecdote. Anecdote meaning you give a really relatable individual experience or an individual example. So, John Smith, who lives up the road for me, has been affected by this because of X, Y, Z. And then also, you can use repetition. Repeat the keywords in the question, make it more persuasive. However, given that this question is an argument, you need to show that you have an appreciation for balancing both sides of the argument. So obviously, in addition to having your three arguments where you give reason number one, two, and three for your perspective, you balance it with giving two counterarguments. This is two reasons why some people will disagree with you. And so I would say in paragraph five, you add your counterarguments one and two, and you give examples of why people will disagree with you. One way to introduce your counterarguments you can begin with, there's some people who would say that, blah, blah, blah. There's some people who disagree with me and they would argue that climate change actually is not a big deal because of blah, blah, blah. So I'm going back to that original example. And then of course you can give statistics to counter that and to support their perspective. University of Oxford found that people who lived in Hampshire actually believed climate change was not really a big deal and they've never been affected by climate change. That can be a statistic to use as part of your counterargument. And of course, you can also add a rhetorical question. However, after you show your counterarguments and after you show that you can appreciate other differing viewpoints from you, of course you end your final part of your speech in paragraph six by completing but refuting these counterpoints and saying why in spite of considering these counterarguments, you still stand with your viewpoints and you still believe your perspective is correct. Then of course, after you do so and after you refute these counterarguments and you summarize points number one, two and three, you then end. Now, this is a speech. So you need to show that you are ending by appreciating your audience's attention. So a good way to end this would be by saying, thank you for your attention. I hope you learned something new. So that's a really, really nice way to end your speech. So I hope this helped. This mind map will be available as a downloadable resource. So make sure you watch this video again, download this mind map and make notes as you go along. So thank you so much for listening.


Hi, good morning and welcome to today's products and focus as you'll see there The u.s. There is bouncing back higher now in the middle of two ranges neck potential resistance at 16 598 and potential support is at 16401 and today you do have Twitter and eBay reporting over in the US So there should be some interesting moves overnight if there is some unexpected Results in that sphere. So if I have a look at the UK 100 actually spiked a lot higher this morning I've been pushed back down A fair amount so far So this is looking a lot like a doji formation if this was going to continue in this fashion But potential support remains at 6 713 potential resistance at 60 774 Looking at Japan 2 to 5 because the dollar yen is is creeping up quite nicely. So you're seeing a lot of Well, it's obviously US dollar buying but I can see GBP and euro dollars actually showing a fair amount of buying as well So you see they were bounced there nicely of potential support at 14 2 1 9 This is Japan 2 to 5 the next potential support It's probably round about the tip of this candle here around about 14 6 54 And obviously the longer term resistance remains at 14 9 77 Looking at dollar yen in that instance You'll actually be able to see a move up towards that potential resistance at 102 spot 87 We're trading above both moving averages and the technical indicators are relatively neutral indicating there could be further room for expansion then we do have a series of data today, but UK GDP and European Consumer confidence, and then you've got US DCI data So there's a lot of fundamentals due out today, which could be quite impactful in the markets So if you have a look at Crudall with Texas, it's again in the middle of two ranges There's additional flow coming from Libya the second Proposal with the rebels in that area. They had some ports held there They're now allowing the flow of oil and oil tankers out there So there's a little bit of pressure on the fundamentals of Crudall But then of course you do have Ukraine continuing to kind of deteriorate that situation over there just now So potential support at 100 spot 61 potential resistance remains at 103 Looking at gold right now Gold has come off again bad day yesterday trading below pretty much bang on the support level But we're comfortably trading below the support level now, which is 12 95 So that brings open the next potential support at 12 67 If we fast forward then on to your dollar your dollar and cable a big shot in the army yesterday So your dollars having another attempt to break and close above 3863 on common from the ECB Well, as you can see there are real volatility yesterday session We're on the right side of it today But lots of volatility still potentially in the mix especially with that business and consumer confidence figured you at 10 a.m UK time every finish up with GBP USD again very similar lots of volatility and other doji for me graveyard doji formation right here We're having another attempt to break above it But we've not yet had a convincing break and close above 6820 for some time So again keep your eye neck on the calendar look at the chart form from updates from our global analyst team And make sure you make insights part of your layout and join me again tomorrow to find out what happened next


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Hey everyone, welcome to the call. So we have an agenda here today. We have a few orders of business before we get started. I believe Ryan is taking the minutes. He's doing a I mean yes. Let's log all of the board members that are in attendance to see if we have a quorum. Here on my site, we have me. I was looking around for both. None of the others are board members. Tiffany is still a board member, yes. And then on the Zoom, I can actually see the Zoom, but I have Steve, I see Jacob, I can see now Ryan, Jeff, Vessa. So I think we have quorum, a couple people missing. Mike is missing. And we lost Annie in the other slack. Hopefully transition to the new Zoom soon. My first order of business is we have to approve the minutes from the last board meeting. So we had the minutes from the last board meeting in September, which was in Vienna, and I will just share screen so you can see them. In that meeting, we talked about the bylaw changes and gave an operational update. I'm sure you'll kind of remember that one. We also said goodbye to Tiffany and Vessa and Jeff and thank them for all their many years of service on the board. Those are some of the highlights that came from that meeting. Awesome, thank you. Any questions on the minutes or any corrections or annotations people want to make? Just to clarify for the sake of my minute keeping right now, yeah, though we said so well to them, we didn't actually, they don't actually rotate it off yet, correct? That's correct. Yes, okay. We'll rotate off until new people are voted on. Yes, all right. Okay. So the longer we take on that process, the happier our All right, so if there's no other questions or corrections, I would be good to get a motion. Is it Tiffany? Anyone second? I second. I got to raise my hand today. I'm actually writing, I was writing Jacob seconded as you, like even before you raised your hand, I feel like I compelled you to do that. I don't know if somebody's raising their hand, I can't see you. So please use words. Let's maybe go around to room and do roll call. It's maybe a little bit easier to say your name and then gay or nay. Tiffany. Steve's yay. Brian. Yay. Samir's yay. Shyam Lae. Therese, yay. I was there though for about five minutes, but there's no decisions, so okay. Jeff, are we voting? I'm sorry, I dropped off for a minute. We're voting on approving the minutes. Okay, I approve. Cool. Great. Okay. All right, second item on the agenda is some changes that we need to make to the by-laws. We actually talked about this in Vienna, as you may recall. In Vienna, we announced that I would remain on the board, but that I would no longer chair the board meetings that we hope to add Adam Goodman as the chairman of the board. And so in order to make that happen, we need to change the minutes. We don't officially have a chairman position as part of our board, plus as we talked about, we do pay Adam some advisory fees. So we also need to accommodate for that in by-laws. So it's really centered around making it possible for us to add Adam Goodman to the board as an interim chair, I should say, as we look for a more permanent solution in the long term. In addition to that, we took advantage of the opportunity to do some other housekeeping of our by-laws, like we added things like we meet using Zoom versus by phone, and some other smaller changes. These by-law changes have been circulated to all of the board members, so I hope you had a chance to look at them in advance. So yeah, unless there is questions, I suggest we move to a vote. Want to motion that? Sure. We approve the by-law changes. Is that Annie? That is Tiffany. Tiffany again. All second. All right. Well, so let's- That was Jeff? That was Jeff, yep. Let's say, you know, let's vote to approve the by-law changes, and let's do the same roll call thing. Oh, that's okay. Tiffany, aye. Jeff, aye. Steve, aye. Grace, aye. Shyam, aye. Ryan, aye. Nobody missing? I said aye. Checkerwood's, aye. Yeah, I think everybody would have seen it. Awesome. That's approved. Thank you. Exciting. All right. That's one step closer to getting Adam on the board. All right. We have another item on the agenda, another vote. We need to or we'd like to vote on extending the term effectively, or the expiration date, I guess, of the community at large members. And what we would like to do is we would like to move those dates from January to November for their second year. So the background for this is the following. So as you know, we have board members that are, you know, appointed or elected to the nominating community, and then we have community that are elected by the community.  The end dates of these terms are not aligned, which makes a little bit tricky. And so we would really just like to align those so that people- their people's second terms expire on the same day or in the same month. And so that just streamlines our process. And it's really, there's really nothing more to that, to be honest. But what it means is that we need to vote today to extend Shamala's at large position to expire in November of 2018, rather than in January of 2018. And that we need to vote for Ryan's at large position to expire also in November but of 2019 rather than January of 2019. All right. Is there any questions about that? No? All right then, let's look right to move to vote on this. Sorry, just one point of clarification too. Just both candidates did get an advance notice of that and did say they would be interested just in case anyone feels like they're voting for someone else's fate who's sitting here watching and they haven't. They are not a sort of it's okay with them is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I guess maybe we need to vote in two votes or do you want to like Ryan and Shamala will excuse himself from the vote? Yeah, so I think it's a little bit better, right? So first let's vote on Shamala and that's extending very quickly from January 2018 to November 2018. So let's do Shamala first. Tiffany moved. Let's do the roll file again. Samir, aye. Steve, aye. Plus, aye. Jeff, aye. Chris, aye. Jacob, aye. Annie, aye. Welcome. Yes. All right. I believe that's approved. Thank you everyone. Now let's do the same for Ryan except we're talking 2019 instead of 2018. So we're extending Ryan's expiration date from January 2019 to November 2019 and that's a bit of a motion. Tiffany moved. It's tradition. Seconded. All right, awesome. Let's do the same roll call. Chris, aye. Samir, aye. Steve, aye. No mess, aye. Jeff, aye. Annie, aye. And Jacob, aye. I think that was everybody. So that means that's all in favor and approved. Thank you very much. Next, I'd like to hand it off to Megan for the operational update. All right. So let me just move a few things around. Awesome. Okay. So since it's almost the end of the year, I do a high level of 2017 in a review and talk about our 2018 themes that you'll hear more about in the new year. And then also I have, we have two new hires I like to introduce. And then I'd like to just talk about some things coming up, DrupalCon Nashville and Drupal Europe and Drupal.org. So this is our amazing team, really so proud and thankful for our staff and what a great job they've done this year. We had a theme this year about building a bridge to the future with goals focused on strengthening Drupal Association sustainability and helping to grow adoption through our channels, Drupal.org and DrupalCon and also improving Drupal.org tooling in the processes that support the building community. And just some quick highlights in terms of sustainability. We have a net income margin goal, basically like our profitability at the end of the year of 10%. And we are tracking to make that goal. We've done a great job budgeting conservatively and working really hard to exceed those goals. And it's really paying off. And we also went through our financial audit when we passed with very high marks, which was great. Big thanks to our operations team for that. In terms of growing adoption, we've done a lot of work on that side, which I think is a good benchmark to put us in an even better position next year. So at DrupalCon Nashville, for example, we started to really highlight more case studies, whether they were technical case studies or business case studies, or they focused on many different verticals. It really starts showing the power of Drupal. And then we also started creating the industry pages that starts telling that story more to the evaluator that's coming to Drupal.org. And we've been doing a lot of experimenting with some really great partners that have provided content and sponsored the pages. And we're learning a lot from this effort and starting to evolve this program as well. One of the things that's been interesting is just adding lead forms to different case studies associated with those industry pages and also learning who's coming to the site and looking for information. So that's been an interesting teacher. That's not just about growing leads, but learning about our potential customer base. On the tooling side, the team has just done an amazing job. We've improved project updates, project application process, sorry. We've made it easier to find things for issues with friendlier URLs. And we've evolved the contribution credit system giving us much more insight into what's happening with our community and rewarding people for time, talent, and treasure, as Tiffany likes to say. But there's so many things that we've done this year as staff. I'm just always so amazed with, but what's more important is the impact it has on the community. And we're starting to track different numbers. And it's just amazing to see how many people are building with us, working with our tools, 60,000 Drupal CI tests in 2017 alone for core, and over 200,000 Drupal CI tests for contrib. I mean, these numbers are really impressive about who's working with us. And then also in terms of how many people are coming together to learn and contribute together in real life with us. You know, our Drupal cons were really successful with about 5,000 people coming together. So many sponsors supporting us. It's amazing when you see sprint rooms filled with almost 500 people and what they're doing together. And then, of course, there's, these are opportunities to bring in new community members, having almost a thousand new like first time attendees at Baltimore was really exciting. But even I think I should say that what I'm also really proud of is that we have a new diversity initiative when we are now measuring the number of underrepresented groups who are participating in the speakers. And so we have been putting more effort into that and you'll continue to see that. And then, of course, adopting Drupal with us, you know, our team has been supporting 20 million unique visitors annually to Drupal.org. That's not a small number for our small team of four or five engineers and, you know, 350,000 visitors a month are coming to the front page. And that's who we're really starting to study and understand and push them to the industry pages into the marketplace. And so now these numbers showing just the level of engagement and we're just really excited that the programs and the resources that we provide are providing these kinds of community impacts. We also want to really thank all of those individuals and companies who are supporting the association, whether it is helping to fund our grants or Drupal.org through the supporter program or just participating in the community elections this year. Having 1200 community members care about who's on our board really matters and we hope to see that number grow over time. And so just want to say a big thank you for everything that we could all do together this year as a community. And next year we have some themes in 2018. We just want to call out so you can see where we're putting our focus. We want to continue focusing on growing adoption in our channels. As Dries pointed out in his recent Dries note in Vienna, we'll focus on ambitious digital experiences as well as headless. We also want to help grow adoption by supporting the initiatives that make the product even stronger and reducing any adoption friction areas. We want to support community health. We recognize the community has many different personas, many different stakeholders, developers, to content editors, to the marketeers, to the decision makers. It's just so much more encompassing than what we've been serving in the past and we'd like to kind of step into that a lot more in 2018 and start serving all of the stakeholders in our community. We also want to make sure as you're working together that you have the proper governance support that you need. And so we have seen the blog post that the governance committee put out recently and we want to make sure that we are very focused on supporting the improvements around community governance where we've been asked to help. And of course we want to just make sure that as part of that community health there's just this stronger understanding between the DEA and the community, what we're doing, what needs are, where we can collaborate, things like that. And we also want to make sure there's that kind of collaboration communication being fostered between the BDFL, DREES, and the community. And then lastly we want to just continue building a stronger foundation of support for the association. In the past that's, you know, in the last year that's been very much focused on financial support which we greatly appreciate. But we want to expand that to not just financial support but also just ambassadors out there in the different regions and making sure that people understand what we're doing and that they can provide the support on their local communities for the DEA. So we have some new hires to help us with those themes and by the way you're going to hear a lot more of those themes because we have a community liaison who's going to help us share what our plans are and how you know what our work plans will be and how we're going to move those themes forward. So let me do a quick introduction of our I'll let her introduce herself. Rachel if you can say a quick hello and introduce yourself and what you're focusing on for the community liaison role. Hi everyone. So I'm involved in kind of we've got this Drupal community that's amazing full of some amazing people and we're very lucky. So kind of I'm there to try and help that community understand the Drupal Association better but also to help the Drupal Association understand all of that community better in all of its little nooks and crannies around the world. Now until the new year I'm working part-time so mainly at the moment I'm realizing quite size for operation. It's just kind of entertaining and kind of learning how everything works within the within the Drupal Association so I can try and make sense of it all and then I shall be full-time on the job as from the start of January. That's right well welcome we're super excited that you're in this role and yeah we're going to do lots of great stuff together and yeah and we're up to Candelaria we've asked her to step into the role of conference director and in the last public board meeting we all say goodbye to Rachel because she has given us over three years of amazing service and has really leveled up Drupal Con and she's still with us until January 15th so I'm not going to say goodbye again because that's very hard for me but I am happy to welcome Brooke here we're all very excited to have her here and let me ask you Brooke to introduce yourself. Well thank you hi everybody I'm really glad to be here I actually am originally from upstate New York and I started out in public relations and moved my way over to event management which I love and my purpose really is to further help to level up Drupal Con because to me it's really the embodiment of an amazing community and I'm excited to help evolve it and go along the themes as well that Megan has so well described to all of you for 2018 and beyond and so it's just wonderful to be here and I look forward to working with everybody. That's great thanks Brooke we're really excited you're here too right so speaking of Drupal Con just wanted to let everyone know that call for papers is open registration is open so make sure you get your ticket at the early bird rate and submit your call for papers by January 17th I believe is the last date we have all of our important dates up on the on the site so you can kind of track along when when early bird ends and so just make sure around January 12th buy your ticket if you want to get the lowest rate and what I want to point out is that we are definitely going to make sure that those 2018 themes kind of percolate through the Drupal Con programming one of the things we talked about was how the community has many stakeholders and many personas as you know it's Drupal Con the past has had a strong developer base and a strong developer focus and we're really proud of that history and we don't want to lose any of that but you know to create that digital experience for the visitor it takes more than just developers it takes the decision maker it takes the leader of the building team it takes then the content strategist the content editors and the marketing people who are putting in the content and running the campaigns to serve those visitors that are coming to the site or to the application and we want to make sure this event really brings all these stakeholders together because as we like to say no chain is stronger than its weakest link and we want every link in this chain of delivering an ambitious digital experience to be as strong as possible and we can use Drupal Con to do that and so what you're going to see is that our tracks are serving more personas than they have in the past you'll see many of the traditional ones for your your building team so it has like your back end development front end development dev ops things like that but some newer ones that you'll see are the content editorial track and the user experience track we also have a technical leadership track which is new this is for the person who's responsible for the team building the sites and that might be someone who works in end user or digital agency we wanted them there because when we called on them and asked them why did you attend the past they said oh we just wanted to check it out but we don't need to go again and we said well what would make you go again and for them they said well I really just need an opportunity to come together with my peers and here get some blue sky ideas so what can we be doing more differently or bigger with Drupal and how can I do a better job managing my Drupal team and so we're creating content to serve that need for that for that track and so this is the start of an evolution of our tracks where we are going to be serving more personas and you'll be seeing more of this over time one other thing I wanted to point out is the theme ambitious digital experience and headless is going to be coming through the tracks when you go and you read what kind of content we're looking for you'll see that in all of the tracks we would like sessions that are key studies related to that track so that we can really highlight the best of Drupal and also we know headless is a really big area of opportunity for Drupal adoption and so you're going to see JavaScript highlighted in a lot of these different tracks as well whether it's more technical or it's more on the solution side so for example horizons is specifically about pushing boundaries with headless I mean I'd love to see someone talk about what can Drupal do with smart cities right there's just so many exciting types of topics that we could get into with these tracks as it relates to headless and decoupled additionally we have the Monday beforehand summits and we're going to have the industry vertical summits as well and that's where there's peer-to-peer networking and solving of how to create better solutions for your business in a certain industry and we're going to add a new one this year which will be solely on decoupled solutions so these are a few things to look forward to for Nashville a lot more to come some other things that are happening I just want to point out is Drupal Europe events that are coming up so there will not be a Drupal con next year in Europe as many of you know however there is a group of community members who are creating a Drupal event that is going to bring multiple stakeholders together and the community together for people from all sorts of countries it's not Drupal con because it's this is an MVP they're they're trying a lot of new things and they're working really hard to bring this together it's called Drupal Europe 2018 and I just want to say a big thank you to this group who's putting this together I've been working with them lots of hours are going into this and I know it's going to be great you're going to hear more from them as I understand it in January in terms of location so keep an eye out for that and then I've been working with a committee of this great group of people to work on a new model for serving Drupal con in Europe and that is a you know the licensing model that we talked about and we've done a lot of research looking at best practices that TED uses for TEDx and how they scale their conference around the world and they have their best practices really rules and tools make sure there's really clear rules and that whoever gets the license is properly supported with all the tools that they need and so we've been putting this together and figuring out the process for applying for a license and what those rules ought to be and we are getting ready to release that this month so that those that are interested in licensing Drupal con and hosting it in Europe will know exactly what they need to provide and by when and we'll have some more news on that in the next week or so but we're really close to releasing it and just want to say a big thank you to this group because they are putting in a lot of extra time as well helping me think through this new model which is not only going to help serve Europe but once we figured out for Europe we get to scale this and we get to now hold Drupal cons and places all around the world that have been waiting for many years to have a Drupal con so that's pretty exciting all right and so that is it some a little bit of time for Q&A if there's questions from people on the zoom or people in the room all right any questions there is a oh chat okay thank you thank you yes there's many chat in chat chef well pull is thanking the volunteers for helping with the european event lots of other things but no questions awesome well it's a great update i love all the the process progress i should say not process i like process too but i like the progress that comes from the process you know seeing the innovations on Drupal at orc for example is something that we haven't had and just seeing that regular cadence with you know improvements is awesome and it's great to have more people on the team so welcome also for me to these new team members and you know feel like things are heading the right direction so it's an exciting time um so yeah there is no other questions i think we can adjourn the public part of the meeting and then we have some more business to take care of in the executive session that's right so with that um anyone who is a board member or say on we're going to use this zoom for the executive session and for those that have joined us um i thank you for joining and i'm going to have to ask you to hang up thank you bye bye you don't have to go home so you can't stay here yeah


Hello everyone, I'm Yunqing, and today I'm going to talk a little bit about my project on fitting M-M functional forms on QM energies and forces. So it is a huge dilemma that the protein molecular simulation community has been facing for decades is that M-M is very fast but not that reliable, Q-M is considered as the ghost standard but prohibitively slow. So recent years there is a trend that people are using symmetry functionists like Bader and Palerino to summarize the local chemical environment of atoms and come up with the so-called machine learning force field, machine learning potential models or machine learning force field which is somehow not that which is somehow has an accuracy that's close to Q-M but slightly faster than Q-M but still it's still around 2000 times if not more slower than M-M models especially in solvated the system and there is a huge design space between M-M potentials and M-M potentials. If you look at a pros and cons of the M-M potentials and M-M potentials then I guess we can agree here that whatever merits for molecular force field comes from its function, its simplistic functional forms. So for example, if you have all your path is bounded non-mundered and bounded as basically harmonics or some other polynomials then it is extremely fast to sample and you can encode a lot of your beliefs in that. So for example, if you believe that when you have a non-bounded interaction and you separate the atoms apart to a enough distance then the energy should degrade to zero then you can encode that belief in your functional forms whereas all the benefits from M-M potential comes from we believe from its optimization strategy to be more specific you can use this kind of optimization strategy used by machine learning communities namely back propagation to rapidly train your neural network to come up with more and more accurate models. So it's impossible if we can combine the merits of M-M and M-M potential and of course this is hardly anything new and it's basically the work force of the entire open force field consortium which is force balance developed by Li-Ping. There's only one problem or maybe two for this one force scheme is that although you optimize very aggressively the force field parameters you are not optimizing the typing scheme of force field parameters and this means that you need to start with a decent enough force field. So a lot of the force field especially small market force field that people are using right now started from development in 1990s. So it is of our interest to ask the question is it possible to optimize atom typing and the parameters at the same time. Before we dig into the details let's just clarify a little bit on the nomenclature of different aspects of force field. So the final energy the energy that we care about which could give us a lot of information including the behavior of the molecular system of course you can take the derivatives to get the forces comes from parameters as well as coordinates. So the parameters comes from including bound angle, torsion, non-bonded types, a parameter this comes from bound angle, torsion, non-bonded types which comes from atom types. And the we call the process of translating a molecular graph into these types and further into the parameters atom typing and the rest force field parameterization. And in this project we're wondering whether we can replace the current atom typing scheme which is based on basically looking at the table. Can we switch that to be based on graph neural networks. So there is a wish list that we hope to achieve by the end of the project. So we want to know whether graph nets can fit atom types, whether it can fit atom, bond, angle, torsion types and therefore parameters and whether we can reproduce the same set of parameters given the sufficient Mb trajectory and if we prove that we can do very well on Md energies and forces then we can move on to Qm which we really care about whereas Mm is just a no more than a sanity check and finally such neural parameterization schemes afford us the ability to expand the complexity of the functional form. So for example we can include terms that are used in MmFF or some other classful force field that have been proven to increase the fineness between Mm and Qm but were too difficult to compromise if promised manually that is to say to putting a huge table. So speaking of huge table let's look at one of the most classic huge tables for atom typing scheme. So this is just a few columns of gaff. This is gaff one I believe which is published in 2004 but the development effort goes well back into 1990s if not earlier. If you analyze the grammar of all these atom typing rules then you will realize that it is no more complex than combining node attributes number of neighbors and neighbor attributes all together. So interestingly it is obvious to see that these these grammar could be realized by a graph kernel called Weiss-Fehler-Lehmann test which is basically a tree expansion heuristic. So for example if you look at a cyanote here I don't think you can see my cursor but anyhow if you look at a cyanote here then expanded trees into green green green and you further expand the the green nodes into green sign green and green sign green and the the middle green node could be expanded to three whereas the side nodes could be expanded as two. So this procedure has been used to distinguish between different nodes in a graph or different graphs for a very long time and last year there is a wonderful paper published by Shrieh et al in MIT that consists of a GitHub repo for four lines of code that prove that Weiss-Fehler-Lehmann test could be approximated by graph nets. So what we have here is that graph nets could be as powerful as Weiss-Fehler-Lehmann test whereas Weiss-Fehler-Lehmann test can almost perfectly approximate the atom typing. Naturally we can hypothesize that graph nets can approximate atom typing and if I want to put an attribute on that there is actually a corresponding relationship between graph nets with a layer and Weiss-Fehler-Lehmann test and steps and Weiss-Fehler-Lehmann test and steps to atom typing that looks at most an atoms away. So let's test this experimentally. We just have a very toyish data set here that consists of a thousand molecules from zinc data set, split it into 80-10-10 training validation tests and we used enough to show graph neural net models and if you ignore the 1.5 hour rate here you can say that okay maybe graph net can do the task of fit atom types perfectly. Then the next question we want to ask is if you can do the atom types can you do the bond types and therefore bond parameters. So these are apparently two questions that consist of an and operation which takes one end of the bond and the other and use an operator due to join them together as far as a dictionary lookup. So the first half is a bond typing scheme so to speak and the second is the prompteration scheme because neural networks all neural networks this is not even a graph convolutional or anything even if the simplest feed forward neural networks can do logistic operations. Also any kind of neural networks can look up a dictionary. So we hypothesized that maybe graph nets can after do message passing on the on the nodes maybe can also come up with bond types and therefore parameters. Now there's a slight problem here so after you do the atom message passing you will come up with latent code for each node but for bond angle and torsion parameters you necessarily need to combine the latent code of individual atoms into an entity and meanwhile we need to respect the symmetry here that there is a so for example the other symmetry for bond is that if you name if you switched order you input so if you if you input the blue atom first and red and red atom next or if you switched order this should give you the this should give you the exact same answer because there's a topological symmetry here. One of the techniques that we can use is called Genesee pooling. This huge chunk of math here basically says that I don't care what kind of symmetry you want to to respect. One simplest way of pull things together that is expressive is that just enumerate all of these permutations and sum them up together so this is what we did. So we have a feed fewer a feed forward in your network that operates on the concatenation of all the enumeration of permutations and then add them up together to come up with a latent representation of bond angles and torsions and from there we determine the parameters and it's not doing too bad although there are still some although there is still some error the R square is generally over 0.9. There is another version of the scheme that we tested which is which involves hierarchical message passing that can do slightly better but this is 10 times more expensive so it did not proceed with this herosite. Okay again if you tolerate that 0.9 R square you can say that okay seems that fitting atom bond angle and torsion parameters could be achieved by graph Nets. Then next we move on to whether we can reproduce this set of parameters if you have sufficient enough md trajectories. So this is again a sanity check for before we go to fitting QM energies because we know the answer here we know that the model now is expressive enough it is just a matter of the optimization process. So again this is a toyish task we selected a hundred molecules from the ANI dataset for training and 24 tests. We parameterized the system by open force of tools using spurnoff and we draw samples from an NM simulation at 400k. We feed those energies and those snapshots into a graph net and try to see whether it can whether it can reproduce the energies first. So it seems that our messy of the predicted and the reference energy is around 0.4 0.5 k copper mole for training and slightly larger for test set. However when you look at the parameters it seems that the only parameter that the model can reproduce with some confidence is the equilibrium bond lens. So this has something to do with the very rocked landscape of the optimization process and we've shown that this is not the issue of the expressiveness because if you train it directly on parameters then you can get a perfect energy whereas it is the the rugged landscape endowed by the complex functional form that is increasing the difficulty of training here. So this is still a problem that we're trying to overcome but we're also trying to make do with this kind of an accuracy that we have and move on to QM. Now if you train on a QM energy dataset then there are more challenges that are added. So you really if you have something like a QM9 or a ANI dataset then the dynamic range for your model needs to be very very large because the energies you really sometimes span from negative few thousand to somewhere near zero. So you want a very high r-square as well as a very high RMSE because in order to make the model useful at a local region then even if you get a general trend it can still make some errors at the very local scale. So if you look at the scatterplot this is just some random experiment that I did on QM9 dataset. If you give this plot to any machine learning person they'll tell you that okay this looks perfect but still the RMSE of this specific experiment is greater than 10k Calprimole which makes the potential energy model basically unusable. So I guess what we need to do here is we need to do more experiments on molecular mechanics to make sure the optimization process works smoothly. This is just another example to show that the last landscape the training curve looks very smooth but in order to achieve a RMSE that is actually usable for a potential energy model there is still some work to be done. Another thing worth mentioning here is that when fitting a MM model or a MM-like model to a QM energy then we also apart from predicting the bound non-bonded terms we necessarily also need to predict a offset because even if you count all the atom offset there is still a part of QM energy that is not explained so you still have to predict per molecule offset for each molecule. It is kind of well known that you cannot perfectly reproduce MM energies using traditional class 1 force field. So what we are doing now is also to expanding the functional forms of the force field so that it will achieve a better finish with regard to QM energies and forces but again this is made easier by the neuralized parameterization scheme. So one of the things that we can do is to follow the guidelines for a class 2 force field. If you look at such a formulation you will realize that the first few terms is no more than just a higher order polynomial for other bounded terms and we can also add bond-bond coupling, angle-angle coupling, bond-angle coupling, torsion-bond coupling and torsion-angle coupling as well. Portion-angle-angle coupling. So we can easily put all these coupling terms. We can squeeze them into the hypernodes that we introduced before. So I have a TensorFlow implementation of this and now the ballpark of the RMSE is around 5k copper mole trend on QC archive data but this is still a working progress where we try to further lower that that error. So with that I'd like to thank everybody in Tulera Lab who helped me with this project and thank you for your time.