Yeah, and I so loved the um, let's talk the day-by-day after the eternal sunshine. It was talking about Tracking back Through time to before time and I think of that very much like this causation lineage that was given Because when you start with the half and you go up to the do and up to the feeling and up to the Thawed and up to the belief you end up with the identity and Understanding each time as I would track it back in my mind. It would take me back to what do I believe? I am because all that follows has to prove that in every way it has to flow from that and and be the manifestation of it so Every single seeming issue that I perceived as a lack of limitation of problem it ultimately sourced with I was identifying with that which is limited and That just the awareness that all of these things flowed From a misplaced I am was just such an awakener for me I hear what you're saying, and I've tried to do Some of the things you're talking about I have I fell off a horse many years ago and broke my foot in five places and I'm always it's in pain. It has pain right now as well It's always has pain, and I've tried so many things to get this You know pain what I've offered in dollars and yours and everything too To have this pain go away, and I don't know any what to do anymore because I want this symptom relief I mean And I can't see why it serves me I I I Recognize that that absolutely is a possibility, but I can't see the way, and I'm so tired of Being in pain Yeah, well, we we use the the chart or the rings that I talk about a lot Where the rings I do out was that there's the perceptual world Which is the outer ring and then the emotions are underneath that and your your thoughts And your beliefs and then your desire So if we looked at that ring and sent it circles everything and we said okay broke my foot in five places and it's been like Almost constant or consistent pain and also many Dollars euros and much effort spent at Addressing the symptom, you know, it's really gone on to the feet You know there's been a huge focus sounds like for years on the feet That would be like out of this entire outer ring That's like this little spot out there just like somebody when they say they they find a lump in the breast Or they find a spot in the lungs You know, and then they put all this effort To go after that spot. This is what all this whole ring is the entire cosmos of time and space All the galaxies and planets and stars and and countries and so forth And then there's a speck on that taste feet It's there and you've put a lot of energy going right at that and what we really work on is Is first of all to take the focus off of of that because But that's the that's an effect and so when the mind is so riveted riveted riveted on an effect Then it's even if it's and you sounds like you have done a lot of metaphysical searching And you've been searching your whole life and really trying to really connect with Jesus and and really connect with that Real deep experience but by pulling the attention off of it and then opening up to what I call this awareness that that The problem is not anything to do with feet, but the problem is a perceptual problem You know first of all seeing a world that's not there That's we could call that hallucination and then seeing fragmentation in that world Which is not seeing it as a whole. It's just seeing it in parts You know, that's a perceptual problem and it does seem to take lots of Convincing but you know, I'm telling you right now. This is this is where the relief will start is Is really coming to that admission that it's a perceptual problem.  It's like a focus there So once you start to do that then it's like I guess for myself When I started to frame it in that way Then I started to put my full attention into What is holding up this perceptual problem? What's propping it up? What are the underpinnings underneath it? Not with the specific symptom because there are some great authors like Louise Haye for example who actually do a pretty good job of tracing back specific symptoms to various thoughts and belief systems that are underneath they really do a spectacular job There was one of his pamphlets. I think it was maybe the psychotherapy pamphlet where Jesus said, you know, a careful tracing back You know, it still won't bring the relief Because the only thing that heals an unforgiveness is forgiveness So it's like the the release point is way way way back in the mind even that tracing back sometimes even though it can be helpful only forgiveness heals an unforgiveness only Forgiveness heals a grievance and the grievance is, you know, no one's been sharing is is much much deeper in there In fact, it's so deep in there. It doesn't even have have any kind of overt or obvious connection to the symptom. Many times you could say, what's this happening? Well, how is this happening to me? You know, I can't possibly believe in this or this or this consciously But subconsciously there's a lot of things for buried down there really deep So to me all that this does is when you start to see that you you get you have an impetus to go much much deeper and And it's really a time of rejoicing, you know, it's a time of not Kind of saying look it. I've failed to find a solution to this specific symptom It's more like hallelujah. I'm getting to the point where I can start to say I have to look Much deeper inside in a much more general way Not so much looking for specific symptom relief, but looking for perceptual problem Relief and that's like a huge difference and and for me it starts with 100% acceptance of the symptom of all of it as long as I'm oh, I hate this I want to fix it and and all that energy that you put and as I described in my story all the energy I put all those doctors, etc. That was all resistance energy That's all perceiving the problem out there and literally the doing of all those attempts Reinforces it it strengthens it and exactly what our egos want us to do Believe the problem is out there and do x y and z to try to fix it And of course says, you know That is all designed to not find the solution So you can do not find this is the only thing that the ego promises So that was when I put it for me just in my own journey and realizing Whatever I'm fighting I'm perpetuating and the trying to fix it is is a battling with it So I was shown the power of acceptance And I was just sharing with our group this morning. I woke up with this little Resist it accept it Give it to spirit. I was shown What tends to happen for me in any given day or in a cycle of my life where there's something It seems like I initially resisted like you're experiencing Thinking it shouldn't be there believing. That's wrong that it's happening that Wishings it could be fixed and then I could be happy so resistance and Then finally. Oh, it's here for a reason I may not know what that reason is But I accept it 100% I Allow it to be With note as much as possible letting go of the judgments about it in any way that we have and something about that acceptance is that is the doorway To allowing spirit to come in and work the miracle so that third step for me is always Okay, I accept it's here, but I don't know what to do about it. I can't like that admittance that David's talking about I Don't know and I can't fix it.  I'm just wasted doing this. I Give it up spirit. Show me the way. I don't know Yes, but still sometimes I mean treatment or therapy or something works Even if I don't change my mind. I had symptom that for many years. I couldn't even hold my head up I was it was so much pain in my neck. So I lay down every like every hour.  And then at one time I was in a therapy about something Completely different and we came down to where I was giving birth to my daughter And I was like that least you know and pushing her out and I was screaming.  I completely forgot I had this and I had it for years And I mean I didn't change my mind there, but something released, you know, so it just I I witnessed that type of phenomena quite often in my journey with all of this and and for me part of it was um I I so believe you know in the in the case of seeing something shift By applying some kind of magic, you know doing a therapy or whatnot That that's what my mind needed to allow the miracle to happen to allow Love in and to let this little piece of self-punishment go And sometimes I I just the letting go Spirit did undo it in other words just the moment of I'm gonna let myself be helped and The Christ can dissolve What we've been claiming to in mind and we don't even know it Yeah, so it is a shift of mind, but it may not be an awareness even that you may even have a conclusion saying I didn't shift my mind, but it just disappeared and things don't Just disappear or appear even The mind is very deep and it's it has lots and lots of tricks And uh, it's like these magicians that seem to do all these things and it's like how are they doing that? you know, they're it's It's very open to suggestions and so forth But but it is this the seed and source of everything And then you you begin to open up to the idea that the mind is extremely causative It is causative And the world of effects has no causation But that's it's going to have to transfer in a lot of areas because it's such a pervasive belief So this just really gives you an opportunity, you know, it's it's like when we live in spiritual community Things are arising all the time Uh emotions are coming up and it can seem like there are external causes of the emotions So and so said this so and so did this Uh, and then I was having a great day and then all of a sudden I heard such and such and then oh My I just shut down or I went into sadness or whatever It's it's a deeply rooted belief in these externals is having causation and The the foot is just like a An opportunity Almost like, you know, I know I was just saying like if you interviewed the foot like okay You definitely got my attention What have you got to say for yourself you've had my attention for years and then you know Interview your foot and it's like Yeah, there's you can get down to The purpose or the meaning underneath it nothing happens by accident And it's almost like if you just instead of just thinking like this is a part of myself that I can't stand That I've tried everything with and put all this time and energy and money and everything in Just try interviewing your foot And asking it, you know, what are you what are you trying to get out of this? What what are you doing?


And our next speaker is Sarah Gibson from the Alan Turing Institute. She is a research software engineer there, and she solves real-world problems using cutting-edge academic research there. And she will talk about binder repusable Python environments with binder. Welcome, Sarah. Hi. Thank you very much for that introduction. I'm Sarah Gibson. If you don't know who I am, I am a research software engineer at the Alan Turing Institute in London. I've been using Python now for about five years since I started my PhD in astrophysics. And I'm also a maintainer and an operator for Project Binder, which we're going to talk about today. And the primary use of binder is that it makes it really super easy to share reproducible computational environments. And I'm going to show you what that means for Python today. But I just very quickly want to start by defining what I mean by reproducible. So what are the means of the word reproducible? Pretty much in whatever field, whether it's data science or a specific domain you go into, reproducibility has a different meaning. So I'm just going to quickly run through this slide so it's absolutely clear what I mean when I say reproducible. So I'm looking at this top right quadrant of reproducible, which is if you gave me the same data and the same analysis pipeline that you were running, I should be able to get the same answer as you. This is like the lowest bar of reproducibility. But if we can conquer that, we can open up these really interesting other dimensions of reproducibility. So if I then run a different data set through the same analysis pipeline and it tells me that qualitatively the same answer, this would be a replicable analysis. If I ran the same data through a different analysis pipeline and that qualitatively gave me the same insights, this would be a robust analysis. It's really interesting dimension because it's looking for methods that should do the same thing. And if we combine all of that together, we get a generalizable analysis. And this is not generalized because it doesn't apply to all of the people during the analysis, but it is two steps towards being able to make inferences about the data to the broader population. And the results of this type of analysis are not specific to one day set or one particular methodology. But we can't achieve any of that unless we can get the same answer out from the same data in the same analysis pipeline. But I'm actually being even more specific than that. And I'm going to talk about what is actually called a repeatable analysis. And this is literally getting the exact same answer from the same data and the same analysis pipeline. And this is not the same as reproducible because repeatable brings in the concept of the computational environment, whereas reproducible only relates to the data and the analysis steps. And this is why I'm talking about binder because binder captures this repeatable aspect by adding in the dimension of what's going on in the background when you're running your analysis on a data set. So I just want to acknowledge that there are many reasons and barriers and why people, why reproducible research isn't happening all of the time across all of the domains and I'm sure many people on this call will relate to at least one reason on the slide right now. And the two I like to focus on the fact that it takes time and it requires additional skills. You need time to learn these skills and implement them. And if you can get over that initial barrier, research in general can be much more efficient and successful in the long run because you've set up your workflows in such a way that you can repeat things much more easily. I like to do a little bit of market research during my talks but I'm aware that I can't see any of you. So hopefully you'll still at least be able to relate to the questions I'm about to ask, but I want you to think about scenarios when you've been collaborating on software. And I'm sure all of us have heard the question, I've heard, oh but it worked on my computer. Or, oh, but it works yesterday. And these are super frustrating things when you're trying to collaborate and work on software and you can't get the same environment going or something different is happening on your machine to someone else's machine. And this is really frustrating because we actually have tools that solve these problems. Whether it worked on my computer scenario, we have Docker, if you're not familiar with that, what Docker does is it creates something called containers. These are portable environments that capture not just code and dependencies such as software or data but it can actually capture high level architecture such as like the operating system. They become very portable from like your Mac laptop to your Linux desktop to even implementing on the cloud and it becomes very easy to share those kind of environments. And for the oh it works yesterday scenario we can use version control version control is the magic time machine I wish I'd had during my PhD, when I can just rewind everything back to last Tuesday when everything was last making sense. But if you combine that with continuous integration and testing, you can actually catch these kind of bugs that might create discrepancies in your code before they actually reach your production research ready code base. But these are exactly the additional skills required, I just said, former barrier to reproducible research and we have to sit down and learn them. So this is where binder comes in. Project binder is a global community of research and software engineers and data scientists who are dedicated to the open and transparent communication of reproducible research. And then my binder org service allows anyone to launch a complete and interactive computing environment from their browser. Complete is I mean the code, the land programming language, any software dependencies and packages any assets you have like pros or media. You can very easily share a full research environment through a browser without actually eating the person you're sharing with to install anything. So I am going to now attempt to demonstrate this so please bear with me. I am just clicking on a link here. And this will take us to the gravitational wave open science center website. So what this is this is a website hosted by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations these are astrophysical research collaborations that are looking into the detection of gravitational waves and they have example notebooks here and you'll see this third one here binary black hole events has this my binder link next to it. And if we click that link we get redirected to the binder website where we have this the binder spinner of reproducibility. And if I click on build logs says found built image launching and we're launching a server. And if it hadn't found a built image at this point it would be building one for us. And this server that is it's launching. It's not actually on my local machine. It's in the cloud. And what's going to happen is my browser will be direct redirected to a Jupyter notebook environment as we can see here. It's being hosted in the cloud, all running through my browser. And if I go down and show you the requirements dot txt file. We'll see, you know, we require h5 pi, maplotlib sci pi, none of those have had to install. And then if I open up the notebook. We will be able to see this tutorial notebook that the Lego and Virgo collaboration have written up that basically goes through all of the analysis steps that they do when they are detecting gravitational waves. And I can just click run all cells. And this will just run. And I can then begin to work my way through this notebook and learn all about signal processing and such and we can see that various different things are running. We can create plots and we can see we have the power spectrum of the gravitational waves and we can even see the chirp signal as the two binary black holes emerging into one another. And this graph shows the the ring down as as the resulting object comes to rest. And that's great. I can now learn all about black holes and gravitational waves and I haven't had to install it. I had to make sure I have the right version of Python and packages. It's just launched in a browser there for me to use. So I'll just go back to my slides. So what did they have to do to create that. So this is what this is a comic that kind of shows the workflow research will go through in order to publish their work on binder so we have Jane here. She's written a paper based on her experiments and she would like anyone anywhere to be able to reproduce check and improve her calculations. So the first steps she takes is to describe the experiment as a Jupyter notebook and she and the reason we like Jupyter notebooks is that you can mix together pros code and visualization. And much like the example we just saw you can walk people through the steps you are taking, although you do not have to use Jupyter notebook in order to use binder it also supports Jupyter lab terminal. So instead of time you can get it to work with VS code and it even works with our studio as well. It's not just for Python environments. So when she's written her notebook she put publishes this on a hosted repository such as GitHub, but many of the public repository websites are supported such as GitLab, BitBucket, Zenodo. So it makes this repository binder ready by just squareable with my binder.org. You just glitched there was maybe 30 seconds loss in the video so can you please go back again. Oh yeah sorry. So I'm just talking through this comic here. Jane has written a notebook based on her experiments. She's publishing it on GitHub. And now she needs to make that repository binder ready. So what does that mean for a for Python developers. How do we, you know, make sure that that's ready.  And this is just plain text file that lists your packages and your package versions. And this is a valid configuration file compatible with with my binder.org. But you might use Conda and therefore have environment.yaml files, which is again just a list of all of your dependent packages and the channels from which you download them. And this too is a compatible configuration file for working with my binder.org. And by providing those kind of configuration files, my binder.org will allow Jane to share her notebook with everyone so that they can run it and reproduce her computations by providing compute power from the cloud. So all my binder.org needs to work. It's a version control repository on a public server and a description of the software dependencies. And importantly, we've configured it such that it recognizes the typical version control, sorry, the typical configuration files that those communities already are using to define their software dependencies. So this is a little bit of background into my binder.org or the binder project. It was originally launched by Jeremy Freeman back in 2015. And at the beginning of 2017 project Jupiter started having meetings with binder as we began to take over stewardship and bring binder into the Jupiter ecosphere. The first half of 2017 was spent redeveloping the back end binder into what is now called binder hub and that's all the technology that powers this service. And in September of that year, binder was awarded a more foundation grant to run its operations. Since these humble beginnings, we've now grown to hosting over 140,000 user sessions per week. So in roughly three years project Jupiter has brought this tool from a prototype to a staple of the open source community, open science community. And binder itself is open source and is built modularly using other open source tools, which means anyone can deploy their own service, for example in an institution. And you can, it's completely configurable as well so you could configure it to only allow sharing between specific teams, which I've represented here by changing the globe that meant everyone to just be a little house that might be your institution or your team. And that's totally fine. So what is the technology what's this binder hub that we use to kind of provide this service. So here is a little screen grab of the form you see on the MyBinder.org web page. And all you do is you paste in the URL of your version control repository so we have an example from GitHub here, and then you just click launch. And everything that happens afterwards is happening in the background automatically. So the first thing that happens is that your repository is cloned. Then we have a tool called repo2docker and if you were at Tanya Allard's talk about Docker and Python yesterday, you will have heard a little bit about this. But what repo2docker does is it basically reads the repository and looks for configuration files, and it builds a Docker image without the need for a Docker file. So you can see across all of the code, any data, it installs all of your software dependencies, and it makes that image compatible with Jupyter by installing all of the necessary Jupyter servers and such. And these configuration files are your requirements.txt or your environment YAML that I showed you earlier. This image is then executed using Docker. And we then host the running Docker container on a Jupyter hub. And if you're not familiar with what a Jupyter hub is, Jupyter hub is one solution to the problem where you have access to some computers and you would like to share them or give access to some humans. And Jupyter notebooks are a good user interface for this scenario. And here, computational resources and humans can take many forms, such as researchers on HPC, anonymous users on the cloud, students on a university, etc. By combining different custom authenticators and spawners, you can create any kind of mapping of any collection of humans onto any kind of computational resources you like. And that is Jupyter hub's job. It's just providing computational resources to your people. So that's what it's doing. It's giving computational resources to our running Docker container. And in the case of my binder.org, these computational resources are a Kubernetes cluster running in the cloud. Jupyter hub then makes the running container accessible at some URL. And then binder is this thin layer running across the top of all of these tools that kind of handles URL redirection. And it just redirects the user's browser to that running container. And lo and behold, as we saw in the example, you get your Jupyter notebook with the environment already installed and you're ready to roll. So how did we manage to scale this up to 140,000 users per week? And the answer is we created a federation. So my binder.org is supported by four clusters around the world, including one that I myself manage at the Turing Institute. And federating the service in this way means we can be resilient against both cluster outages and funding streams. We can be sustainable by creating by sharing the workload and knowledge like this, the service can persist in spite of changes amongst resources and people. And we become robust as well, we can reliably support users present and future. And because binder hub and my binder.org are built using modular open source tooling, we're actually in a really super cool position in that to run my binder.org you do not require cloud vendor lock in. And we're in a really cool position of hosting one website with four different flavors of Kubernetes. And our user base are for the large parts unaffected by the redirection to our different clusters. And in fact, we're not even completely cloud based the geese's cluster, which is the second largest cluster in the federation is actually an on premise facility hosted at the liveness Institute. So another thing that the binder team like to do is to run user surveys, and then we do this trying gauge how our users are using my binder.org and what they like or dislike about it. So the good news is around 80% of our user base or at least 80% of the 346 responses we got to the survey would recommend the service to a friend. So that's good. And we found that there's actually a wide range of use cases for using my binder dog. And but like the top three sort of equally distributed use cases are university teaching, hosting documentation and examples, or running workshops and training courses. And the inference you can make from that is binder really shines in scenarios where installing an environment would be distracting or a waste of time, such as you're running a workshop at a conference. You don't want to spend 20 minutes making sure everybody has the correct version of Python and all of the packages installed, and then downloading all of the necessary materials. Instead, you could just send them a URL to click and they get the environment and everything is there and they can interactively and explore that this. Thank you. But one thing that we could do better on is speed. So this is a word cloud that was generated from free from responses that show one area we could improve is the time it takes to launch binder tackling this problem, however, isn't as simple as it seems. We are part of this is that we're relying on upstream conditions to speed up our launches, for example pulling the Docker images onto our computational nodes, or allocating computational resources with Kubernetes. We are always always going to be limited by how quickly Kubernetes can requisition a user session. But one way we've tried to tackle this is to write up some community guidance and this explains what's happening during the launch process, where the time is spent, which steps could be taking longer and why. And we've been provided pathways, our users can follow to speed up their launch times. And we found that once we've explained what's going on, many people actually go, yeah, actually 10 to 15 seconds to launch binder is actually reasonable considering how much is going on in the background. So we've probably been too good at, you know, streamlining this at this moment. And this is ultimately what this project is all about, we are about community, and we exist in a larger ecosphere of languages as well as I mentioned earlier we don't just support Python we include Julia and R. And we want to meet those communities where they are to ensure we're providing the best and most useful service we can. That being said, binder is a Python project and it is run by Python devs. And this is problematic because when it comes to developing the service for Julia and are, we just don't have the knowledge and the expertise from those communities. However, this year I've been awarded a fellowship by the software sustainability Institute, and my goal for this fellowship is to help diversify the skill set of the teams maintaining an operating binder and my binder dog. And this is so that we can ensure that these communities outside Python are represented when we are innovating binder for the future. So this is all from me here is a whole bunch of links if you're at all interested in this project getting involved asking questions. Thank you very much. I see there are many, many questions. I doubt we have time to answer them all but let's start. There's a question from Francesco what are the pros and cons of binder with respect to Google Collab. For instance, do you also allow users to access GPUs which are essential for several machine learning applications. So, um, pros and cons. So Google Collab is a very different kind of project to binder binder is about Google Collab is about developing quickly with other people. So it kind of installs a kitchen sink environment that has everything you could possibly dream of, but you might not actually be using them. Whereas my binder dog is providing a bespoke environment that is specifically the requirements you need to run an analysis. So the kind of different beasts targeting different use cases. My binder dog does not offer GPU services. This is because we are running. We are providing the service completely free of charge and it's expensive enough to run without adding GPUs to it. We did run a GPU service for New York's conference a few years ago and like it's a very obvious spike in our billing graph. But because it's open source you can deploy binder hub onto your own infrastructure that includes GPUs and you can do really clever things like if you authenticate a user and they're on an allow list to use GPUs. You can then you can then redirect them to a different nerd pool. For example, what I would say about the analyses that rely on GPUs. My binder dog is not a tool to do your analysis on. It's a tool to communicate the result of your analysis. So you probably wouldn't be running your simulation on a GPU that might take X amount of hours. There's no reason to run that in a browser. But like the like the tidy up scripts that creates your plots. That is something you are likely to share and that is where binder becomes powerful. Okay, there are many more questions. One hot question is who is paying for the compute resources. So the Google cluster, which is the largest cluster. We, we was originally paid for by the more foundation, but we get a donation of credits direct from the Google cloud platform. And another cluster is run by over age, which is a cloud provider in Europe. The geese's cluster is paid for by the liveness Institute who hosted and the Azure cluster that I manage is paid for via a donation that the cheering received from Microsoft as well. So we're all kind, we're like this community of binder hub managers that are getting our funding through our own streams, but we just get the traffic from one point and then it's kind of like under the hood distributed across the network is quite a cool system. So another very important question for the project. This is awesome. How would one could, how would one contribute to this? I've left the links up here. The binder hub repository is at the top. We also have this might my Twitter is in the corner if you'd like to send me a direct message. One good way to do is to jump onto our discourse at discourse.jupiter.org and introduce yourself and just be like, Hey, I think this is awesome. I want to contribute. And then we can get into a conversation. I always think the best place to start is by reading the documentation and seeing how you can improve it like fresh pair of eyes that don't suffer from expert blindness are so useful to these kind of things. And then we can just build up into more cool technical ideas. Okay, and one more technical question from Alexander. Does binder and could binder and be configured with pep 518. I looked it up. This is specifying minimal bin system requirements for Python projects. If no, will it be supported in the future. I have no idea what that means. I think this is something you can discuss on discord later. Yeah. So I had no clue too. So I looked it up quickly. If we can drop the pep in discourse, I will try and read it and make sense of it. Okay, I think we have unfortunately run out of time. So there are three more questions. Please take that to the discord chat. It's a talk binder. I think the channel name. So, yeah, please join us there in the binder channel discord and I'm sure Sarah will answer all your hot questions. So thanks again, Sarah. Thank you.


Good morning friends. Welcome to the First Deuterian Society of Madison, my name is Kelly Astros-Jackson, and I am one of the ministers here. The vision of FUS is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community, and our world. Thank you for joining us today for this special performance, a seasonal departure from our usual Sunday morning fair. We ask that you keep your mask on so long as you are indoors, including and especially when singing. You may notice that today's performers will be both speaking and singing unmasked, and I just want to let you know that this is a special exception to our current COVID safety policies here at FUS, specifically for this theatrical team who are observing a very stringent set of testing and safety protocols. Following this morning's performance, we would ask you to help us in clearing the atrium in the building. In a timely fashion, we want to give the performers the time and space that they need in order to disassemble the set to get ready for a memorial service we're having later in the day. This morning and throughout the holiday season, our offering will go to support Just Dane's eviction program, providing rent assistance to families at risk of homelessness. To contribute, there are places to deposit checks or cash just outside the auditorium, and you can also donate from our website, FUSMadison.org. Again, welcome. We're so very glad you're joining us for this special performance of Old Bethana with Ken Longquist and friends. Please enjoy this beloved ancient tale as we enter into the holiday season together. What a beautiful morning, a beautiful morning for selling my fish at the marketplace I see you're already to buy. You're my favorite kind of people, people at the market. Look at this fine catch. These will bring a good price. Oh, I can see you. You're wondering why the fish are clattering and clanking around so much. It's simple, really. I told them I was going to have them boosted. The thought of a needle scared them stiff. Tibbles! Vegetables! Get your fresh vegetable seller. And you? Well, I'm crisp as a cucumber. Zippier than a zucchini. Tipsy as a tomato. Wow, did you ask me? Good morning, friend. Good morning. My friend, let me try. Are you feeling as excellent as an eggplant? Why, yes I. Be so fresh they flop. Tastic hands. My apple's got no... Oh yes, all over, everywhere. With candies. Cakes. Have you never heard of Babushka? Russia or Ukraine then? Baba Yaga. Baba who? Baba Yaga. Well, you're not from Romania, then that's for sure. Those three can be terrible. Know what she will do to you. If you're bad, just be glad she leaves. Sinners to Babushka. Babushka, Babula, Mabaki. Maversor, maybe even word bird she picks. Kissed a wentshot. Babushka what's from your room? Betcha and a saw. She is always told, but her story is very old and differently told. She even goes by all those different names. Befriendly is a good spirit. To me, she's always been about hope. Well, you tell that tale better than anyone, fishmonger. And since none of these fine customers are interested in buying any of your stinky fish, you've got plenty of time. Why not entertain your friends today? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Tell us the tale.  I'm much too old and tired to tell such an exhausting tale all by myself. What if we help? We'll help you. Yes, I'll play along on the song. We'll all pitch in to start a song. Yes, tell us about Old Bifana. Please. Her story has been told about a thousand times, a thousand times, especially during the holiday time of the year. You know, Santa Lucia, Hanukkah, the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. And of course, Christmas, this is her time of the year. Old Bifana's time. Now you maybe haven't heard too much about her, but believe you me, over in Italy, she's as much a part of the holiday season as candlelight and snowflakes. Carol Chocolate. Some say her story can't be true. Others swear that it is. All I know is from the time when I was just a little boy, it's the most magical story I ever heard. At the edge of a small that was traveled from east to west, strangers were passing through that village all the time. People like these, you know, who would wander around the streets late at night whistling in the streets. They didn't care who they woke up. They didn't care what parents were tired and trying to get some sleep before dealing with, I mean, raising the children the next day. They just did what they wanted. You know the type. They were very strange. They weren't the only ones, though. Oh, no. There were men in the village, men who wore loud plaid shirts. You know the type. They'd go out in public dressed like that and they thought it was just fine. Some people wore vests in public, which was not the style of the day, but they just did it anyway. I'm telling you, everyone in the village was very strange and the children too. But the strangest one of them all, without a doubt, was old Bifanna herself. Well, she kept to herself. She wasn't very friendly. She'd chase dogs out of her yard. And kids out of her trees shaking her broom at them as they ran away. You grumpy old woman. Yeah, what a grump. She's always like that. Well, who could blame them for feeling that way? She really was rather unpleasant. But it wasn't just grumpiness that made people wonder about old Bifanna. You see, she lived all alone. She was always baking. Baking like crazy. Delicious smells were drifting out of her windows, collecting the noses of her neighbors. But would Bifanna ever share? No. She'd chew her neighbors away with a whoosh of her broom. How stingy. All I wanted was a taste. Sheesh. Sometimes, late at night, under the twinkling stars, they'd be drawn back to her house as if by magic. Someone was singing. It sounded beautiful. And they'd look at each other with amazement when they realized it was old Bifanna. Well, how can such a grump sing so beautifully? How can she sound so sweet when she acts so sour? If Bifanna heard them, she'd stop singing and slam her window shut. Well, who does she sing for anyway? And why does she bake so much? No one knew. All anyone really knew about old Bifanna was that she loved to sweep. It sounds crazy, I know. And it was. But she always had a broom in her hand. And she'd sweep her little house. She'd sweep her front steps. She'd even sweep her walkway. All the way down to the road. The villagers just laughed. Why did she sweep so much? She won't let anyone visit. No one ever trumps mud into her house. But sweep she did. And everyone thought she was truly crazy. Take your broom and whisk it all into a heap. Oh, she was happier then, until a terrible illness came. And took them both away from her. I guess it was the pain of that loss that turned her so bitter and grumpy. She missed them that much. Well, that was why she swept and baked and sang all the time. She was just trying to remember how it felt back when she used to do those things for the family she'd lost. Every night, she'd fall asleep with a lullaby on her lips and dream of happier times. Except for one evening. This is where the story really begins. Well, after supper, after she did the dishes and swept the floor, walked the door and got ready for bed. She put on her slippers and her nightgown and her robe. And then she lit a lamp and went to shutter the windows. No, her shutters were shut. She got out of bed. And then, hills and fields to Bifana's ears with a ringing sound, like the tinkling of little bells. Special to somebody. Taste that when a bright star appears in the east, like that one up there, a special child will be born. A child will help the poor. They say it lies beneath the star. And we're bringing gifts to honor the child. I can't help you. I never heard of it. She hunkered down and started sweeping periously, trying to push that starlight off her front steps. Butch. Look! Bifana looks at that little girl and for just a moment, her heart softened. She shook her head. Too busy. The starlight and the children singing. Understand. Don't understand. Try. She stopped sweeping. But in the wind, she could hear the faint singing and laughter of the caravan. And she wondered what it might be like to be traveling with them. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Everybody's happy in the carousel. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Travelin' together across the desert. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Travelin' and wreckin' the fire. Bop su-wabi-wabi. Weed three kings. Weed three-wabi-wabi. To visit after all, she looked to the horizon, but the caravan was gone. The wind had even erased the animal tracks in her yard. The visit of the kings seemed like it might have only been a dream. Song finally came up and peaked through her wind. She made a fire on the flames until they grew red hot. Then she took nuts and dates and honey from her cupboards. And she did cookies, candies and cakes.  And as she baked, she sang. Lullaby for that baby. Oh, that would make two nice gifts. She was so happy. She sang all day long. That little baby's parents, they'll like that. That was my gift from Oba Fana. Well, she walked toward the horizon, but it wasn't long before she lost her way in that trackless desert. Around and around, she went in circles. She picked up her skirts and began trotting, trying to make up for lost time. Still no caravan. She even tried running, which was hard on her old legs. Her muscles ached and her breath grew short. Slower and slower, she went till she finally slumped down beside an old tree by the side of the road. Squinted up toward the heavens and she heard something heavenly sort of like angels. Was angels? And they were singing. Happening to ya, brand spanking new ya, hunky dory, danger world. Happening to ya, hunky dory, there's a child there, here's a story, come and change your world.  Made her way back down the hill past the old tree. She began to feel, weren't tired anymore. Her toes seemed to dance slightly over the sand. In fact, she felt all together as light as a feather while she laughed in spite of her troubles. I feel as though I could be blown away by a pop of wind. And a wind blew and she found herself running, skipping, almost flying over the sand. Did I say almost? Why she only just managed to gather up her broom and basket before being taken up on a sudden gust of wind. That's her after all. She's following yesterday. He always loved hearing it. We're telling it. Takes myself because it reminds me of my own fresh bakery. I like the part about the sweeping myself. Although if Bifana would have had one of my very fine brooms, she would have gotten her house much cleaner, much cleaner. My favorite part was part about the vegetables. Remember the part about the vegetables. And the fish. Vegetables in that story. And there certainly weren't any fish. Best week they've got. Handmade brooms.  I think there may be a few people here who are wondering, you know, what happened in the end. I suppose we should tell them that. Be a good idea. Right. They may not know. Well, I'm sorry to say, but Bifana never just catch up to the angels or the terror. She never found peace on earth. And she never found that special child. According to the legends, people tell about old Bifana, she never gave up. People say she's searching still to this very day. Every year, during the solstice time of the year, which we are in the midst of now, and especially on the feast of the Epiphany in early January, the feast of the three kings, they say that Bifana, using the gift of flight that was given to her by the angels on that magical night so very long ago, still takes up her room and her basket and flies across the sky, bringing cookies, candies and cakes to children everywhere. She sings them a lullaby as they sleep. And then, she sweeps their rooms all clean. Why? Well, old Bifana would tell you, it's because she has no idea which child might be the special child. Who will make a difference in the world? And make it a better place. It could be you. Who plays the mandolin and the flute but also the melodic which they didn't even have back then. That's how powerful she is. Jeannie Bindley. Who is this mysterious vocalist over here on my right and your left? Is our friend Sharon Brolin, who did us the kind, kind, generous favor of stepping in last June to learn the part of old Bifana just in case because our Bifana had a little uncertainty about her schedule this time of the year and might have to go international for a while, which Bifana regularly does but that's a whole other thing. Now, Sharon learned the old Bifana part and then it turned out, she was willing to join us and add her beautiful voice to the ensemble even in the humble role of the rest of us. Sharon Brolin. Playing the vegetable seller for the, it seems like forever, year, our good friend, the very talented MC of Overture Center's Duck Soup and a leader of comedy sports in Madison and all around good guy, Joe Thompson. Costume commander, designer, also the artist who painted our backdrop, which even Vincent van Gogh would be hard pressed to do as well. Come on. And the finest bell ringer in all the cosmos, Joanne Schilling. And for the fourth year playing the role of old Bifana, a real veteran of the Madison Theater scene and music scene, Marcy Wyland. Some good friends of ours were quite big Bifana fans wrote to me after the first year they saw Marcy as Bifana and they said, wow, your Bifana this year really scared me. That's the best review you can get, right? My name is Ken Lonquist. It's a pleasure to be doing old Bifana. This is our 35th year. Oh my God. 35 years ago in 1987 in December we debuted this show at the Barrymore Theater. I want to tell you we don't have time to do a question and answer session which we like to do, but I want to tell you the best question somebody ever asked. A little girl raised her hand and asked, is this story true? The answer is yes. It is true. I wasn't there to see the details old as I am. But it is absolutely true that anyone can be the one to make the world a better place. And really everyone must be the one more now than ever. So let's all do what we can to make the world more beautiful. You've made our world more beautiful by coming today. We're going to close with a song that explains why stories like this happen. Long ago, when people didn't understand the cosmos so well people worried that the sun was going away at this time of the year. It was getting dark early. They thought the sun was going away and they worried because no sunlight, no life, no survival, plants don't grow, what would we eat? We stay warm. So they had big festivals and we still have them today. We have big bonfires and torch lit parades and people ring bells and they sing songs about the solstice. And if people are singing songs about the solstice well you know I had to make one up too. On December's longest night solstice bells are ringing. Hail the sun's returning light solstice bells are ringing. Round the you'll fires a bowl ring a link, ring a link ring driving off the dark end as we sing. December's longest night solstice bells are ringing. Hail the sun's returning light solstice bells are ringing. Round the you'll fires a bowl ring a link, ring a link ring driving off the dark end as we sing. And sing it. Solstice bells are ringing. Solstice bells are ringing. Ring those bells. Let's bring peace to the earth. Let's bring goodness to all our neighbors and friends and families. Happy 2022. Thanks so much everybody. We're going to be real quick to get out of the way for the visitation service that's happening soon. So thanks so much and we'll see you again soon I hope. Take care. Good to see you Tara. Thanks for coming. Good to see your kids.