and I wanted to talk to you tonight and thank you so much for coming to the first performance in Main Street Landing in over 19 months. By the way, the woman's suffragist just kind of fits with everything that we do and everything we believe in and it just could be more perfect. And it really was an incredible play, so thank you so much. Let's get into it. We are hearing from Governor Madeline Cunan who wanted to say a few words. Relations, everybody, and especially to you, the playwright. I think she deserves another round of applause. And all the actors and all the audience, it's so important to really teach suffrage and what happened and how hard it was. It took a hundred years for women to achieve suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Sandlin did not live and Susan Begant and he did not live to actually see women get the vote even though they sacrificed their own personal lives for that. Women had to fight and had to endure as was shown in the play, forced feeding when they were arrested for marching in front of the capital and they had to convince Woodrow Wilson to deny the pleas for suffrage and it was an incredible struggle for so long and when we think about their struggle, we have our own struggle today. We have our own struggle for the right to our own bodies and to make a decision about when and whether to have an abortion. The fight is as fierce as it was in the 19th and early 20th century. So this play is going to go places for each larger audience, which is terrific. It's funny, it's pointed, it's silly, it's serious. I think it touches all the emotions and it's lively. So people can't say, well, this is boring history. This is nothing if not boring and so important because people look at the vote today as well alone if I have time or we know the states which the play mentioned that are making voting more difficult. So we have to continue to fight for the right to vote for all people and the play acknowledges something which has only come to light recently, at least in the Broadway that even though women's suffrage was noble, they didn't include blacks, they didn't include indigenous people, they didn't include a lot of immigrants, they didn't include a lot of people.  So thank you for bringing us the message in a very clear and exuberant way. Thank you so much for including me to say a few words and I wish the panel great success and I may not be able to stay for the whole panel because I've had a very long day starting in Tarretown, New York, but kudos. We honor all that you've done for women in the state, by the way, I should note. Thank you. The questions, just to the end, we're going to have sort of more of an organized component to the panel. You guys can ask questions and I will let you know when that happens, okay? So if you can save on those, that'd be great. To start out with, I'd like our panel to introduce themselves and I think it's fitting we start with Mary Beth, who is the wonderful playwright who wrote the play that you just saw. Mary Beth? Nice to be in a theater and finally see the play on its feet and I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment for everyone to also recognize my director, Laura Roll, and then you collaborate and Laura is an incredible collaborator and also our designers looking at these banners and then the signs, just bringing everything to life and its theater is collaborative and you are the final piece of this collaboration. So thank you all. I am Katherine Dungey, a professor of history at St. Michael's College and I was also one of the readers, an early reader for the play. Interesting. No, actually. So I'm Selena Colburn and Beth is my constituent so it's a special honor and pleasure for me to be here tonight. I am a part of the library faculty at the University of Vermont and also a performing artist and dancer and also teach dance there and then I serve part of the year in the Vermont Legislature as a representative. I represent Burlington's Chittenden 64 district. Mary, please. Very happy to be here. Hello everybody. My name is Jen Berger. I am an artist, an activist, a former community organizer, and an educator and I run a small project called At The Root that does community engagement and art and social justice. And I'm also at the faculty at St. Michael's College at CCB. Jen, we're going to go down again. I guess we'll start with Jen and move our way down. And we're going to ask our panelists to give their visceral reaction of the play now that they finally see that. A visceral reaction. A visceral reaction. I feel after watching that play and I think that there's so much information and I love that it took so many different turns. It was exciting, informational. It got heavy in the right moments. I think it was well performed, well written. I have a lot more thoughts but that was just my first visceral reaction. I share a lot of what Jen had to say. I had the opportunity to read the play before seeing it. Such a different experience. Sort of feeling it off the page and huge kudos to the performers. For me it was very exciting, the physicality of it. And just I've been thinking a lot about that relationship between embodiment in history and embodiment as a tool of understanding history. I just finished reading Clint Smith's How the Word is Past, which is an amazing book about cultural heritage and slavery and how stories are told. But there's really a body of quality to that book. So I was thinking a lot about that and it just found great pleasure in the movement and the physicality of the actual part of it. My first thoughts were, wow! As I said before, I've seen so many stages of this play. And to have read the really early draft of it and then have been in on the conversation of what can I do with this? And then to see what she did is amazing. And the problem with this movement, it wasn't easy. It wasn't AV. It was all of these many faceted elements that went into where we are today. And I just really appreciate that that's all I know. Mary Beth, I don't know if you want us to explain your reaction, but I'm sure you've seen this a few times. Was there anything in particular that came about actually seeing it in performance and seeing it in audience reaction? So the play is written to have a lot of audience improvisation and to be truly interactive. And that has been a real challenge because those are some of the revisions we had to make to try to keep the actors safe and you safe. And I'm so thrilled that you were calling out answers and you were having a vote. And the same, you were singing. That was wonderful. So I wasn't sure how comfortable we would all be together in a room again. A relief that we're at a place where we have the vaccinations and the masks and we weren't able to be together again. And that was super exciting. Well, thank you. And thank you for writing such a fun way because that audience interaction needed a real treat, I think, for the entire audience. I'm sure you all agree with that. So we worked as a panelist to come up with all the panelists and we talked about questions that we wanted to discuss here with you tonight. And so I'm going to dive into some of these questions. And any of the panelists who want to speak about it begin like we discussed raise your hand. So our first question that we have is, do you feel this performance as an artwork was effective as a tool of education and or activism? So who wants to take this first? I can take that one. I mean, yes. Yes. Yes. And I think for me that there, I think of art and especially performing art as a collaboration between the artists, the performers and the viewers. And together we make meaning. And so I think what I appreciated and felt like was really effective in this work was how much was left unresolved for us to continue to sort through as an audience. I bet like after we leave here tonight and keep kind of trying to sort through the messiness that you were talking about. And the hard troops of what kind of really, so I appreciated that. I appreciated that you didn't wrap things up for us because I think that means that we're just going to keep engaging with this work. Anyone else? Yeah. I agree. I think definitely it was effective. I think about what I mean by effective and I think it does that create change. It's something that we can take home with us. And I think both as an art piece and as an education, it absolutely does. It looked at multi layers of issues that are still current today and that were happening then. And it also as an art piece really like highlighted, you know, highlighted so many things. And so I think that yes, I think thinking about also who is engaging with the material and how many different perspectives that we come from. And it also gave us some actual information and tools to work with as well. So we learned about the history of the activism that we can still work on today and made those links. The second question I have here is the story of the suffrages movement is often told through the lens of white women. How do we best honor the full intersectional history of the movement as well as the moments where white supremacy prevailed in the movement? Who wants to feel that one first? That was one of the things we talked about as the play was developing is how to add those voices in and how to make sure others weren't included or hidden in the story. It's hard work I know because that's what I do for a living. And I'm sitting here looking at all of this in the red and black and white. And one of the things is that we learned about our members of my sorority and they founded my sorority and our first public service activity. The first thing we did as a party was to march in the 19th, 30th march. So that as a public service organization, that's what we were founded on. And so this whole story has a deep meaning for me. And to hear these amazing women being shown in their cool hurdy and the things that they did, not just for black women, but for women that it's been really important. And so I think this play does that. Bringing out all the women who are part of this movement. I think that's very important. And another thing, I mean just kind of as I'm thinking about it, for me too a lot of this isn't known anymore. I feel like a lot of this is lost history. You know, for me I wasn't really aware that women couldn't own land. I mean I think there's a certain element that's lost of how little rights women actually had. And so that kind of knowledge I think is really important for people to be aware of. And the play does a great job of teaching you that. For me there's a really powerful moment early on in the play where the characters are beginning to have this conversation about kind of what do we include. And I think it's talking about the battle for Kansas. At that moment where was there was this vikation of who's votes are we fighting for here? And can we fight for the whole realm of humanity? Or are we going to make allegedly strategic incremental choices? And I think those kinds of choices, you see them all the time in political movements. We make those kinds of choices a lot in the legislature where I work. And they can be really dangerous choices. So I had the opportunity over the last year to study at the Center for Restorative Justice at Vermont Law School and took a really incredible class this past summer on the history of the anti-violence movement that started really in the 60s and 70s, the anti-meaning movement that feminists started in the United States to create structures to respond to domestic violence and sexual assault in this country. And there was a key strategy early on where folks decided police aren't responding to these incidents. And so we're going to kind of embed this movement in policing. And the way that that started was actually with a lawsuit against a California-based police force who had not been responding. And originally the basis for the lawsuit was going to be arguing dual discrimination.  And they simplified. They made the choice to simplify and only bring the last move forward, arguing the last move on the basis of gender. And then there was a lot of pushback from women of color who were like, if you could embed this movement in police and the justice system, this could be dusting to communities of color. And guess what? It was. And now, you know, like 40 years later, we're trying to figure out how to undo that. So I thought about that moment as like, these are the moments that grow roots, you know? And then there's like this whole structure that we have to dismantle. But there are also moments of progress. And it's really hard to argue against progress. So I don't have an answer to that. It was just a moment that like really stuck with me and connected me to that, that other moment is American history or recent American history. I'm so very good. Do you want to touch anything on writing the play and trying to get the intersectionality into it? It sounds like you two worked a little bit on this thing. You did a great job. Thank you. I'm telling... Sorry, Cappan or Cappy? Okay, Cappan, thank you. Because we have a Cappy in the cast. And they're still the same. It's the same that the pandemic hit and we were really sad that we couldn't do the show last fall, but the Suffrage Centennial Alliance spoke with us and said, we're still behind this play and we want you to keep working on it. And well, now that I have the gift of some time at home doing nothing, I really would like to dig more deeply into this racial tension and the most wonderful thing that Alliance did was to say, we would like to pay for you to have some readers because there's a lot of folks in the arts do this work as a labor of love, but we need to take the time and recognize expertise of women of color who are willing to do the work. And we need to acknowledge that financially, not just out of the goodness of your heart, which is wonderful. And that was just this really wonderful moment of respect. And what a gift to me as a writer to be able to access women who were not shy about telling me where I was landing on this draft. It was a really rich conversation.  And then this conversation, like, oh no, Suffrage hats mean something very different for women of color. And that was just an angle I didn't have. Like, that hasn't been my experience. And I had to, oh, that's really helpful. And so just little nuggets like that. And then as part of the larger conversation, you know, we were really excited to maybe have an actor of color. But then after this conversation, there's education. We wanted it to be educational, but we didn't want a person of color on the stage having to educate us. Because we as white women need to do the work.  We love actors of color and we can solve the problem. The mom is very white and there is a small pool of actors, but we could figure it out. We're creative. But ultimately, Laura's like, we said we don't want that person to be in that role.  You know, that's fine. But we realized that we wanted the play to reflect the work that white people need to do. What they should have done historically and what they need to do now to be better. And so that was a real choice we made out of that conversation. And I think that struggle, like Kathy Blue really was helpful. She had to really dig into that tension. And then it became a multi-generational thing of what can people who are younger, how do they push us who are in our middle age and older to do better? And so that was, it was so exciting and I'm just so thankful that the Centennial Alliance and bizarrely thankful for the pandemic. Because I think it is a better play for that time and that opportunity and really thought, like I'm having a little distance from all of the tension, having a distance, they're still happening. The tensions, the racial tensions but being able to see it a little bit more clearly and trying to reflect that in the piece. So I'm glad that you're seeing that intersectionality because it was a lot of work and again playwriting is collaborative. And so I'm so thrilled to have been able to have partners to reach that place. Well I thought it was great how you used sort of the generational conflict as like the sort of stream for the viewership to get that information and have the emotional content with it. And it was very real. I think there's kitchen table dialogue that happens across America, like Thanksgiving, you know, those types of moments and families. And I thought you really did a great job writing for that. So that was wonderful. Thank you. Well, the actors are like, oh it's so stressful. We had to take breaks because you do feel it. That feels real. It was wonderful. And that kind of leads into our next question which I think I'm going to actually break this up. It's actually, we did the giant question with like three questions. So I'm going to break this up and I think it's, this one's more prevalent for wordless discussing, is what audiences will feel included and who might feel excluded from this story? Is the next question. I didn't throw up that question. It's a difficult question because it's intentionally trying to be inclusive. But it's mentioned in the play that you can't be all things everybody. And so I think that there are, the lens is the lens of a white woman. And that's okay.  I was just excited when I heard my source in there and other black women that are really, that I've always known about and I'm like, oh good, you got that one. And then having the indigenous women and Asian women in there. And then I was like, I don't know, what next? I'm just going to quickly, for me I found it fascinating to think that, you know, colonialists coming from Europe and seeing tribes, indigenous tribes in America, you brought that up, that there were women in positions of power who elected the elders.  And so how, I mean, it's such an interesting way to think about that. That by coming to America you saw a culture where women were empowered and you had been in this culture where that was never really chastened. That was very enlightening for me, actually. And I never thought of it like that, but it made sense. And to be fair, not all indigenous tribes were in that position. The Abenaki Frenchens are not, for example, are not matrilennial. But the Haudenosaunee were huge and a very political power that many temperatures women were looking at and learning from and taking inspiration from them, not always giving the credit for. I just want to add something to that. I was thinking about the point that Katherine, you were making. The business is the voice of a white woman. And one of the important things about art is that it not only represents culture, but can also make culture. And that what people have looked for, what people are looking for, and asked about who would feel included or not included, is feeling when art is representative.  And if you don't, and I think you did a great job of naming and including, and I can imagine if somebody didn't feel included, how stark that would feel. And I can see how detailed that you tried to get everybody in there. But just understanding more and think about art and the importance of that and the idea of representation is super important. I think Laura is talking with me already about, okay, what might another draft be? I think what I would let go would be a little bit of the Vermont suffragist in order to bring in, in particular the Latino suffragist, because that's just so large, but Vermont is small. But for us it felt really exciting to tell that story, but I think another draft that would be maybe something. I also love that as an educator thinking about things that are place-based and then actually grounded all of us in the march to the capital. And in the rain, I think about today that everybody was in the rain. And I feel like that was so well done. And so grounding it in Vermont is actually really important. I would not cut that, I would add 10 minutes. And this leads us great. This is a great lead-in to our last and final panel discussion. What parallels in the play do we see today? Who wants to go first on that? I've got first already. Yeah. Sure. I mean, I think Governor Keunan was very direct in talking about the battle for bodily autonomy that's happening. That's incredibly gender-based right now. And as Jen was alluding to, there were marches all around the country in defensive reproductive rights today. And yeah, it's a real, it's just, I mean, it's been ongoing, right? Since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal. And one of the things I didn't tell you about you in my introduction is that I co-founded something called Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom, which is a font. I hope you wouldn't otherwise afford it. And like this is not new. I think it's a really important thing to think about. So, you know, in a very short period of time after Roe v. Wade was legalized, the Hyde Amendment was introduced, which is an annual budget amendment that means that federal dollars can't be used to pay for abortion despite it being a safe legal medical procedure, which means that states have to supplement if they want their Medicaid dollars to be able to be used for abortions. And most states, many states don't. Vermont does, but many states don't. So, even immediately after abortion was legal, it was still inaccessible to so many women or people who didn't have access to medical insurance. And there's always been this huge stark divide. And so, what we're seeing now as a landscape where that divide is just going to grow and grow and grow. But I want to say to you that I think Vermont has a really important role to play in the future of access to reproductive rights because we're one of the states with the least restrictions. We just did a statutory, we just amended our state law to affirm the right to abortion a few years ago and we're about to amend or change our constitution. And you'll get to vote on that in November. That's the legislation. You know, like right after the Texas law, there was already women coming to Planned Harvest right over Vermont to get abortions. And that's going to continue to be the case. So we have a big role to play in this state in this battle as long as we can continue to affirm and unfold the degree of rights to reproductive freedom that we have historically. I think another parallel is the right to vote. It was never fully won. And it is being eroded even more again. So women of color, people of color were always kind of even with the ratification of vote for men and then for universal suffrage, it was not universal. And now it's being eroded again and we're fighting many of the same battles with many of the same stuff drama that was going on on the stage with some of that same drama that's going on again. So that's a stark parallel. So steal yourself for the ongoing fight. It's not over yet. And actually access to voting rights or lack of access to voting rights and redlining and gerrymandering is a direct tool of the anti-choice movement too. That's how they're able to pass these super restrictive laws in places where the majority of people actually support access to voting rights. So there's a direct connection. Always have the same story, different date. We can get anything out of it. Anybody else want to? Yeah, in addition, I thought both of those things are really stark for me. And I think also the differences going back to the conversation around the racial tension, that's still very present today. And the generational differences, and I think that while a lot of progress has been made and we're able to have these conversations and have them more openly, that in a lot of the organizing communities this is still a real issue as far as who gets access and who gets voice. So continuing to shine light and truth into this place is going to be really important. Yeah, and another quick thought too is I think it's also socioeconomic. People with means, certain laws don't affect them as much.  So, you know, a lot of those things, you know, it's very easy to set the bar to preclude access, whether it's to abortion or voting. It's definitely being utilized today. So those are the ends of our questions. Now we are open to your questions. Anyone have any questions for the panel? Um, but... What? Were you excited for any dining room table conversations? And perhaps some of the intergenerational conflict between you and me? Julie, you know my mom is in the front room. All the tension is... I regularly talk with Penny. Like, we are... Racism is the soup we swim in. So, yeah. And one of the exciting things again in my work with Laura, I think the kitchen table conversations were often between Laura and I, as we were developing the work, was... It really is, yes, Anne. Can we... These women did amazing things. Like, the scene that Laura staged with Sarah as Alice Paul getting forced fed. Um, I think it's so dry. There's a lot of words from the actual suffragists in the play, obviously in the re-enactment, but those are Alice Paul's words, and they're very dry on the page, and Laura brought that to life, and we should honor that. But Alice Paul also told Ida V. Wells to walk in the back of the parade. And so it's that tension of, yes, Anne, and I think that is in our life of... Yes. You know, our schools are not equal. They may be integrated in some ways, but we still are not serving every child in the way that we should from particularly children of color. And so that tension is in the soup that's the soup we all swim in. But I do take inspiration from being pushed. My daughter certainly has been pushing me a lot on the language I use when thinking about LGBTQ plus young people. So that's, she's keeping me on my toes. Savage. Yeah. So, a little bit. Thank you. Julie also gave me a lot of, like, can we up the language here? So, I appreciate you keeping me on my toes, too. We had some great conversations, like, right back at you, Julia. Who did you fall in love with? I love Victoria Woodhall. We love Victoria Woodhall. She's a geniuses, though. It's tough, and I remember there was something in our school. Laura, you're right. And Kathy and Sarah, and somehow, I don't know, we haven't talked about her in each other's movement before. And I think you said, well, yeah, she's great. She also is a geniusist. And I'm like, she would like people like her. She would support her, and people would like, well, Julia, that would be a good place. She actually would probably would. And also, she would still acknowledge that she did wonderful things. And I said, well, that's really hard. That's work. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you got me. Yes. Through an unusual circumstance, I became very interested in the women's suffrage movement in 2011, and we read about it for about ten years, nine years. Anyway, and became familiar with many, by reading biographies, many of these women. What I learned is the story, the umbrella story of suffrage is so interesting. There's so many amazing women and men who are involved. And I was very excited to come here tonight, and I appreciate what you did very much. My question to you is, given the richness of the umbrella story, how did you ever choose which people to include? You have to choose the complicated people. And so there are some, like, we all love the pre-chamades, but we, the people who I, you know, there were more in there that I had to cut, but because I, as I was able to work with my readers and my actors to find, like, what is the contemporary story and how does the historic story be that contemporary story? So I had to pull in the people that fed that big fight between the character, Blaine and Deborah, like who was going to push the two of them together. So that's our theater company's complications company, because we look for what's complicated. We look for that conflict. And, you know, there, I could really, there's enough material for more, but for this particular piece in the story, these are the suffragists that I found. If you will come together and I agree. Oh, thank you. Contemporary story. Yes, gentlemen? I just wanted to say this was a wonderful piece of very entertaining and powerful theater, live theater that we saw. And you literally broke the fourth wall so many times. And it was, your actors were amazingly just so present. And I kind of felt like I kept on going back and forth through time. I kept on being reminded that it was 2021, but also going back and the blocking and the timing. This was like, this looked like it was the 15th performance, not the first. I just couldn't agree with it. I concur with him, but I also want to say, you know, one other struggle that doesn't get recognized as often in the whole women's suffrage movement is that women who were for peace, the women's international league for peace and freedom, women who were fighting for peace kind of got pushed to the side too. They were sacrificed in all the compromises. And so you don't hear about those women because, you know, what I was taught in school was that the reason women got vote was because of all the work they did for World War I and blah, blah, blah. And that was really pushed at that time, the idea of patriotism and supporting it. And somehow to be a woman for peace against war, like Jeanette Rankin and some of the others was considered bad. So they too were pushed to the side. The whole peace movement and women's involvement in that was pushed to the side. Oh, another American theme. Trouble it. Hi, yes. Hi. Wonderful job. It was really great. Thank you so much. So great to be back in the theater. Yay. I'd like to just also comment that activism is really hard. And I think you really reflected that.  But I think it's a really important message because anyone that's doing any activism today it's just not fun.  And I will also mark it echo under the peace movement and as also there were one other population you might want to just even throw a nod to are the Jewish women that were fighting really hard at the early part of the century. And going along with the war movement they were Yiddish anarchists who weren't working on the feminism but not the suffrage movement. So it just might show up somewhere in there on the next draft. Thanks. The design and the staging and everything. So what were your ups and your downs and your thrills in this whole process? Well, first of all what would be your great doing? Yeah. Knowing that we were going to have this project to come back to when the pandemic would allow us to was a nice beacon I think for us and for the actors as well. Something that Mary Beth has underplayed a little bit is the number of readings we actually did of this work. There were this play and also our company complications company we are devoted to complications in the network but it's a specific reference to dramaturgy that both Mary Beth and I are deeply committed to creating a process based dramaturgy that focuses on the project itself and that means developing a system that will best serve the play in whatever the play happens to be. And this play because it was so much a story of so many women and we knew that we needed to take it to some places that might get dark and we wanted to make sure that we were as inclusive as we could be in one hour that we ended up having a number of public readings at different stages of the script and sometimes they were public reading actors and sometimes they were reading panels where we had panels to read and to reflect on and zoom, oh my gosh. But that process I think it definitely showed up on stage today that we saw that the script, we were able to bring the script to a place that Mary Beth could really tell the story that was in her heart and not just the one that was in her brain and that was really exciting to see. For me personally, my life went upside down when I realized that I wasn't going to be able to pull my costumes out of a trunk from the corner but if I wanted to honor these women's stories that meant we had to go and get really detailed with costumes and so yeah so I've been buried by the sewing machine for a few months trying to get everything to give them the right look because that was part of it too that the suffragists movement was the type of visuals that they created, they created these banners these big banners that the silent sentinels had in front of the White House are really iconic and to the idea of having the big signs of the protests and all of these things, some of the visuals that we have from that era the early 20th century era are truly remarkable and so trying to figure out how we would incorporate those into the visuals of our work was a lot of fun but also a lot of work and trying to find a way to create a sort of this in between world that our actors could belong could bring to audiences all around Vermont that was open and engaging and interesting and visually pleasing but also had strong roots and reflection in the actual movement itself so that was a tremendous amount of fun but the best part of all, and Mary Beth I know will agree with me was when we landed our Dreamcast that was a big, big deal for us and I want to also thank all the tremendous actors who helped us along the way because we had so many different readers coming to join us on Zoom and in real life for the past three years and we've heard a lot of fantastic Vermont women read these roles and not in an audition perspective but really just there to let us hear these words in different people's mouths and to understand what that might mean and how that changes the story and all of those things and that was really terrific but especially when we were getting down to the final wire and we had figured out that Mary Beth had really like found and had really found this story then we knew we needed to have the right folks for this and I couldn't be happier with the three fantastic performers who agreed to join us for this crazy little trip and our amazing stage manager, Caitlin he has to know exactly what order those cards have to be in oh my god, those cards yes, I love the cards the cards are my excuse to buy myself a nice copy of Adobe full creative suite so I was happy that I got to do that and I had an excuse but yes, so maybe Caitlin has to know what order those cards have to be in for every single show and honestly I know I can't do it so I can my hats off at all times that's all I want to say, except I love to have stuff thinking about the coming around actors being hard I think that education is one of the most important tools we have towards activism I mean can't change anything and the timing of this is great so in my classes this week we've been talking about suffragism and second wave feminism in general and so I asked two classes so I told about 40 students, first year students who had heard of the suffragists before and two of them said yes and so I think thinking about what this play can do you can see it and where it can go I would encourage you or anybody who's connections to education out there to see how we can get this to more people because this is where activism happens from it gives us a lot more to work with so I'd like to share that I want to jump in on that one, sorry because I do have an anecdote from something that happened in one of my, I'm adjunct at Northern Vermont University, Johnson where I teach in the performing arts and I'm currently working on a project called Unburn Me about Joan of Arc where it's a device work that's being done about Joan of Arc there with the students and while we were working, I had a group of students who were working on different areas, now this group part of their pandemic thing last year where they had their devised work they, Isaac was directing Isaac was directing the show he's the head of the department there and he thought it would be fun because of the centennial to do a play that was themed about the suffrage, he thought that would be a terrific topic for the students to dive into and since he knew that Mary Beth and I were working on this project he invited us to come and over Zoom to let the students read an earlier draft of the play, the draft that we were currently on and that we would then talk to them and do some dramaturgical work about like how plays, how you build plays and so that's how it is so all the students there and a few of my students actually came tonight to see the show which was great so they saw an earlier draft of this, but what I went to my rehearsal was about two weeks ago now and there was two young men who were there and they were working on an exercise for this Joan of Arc play that we were working on but it's sort of like they finished the exercise and they were waiting for everyone else to catch up to them and I caught an ear so that I heard and I heard Harry burn and I'm like, what? Okay, what are you guys talking about? and I'm like, oh we're just talking about suffragists and how cool it was that this Harry Burns guy in Tennessee that this little Republican boy from nowhere would be the person that passed it and the idea that these two theater students in Northern Vermont would be there chatting about suffrage made me think that I made me feel really great about exactly that, the power that these art things can have can reach much, much further than we ever think they will, so I won't doubt that.