Interview with Catherine Banks

Interview with Hope McIntyre and Catherine Banks

Hope Dive in. So, yeah, the first questions are things we’ve been asking everyone. And so how long have you been, have you been a playwright? How long have you been working as that?

Catherine Well, I, I wrote my very first play that was not produced, it was a one act play, so I wrote that in 1983. So, 40 years? I was like 23 or 24 and, so that was my first one. But, my first produced play was produced in… I started it in 1985 and it was produced in 1991. So really professionally, I guess, since 1991.

Hope Excellent. And what was the pathway to becoming a playwright for you? Was there training? Was there you know, how did you, how did you get into it?

Catherine I’m not trained. I’m not a theatre professional in that I didn’t go through a theatre program. I did take one acting course at Acadia. I’d have to say I just came to it through a passion for storytelling and dialogue. I moved around a lot as a kid, so we were really, my parents really taught us how to move into a new community is to do a lot of listening before you opened your mouth. And so I think that was kind of a foundation. And then in university, I kind of flirted with the feminist cabarets. I would do, you know, a short monologue or a short. I did a lot of cartoons, in university. But I really didn’t get into it until I was probably about 23. I moved to the city. My partner then went to law school and I was teaching full time and I wasn’t really writing enough. I had written, you know, really bad poetry, really bad prose. And so I just saw in the paper an ad, you know, write a play by Christmas, six weeks, a six-week course with Christopher Heide, who was well-known. And so, I took that. And I always say the very first day I felt like I’d come home, like writing that first scene. It just – I knew, okay this is it. This is, if I’m to be a writer, this is what it’s going to be. Yeah.

Hope That’s incredible. Yeah. I don’t think I knew that.

Catherine Yeah.

Hope  And what things do you attribute to your success? And I mean, I define success just that you’re still at it. You’re still doing it. You’re still getting productions, right? Yeah. So.

Catherine   Yeah, well, I think I just wanted so much to be, to write. I think I really had a passion for that. And I was fortunate in that I was in a very stable relationship and had children and I didn’t really have to remain teaching. So, I was able to work around kids. I was a stay-at-home mom. And so, I did have periods of time, very little at the beginning, of course, until they went to school, but a little bit more. So, very privileged in that way that, that financially I didn’t have to do other things. And then, you know, the first ten years was an extremely lonely time because I didn’t live in a theatre centre. The theatre communities here were very established. There was Mulgrave Road and, you know, Ship’s Company. And there was a real sense of this adventurous group of people that I lived quite a distance from. And so, I had about ten years where I just had such a will. I just kept going because I had this will to write and then eventually met Tessa Mendel and, and then Tessa became my first theatre colleague. She read everything. She gave me feedback. She’s very encouraging. And from that point on, I started to grow colleagues. And so, I would say, you know, finding those people, finding that one person who believed in my work and that I could trust and same aesthetic, you know, not exactly the same, of course. But she had, you know, an interest in the type of writing that I was doing. Really, really, I don’t know what I, I’d probably still be writing without that, but I probably wouldn’t be produced.

Hope That’s, that’s fabulous. Yeah, I love that. Growing your colleagues like that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Catherine Very, very important. And I always tell my students, really find that person that you feel aesthetically attuned with because… and when they find it really nurture that relationship because so many of them, you know, they just go to anybody to get feedback and they have no clue. And that’s one thing Tessa actually taught me, because Bone Cage just wasn’t getting a production, wasn’t getting a production, wasn’t getting a production. And I had this one guy out west, he actually grew up in the Stewiacke Valley, where the play is set. I send the play to him. I was sure he was gonna go for, like, how could he not? And he wrote back a form letter almost, you know. And I just, I was so upset. I cried and cried and cried and cried. And I called Tessa in tears, and she said, Catherine, I don’t know why you’re so upset. Why would you allow someone whose aesthetic you don’t know upset you so much? And she was totally right, she was totally right. And that really kind of grew me into the next stage. You know, I started to really think about that when I was sending things out.

Hope Wow. Yeah, that’s a great advice. Absolutely. Is there anything that you wish you had known when you started out?

Catherine Oh, I wish I had known, I was thinking about this because, you know, I have so much trouble moving my work. Not, not to the West, thank goodness. Like people like you have done it, but into Toronto. Like, I’ve just never had a professional production in Toronto. I was talking with Guillermo (Verdecchia) about this and he said, because I took everything very personally, you know, when they rejected the play, it was like because of me like they didn’t like my work. I, I internalized all that, feeling terrible. And Guillermo said to me, “it’s never personal”. And when he said that, that was another growing moment for me. And, you know, he only said it to me a couple of years ago. So, I really suffered for a long time. But yeah, so I wish I hadn’t been so tender with my feelings around sending things out. Like my son works in advertising and he can have the greatest idea that he knows it will work and the client is conservative and says no, and he just lets it go. I don’t have that gene. He must’ve gotten that from his dad because he didn’t get it from me. Yeah. So, I wish I had known that. I wish I had known the importance of networking in Toronto, because I would send things and I would get a rejection. And then I would just like, okay, I’m never sending in something there again, instead of like, actually going up (to Toronto). I remember I was so disappointed, so disappointed that I couldn’t get Nightwood to look at my work like they rejected everything. And I couldn’t understand why. Right? Because I consider myself a writer with feminist ideas. And, I think if I’d actually gone up to Toronto (it might have helped). So, the third thing I would say is that that was the other thing that I – I worked instead of saying, okay, this is my career and I have an equal responsibility to my career that my husband has to his career – so, he was a lawyer. So, anything that he had to do to with his work, I totally supported that. Whether it was, you know, whatever it was, if he had to work late for, you know, five weeks at a time, because it’d be like there was no question. But I didn’t take that space for my work and because I didn’t, I wouldn’t have said, can I, you know, take $500 and go to Toronto for a week and meet people. But if I had been more secure in it more and taken it on as a career, then I would have done that.

Hope Absolutely. Yeah, that’s no, that’s amazing. I think, because we still sometimes see our arts work as a hobby or like something we do for ourselves as opposed to a career. Yeah.

Catherine Yes, exactly. Whereas Mary Vingoe, her family stayed in Nova Scotia, her husband and kids stayed in Nova Scotia, and she went up and ran Magnetic North for like six years. Like, that would have been totally inconceivable to me, right? But she was married to an artist. So that’s the difference, I think too, is that the money in balance for me was a high stressor. Some people wouldn’t see it that way, but I found it that way for myself because I was not contributing money.

Hope Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s really helpful. Thank you for that. And, and I know as a teacher, like, you’re working with emerging artists, right? Yeah. Next question is really about like the gaps that you might notice in the knowledge of the, you know, those coming new into playwriting. What do you think they’re missing?

Catherine Well, I think for one thing that first of all, I’m amazed by them. I’m totally amazed by them. They just seem so, like, risk takers. You know, they’ll form a company. And I think that is actually grown out of like… when I grew up in my education everybody did individual projects. But by the time I was teaching, it was the group model. Everybody worked in groups. And these people have grown up in that model of working in groups. So, they’re totally comfortable having never done lights saying, I’ll do the lights, because that’s what they’ve done all their life. They have that, you know, they are risk takers in a way that I wasn’t. So, I’m really, I really love that. You know I wish they understood. I wish they, and this is not… this is just the youth, you know, it’s nothing to do with it, I’m sure it’s in every field… is that sometimes I feel like they think they’ve invented the wheel, you know? And it’s like, for instance, I know Mary Vingoe and her company, Eastern Front. They worked really hard to reach out to the African Nova Scotia community. They did so much work there. They produced a number of African Nova Scotia playwrights. They nurtured the acting community. And then we had 21 years or 25 years of white men in these positions, and they didn’t. And now the feeling is, oh, well, now finally we’re doing something. And, and I keep saying, Mary Vingoe. So, in the seventies (it was actually the 80s and early 90s), Linda Moore. And, you know, producing women. Like for 20, 21 years or something, there was maybe one Nova Scotia woman produced at Neptune. And, you know, that’s really hard. That’s really hard. So, I wish that there was more understanding of what came before. But I was the same way, you know, when I used to come home with my, you know, feminism and my mother would kind of roll her eyes like she knew all this that I was going on about, you know, And I was telling her something, right? Yes.

Hope Yeah. I think it’s every generation, right?

Catherine Of course, of course. Yeah.

Hope In terms of how like, we as like university, post-secondary educators, like, is there something we could be doing to better prepare theatre workers as part of their training, like people preparing them to go out and do this? As a profession.

Catherine Yeah. I mean, I think when I talked, and I haven’t talked to a lot of people about this, but my sense is that they wish they understood more about grant writing and the money side of it and how to, you know, just how to do that early work and get on the grant system or get some feasible way of earning money. How to run a company, those kinds of things. And maybe it’s being done now, but it wasn’t, hasn’t been in the past. So, I think the practical… I think what they really want is the practical end of it. They’re quite comfortable in the creative realm, but it’s the practical.

Hope Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Which is. Yeah, very much that feedback. We hear that too. And that’s very much why we’re doing this project because, yeah, we, we I think, spend a lot of time teaching them how to be actors or how to get to write or how to, but not how to actually make a living.

Catherine Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Hope Yeah, that’s great. So as a playwright, this is a harder question, but how do you secure work? So how do you, how do you get your work produced?

Catherine Yeah, well, I, I think I’ve only ever once had a – well, I know I’ve only ever once been commissioned to write a full length and you know, I don’t write companies asking to be commissioned. I remember someone said to me after Bone Cage won the GG, oh you just must have so many offers coming in for commissions. I was like no, and it didn’t happen after It Is Solved by Walking won either. So, all my scripts I just write because they’ve appeared and I’m writing them. I’ve hardly made any money in my life as a playwright, I have to say. And it seems like because the Playwrights Guild is not a union, we don’t have a lot of, you know, power, behind requests or, you know, like I think when you think of, oh, a stage manager has to be paid this and actors have to be paid that. And, but that is there’s nothing like that for playwrights. Yes, 10% of the ticket price, but when you have a tiny theatre doing your work, well, there’s just no way. I mean, I did say to Mary, when Mary did Solved, I said, okay, I want to be paid what the director’s being paid. And she was like, you know, she’s got a tiny little company. And she goes, really? And I go yes.

Hope Good for you.

Catherine And she did it. And then, but now she always says to me, well, why don’t you just ask what the director’s being paid? I mean, you made me pay you that. But the thing is, it’s so precarious, right? It’s so precarious right now. So, with Downed Hearts, for instance, you know, I, I yeah, I had to, because Neptune was paying me, they paid me the first installment of $5,000. And, you know, because it was canceled, I didn’t get, you know, I’m not going to go… they’re a couple of million dollars in debt. I’m not going to go ask for $2,500 from them, right? And, you know, and these two little companies, same thing. I’m not going to ask for $4,000 from this tiny little company that, you know, it’s a big play, it’s six actors, it’s got a big set, you know, so it’s that thing, right? It’s that thing. And because I’ve never had a mainstage production of my work, I’ve never had a big paycheck, right? So yeah. So how do I make money? I don’t make very much. I only make, I would say in a good year with teaching and you know, cobbling together different things I don’t think I ever made, discounting grants, and I haven’t had a lot of grants because I – I went through a period where because I was so financially secure in my relationship and I saw all these poor writers. I stopped applying for grants for a lot of years, and then I didn’t apply until after I was divorced. So, you know, a good year for me is about $14,000 in playwriting money.

Hope Wow. See, I think people, because you’ve won Governor General Awards, they would they would be surprised, right? Yeah. But the productions that you do get, even though they don’t pay you, yeah, I would agree, they don’t pay you, any of us what we should is being that we’re the beginning of the production. How, how have you secured getting the shows done. Have you found that you have to reach out to people, reach out to you like, the productions you had.

Catherine Yeah, I would say I reach out and, you know, send my scripts. I would say, sometimes, you know, sometimes I’ll have a reading and then somebody will be interested in something because they’ll come to a public reading and really like something that happens. But I would say at least 75% of the time they’ve heard about the script through, you know, some… 75% of the time I’m sending the script out and then the other 25% that they’ve attended a reading or, you know, they they’ve met me and I’ve talked about the play or something, you know, and they’ve said, send it to me. Yeah.

Hope Excellent. Yeah.

Catherine I have an agent, but the agent, my agent, and it may be different for other people, I think Colleen Murphy works really closely with her agent, but with my agent, she really, she doesn’t send my work out for me. She does occasionally like it when you know, when Solved won the GG, she sent it out, with the announcement and stuff. But mainly she does contracts, which I hate. So, you know, once I’ve secured something, then she takes over.

Hope Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard that about most, I think a lot of the agents. Yeah. And then in terms of like when you’re sending it out like, you know, for others in, in, in their theatre work, there’s a portfolio, there’s something that they send to people. So, what is it that you use to kind of demonstrate? Is it just sending the script or do you include other information?

Catherine Well, mostly I’ve read through, through… looking at websites. I always go on the website first, see what… you know. It’s that the usual thing. You go on the website. Ah, they do plays that are similar, you know, like are they just doing, are they doing Norman Fosters or are they doing more serious work or are they just doing musicals or whatever? So, you know, you find that one that seems to be doing something that’s aligned with your work. You really check, see what they want. Like, I was really surprised, Michael Shamata wants you to send the script in the mail. So mostly what they want is they want a synopsis. They want the list of characters, and they want the first 10 to 15 pages and they want a bio of who you are. And that’s usually what I send out. And then you say, you know, let me know if you’d like to read the rest of the play and I’ll send it on. And I think that, you know, there’s one guy wrote on Twitter something like, why don’t we just all send our scripts and they can stop reading at ten pages if they want. But I think there’s a barrier for them. They go, oh my God, I’ve got to read that script. But if it’s ten pages, they can actually just have their lunch and say, okay, well I’ll just read these ten pages right now. Right. Oh, it’s kind of interesting. Okay. Or no, this is never going to work for us. What does she mean? Six characters. Good God.

Hope Oh, and it’s funny that sometimes that list of characters is where it stops, stops them. Right?

Catherine Oh, totally. Totally. Yeah. And I’ve never paid attention to that. Yeah. Badly.

Hope Any and any, like, I mean, I always encourage my students to, like, spend some time looking at good synopses and, like, figure out how to write a good bio and, yeah, yeah. Any, any tips around like how to make sure what you’re, what you’re submitting is strong?

Catherine Well, it’s always good to let someone else read it when you do a synopsis, especially a synopsis. I find now with my bio, I don’t go, you know, I don’t start I wrote my first play in 1985, you know, I don’t do that. I, just highlight the three or four career things. I mean, because they can Google you, but the synopsis is really important. So, if you’ve worked with someone on the play, you can just hand, you know, I would send something to Tessa (Mendel) and say, does this sound about right or is there anything that’s not here that I should add? And yeah, so just getting, getting some feedback before you send it out. They’d really like it if it was under 500 words.

Hope Excellent. And yeah, in terms of, and I know primarily as a playwright, like your collaborators would be more of directors, right? Or dramaturgs. But are there certain things that that you look for in those collaborators that might.

Catherine Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Like with my work, you know, I do have magic realism quite often, and so I need to work with somebody who is comfortable with that. And I have had experience now with enough dramaturgs that I actually know who I want to work on a particular play with. And it’s really interesting. So, with Downed Hearts, I’ve been working with Mary Vingoe and Mary, Mary, you know, she herself writes very political plays and they’re factual plays. They’re not – there’s no magic realism in her work generally. And she, you know, and same she worked a long time with Wendy and that’s Wendy Lill, that’s the same. So, with Downed Hearts, there’s definitely realism. And so, Mary and I go back and forth on that. We had some really good discussions and Mary’s good for me because she makes me talk about every question. I have to justify it. So I have to work. Work it all through. I can’t just be airy fairy completely. But at a certain point, I needed to work with Lois Brown. And Lois Brown is a Newfoundlander and she is very comfortable, very, very comfortable in the magic realism. And so, you know, I worked with her briefly on the script. And, you know she comes back instantly with, because I have a character who appears and we don’t really know where she’s come from, she might have been from the plane crash, but highly unlikely. But who is she? And, Lois said, well, she’s a mermaid, like that. And then we go forward from there, right? You get attuned to what you need, but you also have to allow yourself to be stretched. And Mary stretches me in ways that are really important. Yeah.

Hope That’s fabulous. Yeah. And any resources that you would recommend to, to students or emerging, emerging playwrights, anything that that you find is helpful as a resource.

Catherine Well, I always encourage them to join the playwriting centres wherever they are. I think those centres are just fabulous. They’ve done so much for Canadian theatre. I encourage them to join PGC. I encourage them to read. I always ask at the beginning of every playwriting class, I ask them to tell me about the play that changed their life. And, you know, it might have been a play they saw when they were six, or it might have been one they saw on Broadway when they were 18 or whatever. But I ask them, and then I have kind of an idea of what they’ll be aiming for in their own work. And then I encourage them to read. I encourage them to read, you know, the well-made plays. I really do. Like All My Sons, Death and the King’s Horseman, Wole Soyinka’s beautiful, beautiful play. And because I just feel like they are, you know, their structure is so clear. The journey of the character’s so clear. The tension is so clear. It’s kind of like that, that thing you hear about artists. Well, first you learn to draw and then you can throw everything out. And that’s kind of like what I feel. You don’t have to write that way. But I think they should know those plays well.

Hope Yeah. Again, understanding those rules, not rules, but, but what audiences have but also been trained to expect.

Catherine  Yes. Yes.

Hope That’s great. And any advice for, for, you know, students leaving the training or starting to enter the profession?

Catherine I always tell them if they’re writers to write, they don’t have to be writing plays, but they do have to write. I, for instance, for a lot of years, I only had, when the kids were really young, I had half a day, twice a week to write. And so, I, that’s not very much time, but I was probably writing two letters a day, two long letters a day, to friends. I had, you know, a bunch of friends that we wrote almost daily to, like Laura MacLauchlan and I, we wrote, I’m sure, daily. And so, I was always expressing myself with words. And I’m really grateful because we were also talking about very intimate things. Right? We were talking about things like maybe marriage wasn’t going well. I mean, really from the heart. And, I think that really helped me be a better writer in my playwriting, too. So, I always say, keep writing, keep going. Like it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard. And you have to really want it, I think. And you have to be, but you have to have compassion for yourself. And that’s one thing I didn’t have for myself. I constantly, constantly questioned whether I was good enough, whether I should even be writing plays. I wasn’t making money, I wasn’t contributing. I was getting all these rejections. I had my first production when I was 34, and then I had two productions when I was 43. So that’s a really long gap. And then it was another seven years before I had another production. So, I had long periods of time where I was just filled with self-doubt. And I never once said only 20% of women are being produced. It was always, my plays are bad, my plays aren’t good enough, like I always made it about me. So, I think they have to have compassion for themselves, they have to find that nurturing person that will encourage them build, you know, important relationships in the theatre community. And I see them all doing this. They’re amazing. You know, I see them, their kindness towards each other, their generosity towards each other. It’s just so lovely. I, you know, I have these, before COVID, three or four times a year, I would have women it was called Women in Theatre in Sambro (where I live). And, you know, it had different artists some emerging, some mid-career and some senior and some were playwrights and some actors, some directors, and they would just come and be in my living room and I’d serve coffee and cinnamon buns and we’d spend the afternoon just networking and chat about, you know, theatre. It was so, so lonely when I started. So, so lonely. I said to Mary, I think this would be a good thing for the emerging writers. And so, Mary and I kind of did it together. And after they left, after the first time, I said, I feel so inspired. You know, I do. And so, I would say to them, you know, seek out, you know, just don’t hang around your group. Like, seek out people that are, you know, ask the senior artists out for coffee, ask the mid-career person out for coffee and get the benefit of their experience. And because you will also be giving them something very precious. And it just builds such a healthy ecology of, you know, relationships within the community to have. I go to shows now, I used to go to shows and, you know, I would say hi to my age group, but now I have young people coming up and speaking with me because they’ve been in my house and this (past) summer, because we hadn’t gathered, for a while, because of COVID, I just opened my studio and said, anybody who wants to come for a writing retreat for one day can come out and I’ll serve soup for lunch. And, you know, they just hung out in the studio for the day. And there was only a couple of people that took me up on it. I think you constantly have to figure out how can I give back? And really important I say to the young people, you know, be on the board, be on the board of your local playwriting centre. You’ll meet so many people. And, you know, get on the board of PGC, serve and serve and you’ll get, you’ll contribute, but you’ll also get back in a big way. We’re a small family of playwrights across the country and so it’s just really important to put yourself out there and, join, join in. Because otherwise it’s, it’s too hard.

Hope Yeah, well, good for you for doing that, that is so important, like that community building, right? Yeah.

Catherine Yeah, I thank Carol Bolt for that. Because Carol, I went on the board of the PGC, you know, I had my first professional production. I went on the board, she asked me on the board and she just like she took me under her wing and she demonstrated community building to me. Yeah. And how important that was and, you know. Yeah. Wonderful woman.

Hope Before we, we go to the future, which is just kind of a last general question, I’m just gonna go down to the more self-employed kind of questions because we’ve been talking to people who work at theatres and people who freelance. Are there any particular challenges of managing your own career or yourself as a business? You’ve, you’ve mentioned a few. But anything else you’d want to highlight?

Catherine I mean, I’m not much of a business person. And so, I listen to Mary and, you know, somebody will ask her to do something and, you know, and she’ll say, oh, they wanted me to do blah, blah, blah. And they were only like maybe a teaching gig and they were only going to offer me $500. So, I’m not doing that. And, you know, it’s sort of knowing your value. And I guess that’s the one thing I struggle with. I don’t really know my value and I’m not the only person who is like that. Sometimes when you need money, you’ll take very little because you really need it. Right? So yeah. So, I think I’d be a little more, trust that I have something to contribute. I have trouble with that. So, I think that that would help.

Hope Absolutely. And that kind of, that’s I was a little bit into like, when should you say no to something? So, is there anything that would make you say no to someone wanting to produce your play?

Catherine Yes. If, you know, you have this kind of gut reaction and I have this example. This young man who directed Bitter Rose, he did, he did. He directed it in 20, I think it was 2017. And so, I learned a lesson because always before I wasn’t very good at saying no. But I’ve been taught a lesson. So, he came to me and said he really wanted to do this show. And he had an actress in mind. And I felt that the actress wasn’t the right person for this role. And she, you know, she does fine in other roles, but not this particular role. And so I you know, I tried everything to get him to audition other people and he just kept saying, no, you know, why wouldn’t you like… No, no. And so anyway, I did say to him, she’s not the right person for this role. And he said, oh, no, I disagree. I’m sure she is. And of course, she wasn’t. And so, you know, afterwards when we had a chat about it, he said, well, you should have said no. And, and he’s right. I should have said no. So, I think the thing is, you have to work with people who listen. That’s what you’re looking for. So, you know, and on the other side of that, when I was, you know, looking for a production for It is Solved by Walking, I met with a first-time director. I’m not going to remember the name of the company; I’ve been trying to think of it for the last two days. In Calgary, the feminist company, it’s changed its name now – I forget what it used to be called. But Kat Waters was the director, and so, you know, we were sitting around talking about the play, and she was so excited about it. And she said, “I want to do this play in April because I want people to come out in the spring air”. And I was like, you can do it, you know, because that’s the instinct. So, you know, you have that feeling. Mainly it’s listening really carefully and trusting how you’re reacting to that. But is, does that person listen? Yeah, That’s great. Yeah. Excellent.

Hope Yeah, That’s great. Yeah. Excellent. Anything you want to say about self producing as a way for, for folks to get their, their work?

Catherine  No, I’ve never done it.

Hope That’s, that’s okay. But you have worked closely with some of the productions of your work. I know. Yeah.

Catherine Yeah. Yeah. You know, I’ve never. You know, I’ve, well, I guess technically I self-produced, well with other people, with Bone Cage, and I hated it, and I was terrible at it. And I never, ever will do it ever again.

Hope That, that is fair. And then the last question is just about any thoughts on the future of theatre. What should we be working towards in student readiness or trends or changes you hope to see?

Catherine  I’m very excited about the changes in theatre. I, you know, I think that we’ve heard the same, you know, there’s a period of time when we’re hearing the same stories over and over and over again, hear this from the same, you know, cohort or whatever. And now we’re, you know, it’s just been open, opening up. And it’s amazing. It’s really different. It challenges us, but it’s… theatre so needed it. It so, so needed it. It’s like the seventies was a very exciting time. And then it just went into a period of being very staid and, and now it’s opening up again. And, you know, even though I kind of feel like sometimes it’s going to leave me behind, it’s still, it’s just it’s doing what it needs to do. It should have done it years ago. And I and I’m very excited by the changes. Truly.

Hope Excellent. It’s amazing. This has been very valuable. I’m so glad you agreed. I think this is really, really important. And, and your perspective is so, so useful. Is there anything else you want to add? I know you have to go and one minute, but, yeah.

Catherine Um. You know, I think that I feel really blessed in being a theatre artist, I say to my students, you will know, you won’t make a lot of money. You’re just not going to. And, or there’s a rare person of course, but doing theatre, you will be enriched with the people that you meet. And so you won’t have material things but you’ll have this incredible enriched life that’s all about exploring what it’s like to be human. And there’s not very many people on the planet who get to do that. And really, it’s what we’re here for. We’re here to discover as much as we can about being in these bodies and moving around this planet. And I just feel so lucky like that I know you and you’ve done my work and I know people all across the country. Heather Inglis and, you know, it’s just like, that’s incredible. What a gift.