This interview was originally recorded on February 21st, 2024.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

Paul Horpedahl, production director

Paul Horpedahl’s career in the opera production world has spanned 45 years, starting with his first apprenticeship at the Santa Fe Opera. He worked his way through the ranks as carpenter, assistant technical director, and technical director in opera, theater, and movies, culminating in 22 years as the Santa Fe Opera’s director of production and facilities (1998–2020). At the Santa Fe Opera, he worked on over 175 operas, including numerous world premieres and co-productions with companies in the U.S. and Europe. Additionally, he led a team to redesign the seatback titles system and supervised the redevelopment of the Santa Fe campus and backstage support facilities. Active in OPERA America’s technical/production network, he championed safety and the open sharing of best practices in all production areas. Beyond Santa Fe, Paul worked at The Juilliard School, San Francisco Opera, and Skylight Music Theatre and taught at San Francisco State University. Since leaving Santa Fe, he has been called in as a consultant for many companies, including San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera Chicago, Washington National Opera, and the Washington Ballet.

Transcript

Marc A. Scorca: Paul Horpedahl, welcome. It is so good of you to take time from your schedule to be with us today, and to add your stories to our collective Oral History Project. Thank you.

Paul Horpedahl: Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Marc. I'm really touched that you would consider me as part of this amazing project.

Marc A. Scorca: You're borderline legendary, so we need to keep this going. Who brought you to your first opera?

Paul Horpedahl: That's a funny question. I grew up in Los Alamos only 30 minutes away from The Santa Fe Opera, so I do remember my parents taking us, as a family, to an opera once, when I was very small. I fell asleep during the show, and that was a time when your parents could take you out to the car, and bed you down in the backseat, and go back into the show, and nobody would frown upon that. So, that's what happened. I can't tell you what the show was. What I can tell you is that, when they woke me up to drive home with the rest of the family, I asked how it ended, and my mother just said, "Oh, he married her". So, I thought, "Well, boy" ... I heard "He buried her", and I was immediately intrigued as to how one might dig a grave on a stage to bury somebody, and I puzzled on that all the way home. That's my earliest memory.

Marc A. Scorca: Barely out of the cradle, you were already thinking about how to realize stage effects.

Paul Horpedahl: Well, it's a problem, right? How do you dig a hole on stage?

Marc A. Scorca: And I was trying to think what opera might include both "she married him" and "she buried him", and there are several operas where that is a possibility. Lucia comes to mind as a possibility. So what was the first opera though that really galvanized your sustained interest in this art form?

Paul Horpedahl: That's very easy; it was Tosca. That was my first opening night at Santa Fe as a technical apprentice, and it was an amazing, eye-opening experience for a college kid. Jack O'Brien directed it, and Clamma Dale sang Tosca, and she was absolutely spectacular, and also a very gracious human being to be around. So that whole production just swept me up.

Marc A. Scorca: It is so interesting how Santa Fe figures (as it would, given the fact that you were born in Los Alamos) so prominently in your formation of loving opera. And it reminds me, of course, that Charles MacKay discovered opera at The Santa Fe Opera, and Brad Woolbright was there for over 40 years. You have this remarkable element in your professional life of knowing and working with people at a company for decades and decades. It's really rare.

Paul Horpedahl: It is rare, and I cherish it. I cherish it even more now, than I did then. The older you get, the more you realize how lucky you've been. It has always bewildered me working at Santa Fe, because I always think, "Well, this is a very small company. It's a company I grew up with". But when you leave and go out into the world and find out the impact it has had on artists and technicians and administrators all over the country and even into Europe, it's staggering (when) you think ... what you're doing every day is that far reaching.

Marc A. Scorca: I'm glad you are appreciating that; it is true. I'm kind of curious - we'll get into this a little bit later - but which opera house was your first experience at Santa Fe Opera? Were you, I guess, as a child in the original Santa Fe Opera House before it burned? Or was your opera attendance after the first one burned?

Paul Horpedahl: Oh no, it was the first one. In fact, the night that the Opera burned, we could see it from my parent's bedroom window in Los Alamos; we could see the flames. So I remember that very clearly, waking up in the night to a lot of commotion, and going to the window and watching that from there. And then I started work as an apprentice in the (second) opera house. So I've been really lucky to ...have been ...in all three buildings and under all the directors, from John (Crosby) all the way through to Robert Meya, and everything in between. It's fun to think about.

Marc A. Scorca: I was never in the original opera house, and clearly it was flammable. It was considerably smaller, wasn't it?

Paul Horpedahl: The stage size itself is about the same; it was the auditorium that was smaller.

Marc A. Scorca: And in the original house, was the roof open to the sky, the way it was in the second house?

Paul Horpedahl: The first house had no roof over the audience at all; it was completely open. There was just a little bit of an extension over the front rows to protect the orchestra a little bit.

Marc A. Scorca: As time passes, fewer and fewer people will remember the open roof of the second house, now they've become so accustomed to having the comfort of being protected from the rain, at least from above. Sideways, who knows? So, in a way, you already answered it, but probably in a more advanced way, what first interested you in the backstage life? Here, you're going to the opera with family, enjoying opera, but backstage called you. What about it spoke to you?

Paul Horpedahl: To be honest, when I went off to college, I wanted to be a performer, but in high school, you did everything, right? You built the show, and you were in the show and all of that. So when I went off to college, (I) started at Arizona State in Tempe. Surprisingly, I was cast in the first show that I auditioned for, but in the meantime, I had to take all of the appropriate things, and one of those was 'Intro to Stagecraft', and nobody wanted to be there except me. I always liked having my hands on things, and the more the semester progressed, I thought, "Boy, nobody else wants to do this, but this is actually a pretty important part of the deal, and maybe this is a much better direction for me, because it's an open market". There are people auditioning to get into the scene shop, it turns out, like there are to get on a stage. So, that coupled with other friends who were doing that in other places, steered me pretty quickly towards that direction, so I transferred to University of New Mexico, because they had a very strong tech program there, and that was incredible. A lot of the students there ended up working at Santa Fe in the summers. So I heard lots of stories about Santa Fe Opera, but I wasn't convinced, because I grew up with that, and again, didn't understand the impact, or just what a big deal Santa Fe Opera was. So I had my eyes on the Guthrie. I transferred to the University of Washington. I did three colleges in four years, and got great experience from that. But among the people who were at Washington were a lot of people who had been at the Guthrie, and so I really thought that that would be an amazing way to get deeper into this business. I didn't get the internship there, but I did get a last minute 'come replace somebody at Santa Fe' phone call, and that really was the tipping point for me. I discovered what a big deal it was to be in opera, immediately working alongside people whose careers I had followed, like John Conklin. And in that festival situation, especially in Santa Fe, where everyone is rehearsing and all the construction is happening on site, it's pretty easy to be immersed with everybody and feeling like ...(for instance) I immediately had a relationship with the orchestra and with the artists and the apprentice singers, and that really was exciting to me, to participate in that kind of collaboration.

Marc A. Scorca: And I guess what you're describing is, to a degree, a unique characteristic of working at a festival where everyone does come together in a rather intense period, so that that multifaceted, strenuous teamwork is kind of that magic elixir of a festival, isn't it?

Paul Horpedahl: It is, and especially at Santa Fe. There's something about the air, and the beauty of the place, the outdoor venue, everything happening right there on campus. The cantina where everybody has lunch together. There's just so many things that helps bring that group together in a more collaborative way, and that was very intriguing to me - the teamwork and just the matrix coming together in a really incredible way.

Marc A. Scorca: Now, you began with this call as an apprentice-at-the-last-minute at Santa Fe. Is apprenticeship really a key point of entry for technical/production staff?

Paul Horpedahl: I really believe in the apprenticeship. It's a powerful way to get involved, first of all. It's a way to still be learning and protected by an environment that understands that you're still learning, but to be able to be assembling things in a professional way and collaborating with seasoned professionals all around you that can help you and guide you and feed you information and ideas. I found that to be very, very stimulating. And I think that's what gave me my career. Everything goes back to that first season, and the people I met, and the people that showed me trust and confidence in what I could do, and were willing to share all of their wealth of information and knowledge. It was a great place to be a sponge.

Marc A. Scorca: And I think in this area, perhaps more than others, there's only so much that can be taught in the classroom. Isn't it necessary for technical/production professionals to really learn while doing; that there is a limit to what can be taught in a classroom?

Paul Horpedahl: I think it's very, very true. What I gleaned from the technical directors and stage carpenters - my first full-time job was at Santa Fe as a carpenter, and this wonderful man, Gilbert Blea, who grew up in Tesuque, he was a cabinet maker, but he had learned to make scenery at the opera. He taught me so much in the first five months I was there, than I'd ever learned in school about how to read drawings and turn them into physical things, in an efficient and wonderful way. I think one has to go into it with an approach of gathering information as opposed to, "Now I've made it as an apprentice; I've learned all these things". And that's the other thing an apprenticeship does. I've always enjoyed watching the apprentices arrive at the beginning of the summer and they feel like they've made it, and they've have all of this knowledge from their education, and then after about two weeks, you see in their eyes that they realize (that they) have a lot to learn. And about a week after that, they're like, "And I'm learning it; look what we can do, now that we're learning it". So that process of that kind of a program is very exciting.

Marc A. Scorca: Early on, though, you didn't work steadily in opera; you did a little work in theater. You sort of stepped in and out, but opera kept pulling you back. Why?

Paul Horpedahl: I really enjoyed stepping out, certainly and that was fun. I spent a little time at Trinity Square, working with Adrian Hall and Eugene Lee as their house designer. The Santa Fe Festival Theater, which was short-lived, but I was there for their inaugural season, and that was really exciting and interesting. However, both of those were missing music, and I found out that I really, really missed that. I grew up with a lot of music around me in Los Alamos. There were always choirs and orchestras and bands and things like that in Los Alamos growing up. And I don't think I really realized how much that had a connection to me. So that's why opera kept pulling me back. Also, the complexity of it all, and the festival, frankly. But the complexity of - not only do you have actors and the production shops, but now you have singers and chorus and orchestra and dancers, and it is just a much more complicated puzzle to solve, and that really fed me. I enjoyed that complexity and trying to figure out how to massage all that into one common goal, and get that all to the right place for an opening night.

Marc A. Scorca: I'm glad you're attracted to complexity, as you describe it. You spent seven years at Skylight in Milwaukee, and Skylight has just a storied past from the old garage to the beautiful theater that Colin (Cabot) built there. When did you enter the life of Skylight? Was it under Stephen (Wadsworth) and Cesca (Francesca Zambello)?

Paul Horpedahl: It was right after Stephen and Cesca left. Chas Rader-Shieber had become the artistic director, and I joined the company about a year and a half before moving into the new building, so it was a super exciting time. I sort of look at Skylight as being a farm team for a lot of opera companies. We used a lot of young designers and young artists, and gave them an ability to do things they wouldn't have been able to do at other larger institutions. And there are a lot of those folks I still run into and collaborate with. Francesca and I, hitting into the shutdown, we had a lot of conversations about what we learned, by doing shows on a dime at the Skylight, and how to trim things down to the bare minimum. And so, as we were looking at the shutdown, and possibly coming back after the summer for a fall season, we were immediately on each other about, "Oh, we could do this, and we could do that", because that's what we did at the Skylight. That's what we learned. That's how we made that place run. So it's funny how that was so formative for so many people, and it stuck with me.

Marc A. Scorca: I was never in the original Skylight. Would you just share what the old theater at Skylight was?

Paul Horpedahl: It was an old tire recapping garage. The stage was about 14 feet deep and 45 feet long. We would shutter that in a little bit, depending on the scale and scope of the show. It was a hard ceiling above the stage with a pipe grid, so the clearance, I think, floor to the pipes was about 12 feet. It was like a letter box format before anybody knew what letterbox formats were. The whole stage was built on scaffolding over the grease pit for the tire garage. So that's where the orchestra was. They were down underneath that scaffolding, (with) not a lot of open pit space. You had to exit the building and walk around the back, and come in the other side through an alley if you wanted to make a cross from stage right to stage left, unless we managed to put a squeeze point behind the set, which was tricky, given how shallow it was.

Marc A. Scorca: How many people did it seat?

Paul Horpedahl: I think it sat around 130, 140. So, a pretty great space to work in though. It really ratcheted up your creativity as far as what you could do in there; ratcheted up your problem solving,

Marc A. Scorca: It makes the new theater sound like The Metropolitan Opera House. It is beautiful.

Paul Horpedahl: Well, it was by comparison.

Marc A. Scorca: So you opened that theater at Skylight.

Paul Horpedahl: Yeah. I was lucky enough to be part of the project of building it and navigating the whole move and subsequent budget enlargements, personnel enlargements, all of that kind of stuff. That was a great time.

Marc A. Scorca: And then you went back to Santa Fe and had another more than two decades there. And I guess, in this world where people change jobs a lot, what's a benefit of longevity, as you experienced it? The benefit of working with the same people for a long time?

Paul Horpedahl: Well, that's a big question. Certainly, in Santa Fe, there have been a lot of changes, because I got back there with John still in charge, and then the transition to Richard (Gaddes), the transition to Charles (MacKay), and the transition to Robert, but through all that, there are certainly a lot of people who hung on. Brad Woolbright is the perfect through thread of all of that, and he was an amazing person to have stick around. One of the benefits is knowing how each other works and their processes and melding those processes together, and being able to spend time massaging them and making them better; having a greater understanding of what each other's role is, and how to work with that and collaborate. It made the budgeting process really, really tight. The budget process when I left Santa Fe in '87 was exactly the same as when I came back in '98, because it worked really well for them. There had been tweaks and things, but generally everything looked the same and felt the same, so it was very easy to maneuver myself back in there because of that.

Marc A. Scorca: You raise the question of budgeting, and the importance of consistent budgeting, but it is the person in your position, who probably has control over more of the organizational expense budget than anybody else, and everybody probably shouts at you that they want more rehearsals, more scenery, more costumes, more lighting, more everything, and you're the one who has to say, "No, no". So, how do you manage that, Paul?

Paul Horpedahl: I look back at the things I've learned through the people I worked with, first of all - the technical directors and the managers, the leaderships that I've been blessed with working with - (they) taught me a lot about how to manage the numbers. But I'll go back to the Skylight and the collaborative atmosphere that we had there. Such a small, tight company with a dime for each show, and we were hiring mostly students right outta graduate programs as designers, and they really had high aspirations for what they could do when they came out into the professional world, but maybe not understanding quite what having a dime for a show might mean. So, I learned a lot there about how to have conversations with designers and directors about what their vision was versus what the space could accommodate, and what the budget could accommodate. And it taught me to really first get into the vision deeply with the team, which is not something I learned in school, for sure, but how to have a conversation and really understand where their vision wanted to go. And then, once understanding that, I think it's much easier to start sloughing off the things that might not be as important, because you can have better conversations about, "Well, I see why this particular thing is really critical to creating the story that you wanna tell, but this seems like it kind of came up as an afterthought, and it doesn't seem like it's quite the substantive element as these other things". And through those kinds of conversations, I just developed a better way of keeping that under control, and so took that with me to Santa Fe, and I think that that Skylight experience transferred well there to really get to the nitty gritty about what the production's about. Then it's easier to talk about, "Well, I can't afford this, but (what about..."?) It just worked really well for me in Santa Fe.

Marc A. Scorca: And yet you exude calm when everybody must be emotionally tied to what's going on in rehearsal, what's going on with the production; does it look good? Do we actually have enough time to light it the way we want? What skills do you draw on to exude the calm backstage control that someone must have?

Paul Horpedahl: Everyone has to find their own calm, as a production director; I think that's important. I think I found mine first from my father. When I started getting further up the food chain, he shared a book that was a favorite of his. He had a lot of leadership roles in the Laboratory in Los Alamos, and similarly to theater, to the arts, people aren't really trained to be leaders, they're trained to be good craftsmen, or they're trained to be good singers or whatever. There's not a lot of, "Gee, you are a carpenter, but now I want you to run the shop. Let me stop and give you some training". It just doesn't happen, right? It was the same in the science world, and so he gave me a book called The Rational Manager, and it sounds funny, but it was a book that spoke really well to me, being kind of a closet engineer, I guess, but it was really about how to problem-solve, and do it in a careful, linear way and not let emotion or unsound ideas get in your way; to really dig down to what the real situation is. So, that was a good start, but then I watched a lot of situations all through my career when people got excited, the problem persisted a little bit longer than it needed to persist. And (for) my rational brain, that drove me crazy, because I could see where the problem should have been solved, and when it finally did get solved, if ever, and that really sort of taught me that calm is always good, and no matter what's going on in my inside voice, my outside voice needs to be even and thoughtful, and if it's even and thoughtful, then I can bring along a team to better solve whatever that thing is, and it's just really important. It's worked well for me. There've been a number of situations that certainly could have gone a lot worse, not facing that way. Some of those I have gone home afterwards and thought, "What the heck was I doing, trying to pull us through that?" But the outcome was positive, and everybody felt good about it, and everybody felt like they had helped solve the problem too. So, that's a good benefit.

Marc A. Scorca: In all of my opera travels, whether to Skylight or to Santa Fe, seeing you is always like a safe moment that I knew I could kind of get behind you and your shield of calm would protect me. So, we hear today a lot from our general directors in all of our post-Covid zooms about the really desperate need for more technical production personnel, people with the skills, the interest, and not only I will say in set construction or running a show, but also in costuming and draping and cutting and stitching. Just all over the place, the technicians, the artists, the artisans within the production area are apparently just as rare as hen teeth these days. Why is that? Why is there such a dearth of available talent?

Paul Horpedahl: Well Marc, it's a good question. I felt that that was happening before the pandemic, and I think it's easy to blame that on the pandemic right now, but it was happening way before. I think a big part of it is that we, as an industry, have fallen very behind in proper support of our staff, financially. It's really easy to say to our staff, "Well, you know, we're a nonprofit and we just can't afford this; we need to put our money on the stage". Which is fine to a point, but I think before the pandemic even, there was a certain amount of burnout of that happening, and there's more and more big commercial operations that CAN afford that. I lost a lot of good people to the movies. I lost a lot of good people to Cirque du Soleil, and even consulting groups for building new facilities; a lot of people went off to do that before the pandemic. And the main reason was because they could not afford to buy a house; they couldn't afford to have a family, and the hours are ridiculous. I mean, let's be honest, everybody in theater works their own schedule, and it's all grueling. Everything end to end, it's grueling, and I've always said that to my staff at the beginning of every summer: everyone here has a really grueling job to do, whether you're playing a piano or you're building scenery, or you're in the box office, they're all grueling, grueling jobs. But there are jobs that take just a ton of hours to complete, and as an industry, and heck, even as a nation, we kind of feel like, "Well, I'm paying you to do that, so it doesn't matter how many hours. I'm paying you for all those hours, so you should do that". But after a point, you realize that you have no time at home, you have no time with your family, you have no time for vacation, and you're exhausted. It's plain-out exhausted. So all of those things - if you go to the commercial world, you can control that better. They'll have swing teams at different operations. They might have three different teams, so they have three groups running around the clock, if that's what they need. We have a hard time figuring out how to do that in our industry. So, that was all heading up into the pandemic. Then I think at the shutdown, I've noticed a funny thing that's happened. People who really stuck with the industry, and really were giving it 200%, felt really let down at the shutdown. Now, granted, millions of people were without work. Some people had the ability to go back to work remotely. If you're making wigs, you can't work remotely. If you're building scenery, you can't do that remotely, and so I think that left a lot of people feeling let down by the companies that said they were behind them all that time. "Boy, we love you guys; you're part of a family; you're part of OUR family, we're all working hard. I know we can't pay you what we'd like to pay you, but you're part of a family". And then suddenly there was a shutdown, and suddenly the family was immediately dissipated, and I think that was very, very hard on people emotionally, to understand why there was no help for those folks who couldn't work remotely. They couldn't find a remote job. So, that was the next step. And then during the pandemic, those folks realized, "Well, I can retool and I can go into a different industry, and now I can work a 40 hour week. I might not be doing my passion. My passion was opera, my passion was creating, but I can go over to a computer group or a construction group and I can get better money, more regulated hours, more time with my family, which I've learned over the pandemic is a pretty cool thing". So that was another step. Then another step after that, is people who toughed it out and came back, were being brought in at the same pay scale as they were two years previous and weren't necessarily being welcomed back in the way that they had hoped. And it was very difficult. Reopening the theaters has been a very, very difficult thing, not just for the administrative part of it, but remembering how to collaborate in the way that they did before; what all the mechanisms were that had worked so well. It was very, very hard. So, people have just gone away and decided they're not going to do that anymore, unless they are better compensated because it turns out that the emotional impact of being part of a family didn't matter so much. By the way, I've always loathed the notion that we're a family in a theater. I think that has an emotional impact that I don't think we should really be participating in.

Marc A. Scorca: Kind of attempting to paper over emotionally what some of the rough realities are, and promising a kind of emotional reward, that in the end may not be there, as you discovered. Your articulation of the very multifaceted causality here is really insightful. Thank you for sharing that. And I think in a certain way, the question of how can we recover from this is one that you have answered either directly or by inference in terms of bringing people back, and really rethinking what we do, and how we do it; how we pay for it; how the hours are allocated, because I know at your great company, The Santa Fe Opera, there were weeks when you were working, what, 18, 20 hour days because you were teching at night after a show closed in the early part of the season. So you were kind of around the clock for a couple of weeks,

Paul Horpedahl: About eight to 10, really.

Marc A. Scorca: Eight to 10 weeks?

Paul Horpedahl: Right. And there are ways to solve that, but it costs money. It'd be really great if there were two teams of apprentices on stage, so that they could share that time.

Marc A. Scorca: I said at the annual conference in Minneapolis, the first one that we did in person after Covid, and I made people laugh - I'll say it again here, "Opera is about losing money, and one just has to choose how one loses money, and does one lose money because it is a spectacular scene change? Does one lose money because the arts workers are fairly paid? Does one lose money because one wants to keep the ticket prices affordable? There are so many choices to make about how you lose the money. So, it's a matter of choice.

Paul Horpedahl: But I think if you want a company that has good continuity in your staff, that's where you're gonna lose money first, right? You're gonna lose money first on a good, solid staff that is supporting your vision and your dream. That just seems like the baseline for creating good art. I've often said to people, to my own staff, "You know, we don't need scenery to do opera; we don't need lighting to do opera. What we do need is music, and we need singers. So, let's go back to that and then figure out how to make it a more interesting, enveloping experience around those two things. We're not competing with the movies, we're not competing with television, we are bringing people into a theater where their hearts beat all together, as they listen to the music and hear that story. Nothing else competes with that. Nothing else competes with that live experience. So, we need to remember that, in my opinion, and then build out from that. What is helping tell the story? What is helping to connect with those people in the seats? What is making the story crystal clear to them that they are as passionate about it as we are?

Marc A. Scorca: Brilliantly said. Last question: you may have answered partially at least here, which is, young people, I'm sure ask you for advice about their career building. How do I have a career that really does make a difference in technical, theater/production management, and what advice do you have for them today, 2024? What do you tell someone who's in their early twenties wanting to build a career?

Paul Horpedahl: Well, I sort of look at it as 'How do I go about hiring people?' First and foremost, I want someone who really wants to participate, not as a solo lone wolf, but who wants to participate fully and collaboratively, who wants to be part of a real team. Through my own experience, I feel like, once you come into a place with that, you can learn so much about how to do your work, and how to integrate with everybody else, but it really starts with that desire to collaborate and to be passionate in that collaboration. If you can do that, then the rest of it's gonna follow suit. People ask "Do I need a master's program?" No, you don't need to have an MFA. No, you don't need all this advanced study. You need to get out there and get involved in a really solid team, and you need to participate, and you need to glean everything you can. Just absorb, absorb, absorb. I have been super lucky by having so many people around me who have wanted to share their career, starting in high school with Ross Ramsey, who ran the drama club. He just embraced everybody and made you excited about why you were there - and it's gone all the way through - Charles MacKay...it was just amazing sharing his wealth of information. But so are the carpenters. I loved having the apprentice technicians show up every summer, because I learned so much from them every single year. The part of Santa Fe that made me especially excited was all the people who came in, and then they left, and then they came back again, because the ebb and flow of ideas was right there with the tide of people that came back every year. It kept things constantly being refreshed. It kept me constantly learning and constantly growing, and I still feel that way, when I go off to whether it's the (Chicago) Lyric or Washington. I just did a show with Dimitri (Pittas) and Leah (Edwards) down at Charleston in the fall. It was great fun. I learned a lot, I learned a lot about the people in Charleston, the new design team that is coming into their own. I learned a lot from them. And I think that's key for anybody who wants to go in to the profession: be open and collaborative and keep learning from each other.

Marc A. Scorca: Well Paul, this conversation has been really profound in terms of not only the content of what you've said, but the spirit that you display in saying it. No wonder you've had a great career and contributed to great art at great companies. It is abundantly evident in this conversation. So, I want to thank you for sharing your insight.