mitchell kaplan. >> [ applause ] >> [ music ] >> well, well. i want to thank opera and lubar for those remarkable opening comments, and i'm also here to think somebody who is a friend, who is a friend to all of us in this room and is doing all of the kind of work that we heard them talk about. and i'm going to talk with a little story, because we are among the storytellers, right? so, i was 18 years old once. believe it or not. it was 1974, i was an english major then, at that point, at the university of colorado, and they ended up in boulder from miami beach, after reading a book, a book by jack. i had never before seen mountains or snow, but somehow, i figured, as only an 18-year-old can figure, that my destiny was to hang out on the mountaintop, watch for fires, and write poetry. that this was colorado instead of oregon, and that unlike jack, i was a poet, and wouldn't recognize a fire in the wilderness unless that wilderness included lots of palm trees. didn't matter to me. i was heading west, i was on the road. and as you probably see wher