civility and decency of this country are at stake in this election and you have to be involved in it. you cannot walk away from it. you're as responsible as anybody else, and the way you'll fix this is with your kids, and your grandkids. do me a favor tonight, please call home. get your grandkids on the phone and tell them you expect more from them. i just just want a's and win your softball matches. want you to be good people and i want you to treat not just your friend with respect. i want you try treat your enemies as well, shake hands, listen to those who disagree with you and learn. if you will reach out to your children and grandchildren there are 400 people in this room, you can make a difference yourselves. thank you for listening. hope you get to learn something from it. have a good election year. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> booktv continues now on c-span2. television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] >> okay. good evening, everyone and thank you for joining us tonight. i'm behalf of carmikal book. if way could take a moment with begin and silence our phones i'd greatly appreciate that. tonight we are joined by cassie chambers, whose memoir, hill women are honor ordinaries childhood in appalachia and the strong women who raised her he earned a degree from hard sadr law and working with domestic

violence survivores here in kentucky. join me in giving a very warm welcome to cassie. [applause] >> thank you for coming out in rain on a cold night. means to much to have everyone here. i want to think carmichaels for hosting the event. meese purchase becomes. let support them. and use our dollars to do that. so please at the end of tonight i'd appreciate if you would purchase your book and i'll be signing them at the signing table. so, what i want to do tonight is i want to -- i'm going to read some excerpts ol' "hill women pie --" hill woman "and after

that i'll have time for questions so meese anything that is on your mind, i would love to hear from you. this adiscussion and dialogue and i look forward to hearing your thoughts on the book and the subject matter and anything that you have on your mind. so the first part that i want to read comes from the introduction when i'm talking about the county and this book is done withto the poorest counties in all of america. is is sort of in deep appalachia, small county, 4500 boom, one of the highest poverty rates in america. it's hard for me to know which part of the county i should show the rest to the world. presenting the broken falling in places helps people understand the spent extent of the poverty i and i want them to know how deep it goes. many if they understand it, they can help fix it. but i also don't want them to think this poverty is all that

exists in appalachia. to see eastern kentucky ace hopeless, broken, dirty. that's not what i see when i look at this place that i love. i round the square and continue driving. along the way some of the laundry scattered with what appears to be junk. old car parts, refrigerators, children's toys. but i in the that for some people, the piles of seemingly useless stuff serve a purpose and an entrepreneurial one at that. people here make a living however they can. selling old car parts, repairing refrigerators, organizing yard sales. they collect anything of possible value apologies they never know what will come in handy. if nothing else they can sell the junk in a nearby town for 50 tuesday a truckload. they are always thinking of ways to earn money. help a neighbor, provide for their family.

creativity, effort, and unexpected places. some people look at this image of poverty with a sense of disgust. they see unkempt humans living in unkempt homes. others view it with a sense of pity. those poor people. trapped in such awful circumstances. i try to look at it with a sense of respect. to remember how hard they're working to survive and the overlooked corner of the world they call home. that last view of the county feels the truest to me. even if the other views fit more easily into the cat gores outsiders want to create. for me, there's hope in the spirit of a people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been systematically marginalized and many and women who take care of each other even when the outside worlds to not take care of them. and people who broke their bodies and tobacco fields and coal mines, to make a living in

the only community they have ever known. we don't take the time to see it. the hope and the poverty. the spark against the dreary pack trap. the grit in the mountain women. i've come to know that detroit well. that fire that fuels so many women in rural kentucky. i see it rather day in any clients. women, and the midst of a crisis, doing what it takes to keep. thes and their children safe. once i recognize it i saw its affects everywhere. the way it shaped people. families, communities. the way it has shaped me. of course not everything in the county is exceptional. exceptionally horrible, exceptionally virtues. whatever we want it to be. and many ways it's ordinary. full of normal people living normal lives. these lives take a different

shape and arc than in some other places put the basic themes are the same. people care about love, community, family. about a mile outside of town is a narrow gravel road that drops over the side of a hill. plunging steeply into the holler below. the holler is cow creek. shares its name with the stream that cuts through it. a few hundred yarded fare and i'm at the bottom of the valley. a small flat space. on the top of one of the hill it is a farm house, look out on the fields below. it resembles on elderly woman leaning i into itself, i folding around an every weakening structure. gray now. it is wooden boards warm and faded. but there are hints the white and green it once wore. there's a strength in its brokenness and it has withstood weather, time, and families.

it is vacant now. resting, watching, waiting, as each new day cascades into cow creek. this holler feels like home and this house feels like family. there are women stories here, stovers resilience, love and strength. this community knows them well. but their echo has not reached far enough some the outside world. instead these tales he ricocheted went the mountains, growing more faint with time. i want to tell these stories bus they matter. because i'm afraid they will be forgotten. because they have the power to make this community visible. and as i stop my vehicle and walk toward the house, the memories wash over me like the sunlight on the mountain hills. and so this introduction i thing says a lot pout why i wrote hill

women and how i see it being in conversation with some other depictions about appalachia we seeing being really popular in recent year. around 2016, it became -- there were at lot of things about written but appalachia and people're depicting the problems there and they were problems i saw, problems was familiar with. but what i wasn't hearing a lot about was the hope and the way that people are coping with those problems and the creative solutions and the strength of communities that are addressing these problems and addressing them well and so i wrote this book in large part to tell that side of the story, to show that there really is hope in he's humans hat people talk but to problems so often there's hope and poverty and strength in communities that struggle. i had always known this. had always been aware of these virtues of appalachia and the way that stringing communities have so much to offer. but it wasn't until i began

seeing that's other protrails, other books, movies, him ins issue realized that something but the the story of this community and the story of my family was noteworthy. when you grow up in this way and this your life story you don't know it's something that spin else would be interested in and then all of sudden the stories starts come ought but people who kale from the background of poverty and appalachia and went to the hall of ivy league and that somehow that was a you werey that was worth talking but and lessons to take from that. and i looked at people telling these stories, stories that in many ways had very similar plot points and i realize. from the outside that's what my life looks like, the story of my family's life looks like, looks like a story of being born in a trailer to two young parents pao couldn't afford to one the air conditioning and then going on to have the opportunity to away a degree from yale college and harvard law school but the way i thought but the experiences was very than what i was reading

about -- sir different from what i was rating pout and everything opportunity i had is because of my community and the people that shaped me. i talk but this book as i call the anti-bootstraps narrative because in some ways, we all know about the pull yourself up by you boot straps. get an ivy league degree. the take away from the story is the only wean i hads any boots as all was because not just of my immediate family and the immediate community but the generations who came before me and how the women in my family each tried to do something better for the next generation and for the women that came after them and that's really at its core what hill women is all about. a story but women and the ways they work to make their communities better and make their families better things better in the people that come after them. so just to give you all a little bit of context in a flavor for hill women and the stories that are in it, it starts off with my

grandmother. my grandmother i called her grannie, had a third grade education and she was born into extreme poverty, so pad her plank wet froes at night -- froze at night pause her house was so cold and the never got play or go to movies, never went out to riot or a restaurant or had toys. she lived a life that was hard and she started -- she was treated like an adult from the child she was a child and more than anything, even though she had not had the opportunity to get on education and didn't really have the ability to understand what getting an education meant, she wanted her children to be able to do better than she did. and to go further than she had been able to go. and so she had seven children, and sixth of which was my mom, and she pushed my mom from the time my mom wog born to graduate high school, go get an education, and because of that, and because of my mom's sister, ruth, who encouraged her to get a degree merck mom became the

first in her family to graduate high school and went on to graduate college. she went to la brea college, i see heads nodding, a wonderful place that allowed her to get a free education which is something her family didn't have the money for her to go to school to pay tuition and quite if she had to good into debt that wasn't something that people did so the wouldn't have had the chance to get her degree if she had the barriers in place. and my mom coming from that background, saw the way that education changed her life. and made the world smaller and opened doors for her and for her she felted like she had come so far from that holler in kentucky that nobody left, to being able to go to the college where see felt like she would learn buddieds and the world and just had her horizons broadened, she rateses me to believe there was nothing i wasn't capable of doing because she had come to far and she believed i had the

act to do anything the world i wanted to and so because my mom instilled in me how important it was to go and get an education, experience the world, take chances, because she had taken chances, i was able to go on and earn a scholarship to yale college and graduate from harvard law school: in. ...

>> when i was 5 my mother graduated from college. i remember getting a new dress for the occasion, the first i'd owned that was that fancy. it had laced trim and delicate flower print. my mother bought me a child-size graduation cap and gown and let me walk with her in the processional. we are graduating, i told my family as we walked past the aisle, graduating with her degree my mother changed both of our lives, how the value she had put in education had been in my core, better herself and her family would set me up for

success. the day after graduation ceremony the local newspaper ran a picture of the two of us, my mother and me standing side by side, i focused forward graduating to the next phase of our lives. and so the last thing that i want to talk about about the book and then i would love to hear your thoughts and questions and have a conversation about appalachia and depictions of appalachia and how it's rural poverty and different than urban poverty and education and these things, the last thing is my work paying it forward. when your community gives you opportunities it's incumbent upon you to pay the opportunities forward. for me that took the form of starting my career at the glades society, working with women in state of crisis, dealing with safety issues, trying to keep their children safe, trying to

protect their families and i worked in rural county surrounding louisville, i called myself a one-woman traveling law firm, printer and a laptop and met clients at subways and gas stations and public libraries and i got very good at figuring out how to get people to print things when they didn't have access to technology and e-mail thicks when they didn't have an e-mail address and i have fun memories from life on the road, but in this work, one of the things that was important to me was to find tangible ways to make the system better because my experience working in rural kentucky and in eastern kentucky showed me that there are a lot of barriers that exist in places that we don't necessarily see them. when i was working in the civil justice system, i saw the way that there were a lot of financial barriers that stopped women from being able to fully access the court system and keep themselves and their family safe, we talk about this a lot

in the criminal law context, a lot of people here, you know, you the right to an attorney, if you can't afford an attorney one would be provided for you and people don't realize that you don't have the same law in civil context. when i was working with the women trying to get protective orders, they didn't necessarily have a right to get an attorney and so i was representing them for free and sometimes -- it was helpful but wasn't always enough because sometimes you have to pay for things for having attorney appointed for your children, commissioner, pay hourly fees to have case heard on the docket, all the little fees that add up and one of the things that i noticed was that there was a law on the books that required women or anyone, if they wanted to divorce an abusive partner and the partner was in jail for assaulting them the law required that that person be appointed an attorney

which isn't a bad thing and if their incarcerated they should have a lawyer to make sure interests are represented. the problem with the law is who had to pay for the attorney and in the situations the person seeking the divorce, normally the person who had been, you know, the victim of the abuse and the person was in jail for abusing them, it was that person, the victim, that survivor that got stuck with the legal bill for that, i saw time and again how it made women feel and made them feel revictimized and hesitant to use the legal system to get release that they needed, they saw it as a place that didn't protect their interest and so i decided to work with one of my clients.

partnering with people who experience the problems the most to find solutions for them together and so i want to read an excerpt from the latter part of the book where i'm talking about janet and our work together. so what janet and i did together is -- is started off with me saying, janet, can i tell your story, can i use your story as a way to try to make the system better and janet had a pretty, you know, pretty dramatic story, she had experienced violence and abuse of her then husband, one night came home and he was intoxicated and assaulted her and fired pistol at her and bullet ripped through her clothing and clothes are in police custody, husband ended up

going to jail. at first it was just me asking janet if i could use her story, the fact that whenever she tried to get the divorce, she got stuck with a legal bill so that he could have a lawyer even though i was representing her for free because she couldn't afford an attorney, and every time that i've asked a survivor, can i tell your story to try to make things better for other people, the person has said, yes, absolutely, if my story can help someone, you know, use it and so the fact that janet had to pay for incarcerated husband to have an attorney although she couldn't afford one, that was something is that that's she we wanted to tell the world and she we wanted to use that as a way to make a change. and so i wrote an op-ed and i started to tell her story and started to get attention and lawmakers filed a bill and then at that point janet said i'm okay, i want to use my face, i i want to use my name, i'm not

afraid, i want to make the system better myself, and so janet and i had some conversations about how she could get involved, janet decide to go testify in front of the kentucky general assembly and go on the news media and just tell anyone and everyone that would listen about her experience and story and why it mattered and why things needed to change and as a result of that, a bill passed through the kentucky general assembly and was signed into one by the governor and it was called janet's law and named after her. to this day, it's the thing she's proudest in the world and i'm proud to have been able to watch her transform the system that had taken advantage of her and i want to read you a little bit of excerpt of janet and janet's law. my experience with janet was a powerful reminder about the importance of telling women stories, her voice led to

tangible changes in the state law because of bravery other women's lives will be better and each small win is just that, a win, each win is reminder that things can change also, remind they're people who have been victimized be it by spouse or unjust system are nonetheless powerful, some people portray survivors of domestic violence as weak, i think janet's story illustrates the opposite, when given the right tools, support and environment, these women are capable of changing the world. and so with that, i will conclude my reading part of the night and i really look forward to hear all of your questions. again, i want to thank carmichael's for hoping this event and please buy book in

your lock bookstores and with that i will go ahead and open it up to questions, there's a microphone at the aisle here and i know that to make sure that we are capturing the audio, they asked that you speak into the microphone if you have a question. [applause] >> any questions? okay. [inaudible] >> wonderful. >> so i think one of the books that you're talking about is hilly billy -- >> you got it. >> i would like to hear your reaction to that because i had a similar negative reaction to it because i had a great time growing up in eastern kentucky, you know, i was lucky and -- and was not in the poorest county and it was a wonderful place to

grow up at the time, and another thing that i want to ask you how do you pronounce vieanea sausages? >> viena? >> i will take that. [laughter] >> okay. >> well, that's good to know. yes, just a touch on that, i -- you know, one to have books that i think gained a lot of attention and really became what the rest of the world knew about appalachia was hilly billy ilogy and it's important for people to tell the story and i do think that the book talks about appalachia in a way that's helpful and focuses on problems and focuses on problems with people and doesn't acknowledge the way people are marginalized and how much honor and community

that's been marginalized over time, that was really one of the driving forces behind driving hill women trying to put something out in the world to show that what i think is the true view of after latchia -- appalachia and positive views of appalachia, they make a difference in the community and in the larger world and, i think that this is a book that -- i hope it is a book that elevates women's voices and tells women's stories, thank you for the question. any other questions? i see someone in the back. let me take hers and then i will get you. >> i wonder if you will tell us what it was like to write about your family and to know they

were both going to read it and people that didn't know your family were going to read it and -- [laughter] >> thank you for the question. so those who might not have heard the question, the process about writing a memoir and about your family and people who are going to read the book. to write a memoir, i think it's a really interesting process and there's a lot to be said, i think, you to work with an editor that really understands you and how your brain works and i'm lucky that my editor from valentine's book is here tonight and i hope you will stick around and hear she's because an incredible woman and i'm glad that she came down. but one of the things that she did a lot of was asking questions, you know, why did you make this decision, why do you think, why did so and so make that decision, what's underneath the surface of the way you understand world and understand

your story and i think that kind of digging is what's really important to get deeper level and sort of systematic issues and the real value in any story and so i was lucky that i worked with an amazing editor who really helped me digging into that, i will say about writing a memoir, it did not occur to me until it got close to publication that the people i was writing about would actually read the book and then i was faced with the prospect of driving down with finished copies and saying, here is the book, i hope you like the way you're portrayed which is quite an experience which i think none of us, the way anyone the we we would write about anyone is different than what way we would think or talk about ourselves. i got advice from someone who wrote a memoir at the outset that that i had said you'll never regret being overly generous in your portrayal of people and at the time that didn't necessarily make sense, yes, that's good advice, what else can you tell me about writing a memoir and now in

hindsight that's the best advice and that's what i would tell somebody else writing a memoir, be overly generous in portrayal of people because the way you write about them on the page lives forever and you can't take it back and so you'll never regret being a little bit kinder than perhaps during the initial inclination was to be. and i think we had a question over here. >> the process, same question. >> yeah, to talk a little bit more of the process of actually writing the book, i was lucky that this book didn't actually take that long to write in part because when you're writing about your story you already know it, you know, you've heard the family tales, a lot of sitting down, i did a lot of interviews with family members and say said, you know i've always heard you tell that story of granny getting married at 15, what do you remember her talking about? it's interesting to see how everyone's memories differ and that's one of the things too about writing a memoir, this is not a research books, these are

stories and i acknowledge that, you know, everyone's memory is different and the accounts, granny had a brown wedding dress, no, it was blue, at the end of the day i said granny had a blue wedding dress and i'm not sure it might have been brown. but, you know, really fun to be able to sit down and talk to relatives about their memories and my mom was very involved in sitting down and talking with me and sharing her memories and sharing her life story and i think in a lot of ways we are lucky to have the opportunity and that time to have conversations because a lot of us don't have the chances to sit down with our relatives and tell them how much we admire them and how much we've taken away from their life story and so i feel very grateful to have had that opportunity. any other -- i see someone coming, yeah. [laughter]

>> well, congratulations on your book. >> thank you. >> and i wondered, you know, you grew up in alpha county, you went to yale and harvard, et cetera, and then you came back and landed in louisville which many people in eastern kentucky barely even considered to be kentucky, right? so tell me -- how did that wind up being, you know, your decision, you could have gone to pipeville or -- or some place out there, so tell us about that process. >> yeah, i fell in love with louisville when i was a law student and had an opportunity to spend summers here and i always tell folks about louisville, it's big enough to have everything you need and small enough to actually use it. [laughter] >> and so it's true, you can actually get a seat at a coffee shop or at a nice restaurant, you go in and so for me i had gone and i had lived in cities and i think there's so much value in cities and one of the

things i'm really interested in is whole rural-urban divide and people are people and we have more in common than what divides us, i love living in cities because i love the unique and interesting things that happen and kentucky was always hope, always felt like home, i fell in love with louisville and i thought this was a place that i could land and make a difference and so i moved here and started doing the work that i was doing and met my husband and my husband, his first question when he proposed was will you marry me and the second can we always live in the islands in louisville. [laughter] >> and so i am locked in for life, and at the end of the day, you know, i really enjoyed having the opportunity to talk about we can bring rural and urban areas together because perspective that i have seen both sides and, again, i believe that more units us than divides

us and i enjoy having the opportunity to sort of talk to folks in rural areas about louisville and talk to folks in louisville about rural areas, thank you if -- for the question. >> i'm on the lines of rural and urban having so much in common, what's the common thread between lawyeral and urban poverty? >> that's a really interesting question and the truth is i think that rural and urban poverty actually look quite different, they are both significant problems and we need to have resources available to address those, but there are unique challenges around rural poverty, one to have things i noticed in particular is, you know, in cities and, for example, in louisville there are a lot of organizations that provide social services and they're supposed to provide social services for an entire

multi-county area, and yet for my very low-income clients, they might not reliable transportation to drive the hour and a half to louisville to access those social services or might not be able to afford the gas or if the car broke down, they might not be able to make it, and so i think it's really one, transportation and infrastructure and access really matters in rural areas and the way that the poverty is more diffuse makes it harder to bring people together to access services, because you might have a couple of people 3 miles away and much more diffused and that's not just to say the take away from that you have to have different strategies when targeting both, it's not to say that either is -- they're not competing with one another or to say that either is more oppressing concern than the other. yes. >> that brings up another question, i worked in the court system at one time --

[inaudible] >> and i guess it was about 2010 we went from paper protective orders to electronic protective order and at the time i remember a conversation that took place about what's going to happen in rural areas because we don't have a lot -- or even areas that are continuous to urban areas. a great discussion right now in state legislature and governor's office about, you know, expanding accessibility. i know in the rural counties that you worked in -- [inaudible] >> what happens in eastern kentucky when you don't have that and it takes 8, 10, 12, 15 hours to get to a judge to sign an order, what happens then? >> yeah, so the question for those of you who couldn't hear was about in rural counties that

don't have wi-fi access, they might still have paper protective orders as opposed to electronic protective orders and lag time, what happens, i will say that i have had clients call me and i've had to call police on behalf of clients because there's been safety threat and someone haven't been able to get police to respond quickly enough. so, you know, i think the answer is when there's a delay in providing people with safety services, bad things happened and we need to do whatever it takes so that that doesn't happen. we live in a world where we talk access to the internet and access to wi-fi as, you know, a fundamental right, it's something that connects us all and something that we all need to participate in our society today and i have relatives who to this day have never used a computer, they don't own a cell phone; they've never seen a facebook page and these are

relatives that whenever i said, you know, would you like to come to my wedding in louisville, i would love to have you is there, they didn't know how to get to louisville, they don't have any gps, they never used gps, some of them haven't used parking garages and so, you know that was just not an option for them. i was telling people, you know, when my husband why aren't some of your eastern kentucky family coming to your wedding, it might as well as bay in taiwan, they don't know -- they don't have the ability, they don't have the phones and the gps to be able to navigate here and i think something that a lot of people still find shopping in this day and age, sort of disparity that exist in access to technology and access to information about how to use the technology and i think it's really important when we are talking about the high-poverty areas to talk about how we teach young people to be able to use the technology of the future because i think that is what helps -- them connect to large world and job

opportunities and economic opportunities that come from being able to connect to that world. yes. >> you talk about the women -- [inaudible] >> can you point to any policy decisions or things that were in place that you think helps your trajectory and things that you support? >> yeah. so the question was about, you know, i talk about how my family and my community shaped me, what specifically were the policies that i think played a role in that, and in the book i talk about how my family, we received food stamps. we got assistance with medical expenses, you know, i went to a public school and i played in public parks. i went to public libraries because, you know, at the beginning i was talking about being born to two young parents who couldn't run their air-conditioning, you know there's air-conditioning at the public library, dual purpose in my life of being a place that was open to the public that i could go and i could learn and also escape the summer heat and

so i am such a big believer in having policies that provide opportunities and fame took advantage of those and had anyone be missing i wouldn't be where i was today. i certainly got sick as a child, had my family incur large amounts of medical debt, our lives would have been different and had i not had the opportunity to go to public school and get a good education, my life would have looked very different. and so i believe that, you know, we have to make sure that we have policies in place that are making sure that every child has the same opportunity as i had to grow and thrive. yes. >> hi, i work in education including dropout prevention and reengagement. sometimes we hear that particularly in rural parts of the state that there may be a fear of families of their children getting advanced education because it means that they may leave the community,

particularly if you're going to go on higher ed and they won't come back and there's a loss and so i'm curious about your perspective on whether that is true in some cases from your experience and if so, then what is the best way to try to address those complicated dynamics? >> yeah, that's something that i talk about in the book actually, my mom experienced that, more than anything granny wanted my mom to be able to go to college and get an education, but papa; granny's husband did not want my mom to leave for that exact same reason, he said families take care of their children, children stay close to their families, why would you go away, why would you leave, do you think i can't provide a good life for you here? and, you know, his family was the most important thing to him and it broke his heart about one of his children in his mind, might as well have been to the other side of the world, it was about 50 miles, he never had a driver's license, he rarely left county, might as well have been

a completely different county as far as he was concerned. and i think, you know, to some extent that is getting less as people see the ways that education changes their communities and a lot people i think there's a focus now on doing sort of what i did, getting an education and then returning and making a difference in the community that you come from and i know that there are programs that help people bring back to communities and in some ways inspired them to want to leave in the first place, provided with the bedrock, foundation, values and the drive to get an education and sometimes the drive is problems in their own communities that they want to cam back and solve. and so i think there's certainly still work to be done there and i do still hear stories about people saying, you know, my entire world is county, i'm never going to leave, i have heard young children say, you know, college isn't for me, high school is not for me, i'm just going to grow up and work at the jail here and i'm going to do

this or that. and sometimes it makes me sad that people feel that their world is limited. i certainly understand the value of home and the value of family and i think people can make good legitimate choices to stay near home and near family, i just hope for world where every child feels like they have the choice to choose something else if that's what they want. all right, so i am hearing that our time has lapse and we are out of time, thank you all again for coming tonight, it is so great to have you all here. thank you to my agent jamie who came in from new york and editor emily for making the trip down. i was very lucky to have a team of amazing women supporting me in this project, thank you again to car michael's for hosting, buy a book, thank you all for being here.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> tonight on book tv american enterprise institute director argues that supporting american institutions rather than replace ing them there organize and led to multiple teacher strikes. explores genetics and neuroscience of human differences in latest book, espn.com senior writer howard bryant officers his thoughts on sports, politics and race in america. and journalists cony hong of

1972 campaign. this all start 6:30 p.m. eastern, check your program guide for more information. >> you're watching book tv, television for serious readers. >> good evening, welcome to kayle ridge books, it's my honor to introduce to you jim kenkins who was editorial columnist on the editorial page of news and observer for 31 years, he will introduce our special guest, please help me welcome jim jenkins. [applause] >> come on up zucch.