please welcome paul dickson and thomas a. allen. [applause] >> thanks a lot. we're extremely happy to be here tonight. this has been a long odyssey for tom and myself. and people always said, how did this thing start? how did you get this idea? and i think i was probably the one that first started to think about this. i kept -- the question that came to me was, why was this big event, this -- i thought turning point. why was it always sort of margin liesed? >> and one night, tom and i were at a writer's party in georgetown. and we both lived in montgomery county. so i didn't have a ride home from the party, and i hardly knew tom at that point. so i said, can i get a ride home? and tom said, sure. and by the time the door opened at my house, tom and i were partners on this thing. and that was three, over three years ago. we did three years of rather intense research. and i think the best way to sort of illustrate sort of a preamable. if you took a map of america and you went from maine, in this corner, to los angeles, in this corner, from portland, oregon in th