Maybe a logical upshot of running with artists (less physically dangerous than with scissors, but more emotionally taxing), but lately everywhere I turn someone’s using Kickstarter to raise funds. Documentary filmmaker Michael Caplan’s is the most recent effort to come to my attention. Ending on July 11th, his campaign aims to raise $25,000 to complete “Algren,” a documentary about underrated Chicago writer, Nelson Algren. Although the recipient of the first National Book Award and a cultural forerunner, influencing everyone from musicians to painters to theatre-makers, Algren is often overlooked, even by Chicagoans. Caplan, a long time fan of Algren’s, spoke with Our Town about his views on film making, how Kickstarter has changed life for artists and of course Nelson Algren.

Our Town Although Algren loved Chicago (perhaps because rather than in spite of the city’s corrupt aspects) Chicago hasn’t seemed to embrace Algren the way it has Sandburg or Terkel. Why?
Michael Caplan Algren has always been embraced by [those] who want to see the world as it is, not as we want it. The Chicago that Algren described in his many books and essays was the Chicago that "lived behind the billboards." He lived amongst the poor and the dispossessed and that's who he wrote about. On top of that, he did not have the warmest demeanor, compared to Studs or Sandberg. He did not suffer fools.

OT Why did Algren identify so closely with the dispossessed?
MC Algren grew up in Albany Park, about a block from where I live now with my wife and son. His father owned a car repair shop on Kedzie, so his upbringing was solid working class. It's hard to say what sparked his identification with the people on the lowest rungs of society, but I know he was a huge fan of Dostoevsky and would read Crime and Punishment once a year. He quoted Dostoevsky on a regular basis, "The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members."

OT What compelled you to focus on Algren?
MC My roots are in Chicago and with the working class. I grew up on the Southeast Side of Chicago and my great grandfather owned a tavern on Franklin St. In 2008, I met Art Shay, the famed photographer, who was a lifetime friend of Nelson Algren’s, and whose work I admired. He growled at me, "So, you're a documentary filmmaker? Why don't you do something about Algren?" I was shocked that there had never been a documentary about Algren and it took me about ten seconds to agree to do it. We've been working on it ever since.

OT Musicians like Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Henry Rollins are some of the many who agreed to be interviewed for the project. How did you go about securing their participation?
MC We wanted this film to be about Algren's life, his work and his legacy. We believe his story is not just in the past, but very much alive today, in the arts, writing and music. We soon found that everyone from John Sayles, Phillip Kaufman, Cormack McCarthy, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Depp and Tom Waits feel some debt to Algren's work. Connecting with artists is not always easy, but when we have connected, everyone has been very interested in helping out.

OT What goes into putting together a documentary?
MC This is my third feature length documentary, and each project comes together differently. The story always drives everything, from the interviews, to the visualization, to the approach to the audio and soundtrack. Algren's work is very descriptive and visual, so it's not hard to be inspired to create imaginative visuals and soundtracks.

Brian Posen

Whether you want to donate money to people raring to strip to their nipple tassels or attend a fantastic fourteen-day theatrical festival, this blog has something for you. If like me, you are suffering from seasonal allergies and want to tear out your eyes and flay yourself, I suggest an oatmeal bath. It won’t actually help much, but you’ll become distracted trying to understand why sitting in a bathtub full of breakfast cereal is supposed to soothe your skin.

First the festival: Stage773 Artistic Director Brian Posen, a twenty-year veteran of the Chicago theater scene has created 14@Stage773, a two-week celebration of performing arts. Not only does the event feature vaudeville, solo performance, visual arts, children's theater, music, film and comedy, but it also kicks off renovations on the Stage 773 space.

In curating the event, Posen was particularly concerned with providing a performance opportunity for acts that might not often have the opportunity to perform in venues like Stage 773. Says Posen, “we are providing the space for free. We believe in the community and are a strong part of it, so ticket prices reflect that. They are stupidly low and Chicago loves that.”

With only a few days of the festival remaining, Posen is excited about the closing night Graffiti Party, a “lively night of performance and visual arts. We want the neighborhood to come and say good-bye to the old space and help us welcome the new and improved building.”

As for what to expect of Stage 773’s new incarnation, Posen says the theater will “no longer be a place where you come and see a show and leave. We are striving to create a thriving, vibrant artistic home for all of the Chicago arts community. It's going to be home for so many different theater companies and artistic events. [And with] four spaces, two of those turning around shows every two hours, [the space] will be alive!”

Excuse me for a moment; I’ve got to chew off the skin on my upper arm.

But what of the naked burlesquers you ask? Saturday August 20th, queer burlesque troupe Ties and Tassels presents Queerpocalypsee hosted by Chicago comedienne Cameron Esposito. For over a year the troupe has held monthly drag/burlesque variety shows in order to raise money for the event which will take place at The Abbey Pub. However, they’ve not quite hit their goal and in order to make Queerpocalypsee a night to remember, they’re looking for Kickstarter supporters.

If you feel like helping but want some entertainment out of the deal, you can also attend Ties and Tassels’ July 16th performance at Lizard's Liquid Lounge, funds from which benefit Queerpocalypsee.

I’d write more but Lady Gaga is petting a goat in my living room. Either that or the Benadryl I took is making me hallucinate.

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," is forthcoming from Counter Point Press. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by followingOur Town on Facebook and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

Here are things I pretend to understand:
Numbers longer than four digits
Fractals
The word ‘hegemony’
The difference between broasting and roasting
Twitter direct messaging
Why the Beatles are important
The problem with free radicals
How to tell time
Post-modernism

I got to thinking about these items while reading Psycho Dream Factory, Chicago writer/artist and Green Lantern Press founder Caroline Picard’s gorgeous new book. In the introduction, Lily Robert-Foley writes that the stories collected within the volume deal with reappropriated images, with copies that destroy the original; that Picard’s work makes “an explosion between the point of origin and the point of arrival, thereby opening a new space.”

I’m pretty sure Robert-Foley believes CDF postmodern. Here are my clues:
-this word pairing: copy/original
-gathering tension between my shoulder blades

I kind of assume everyone understands everything better than I mostly because whenever I call my mother to ask how to hard-boil eggs she either says “Same way as last time,” or “How do you not know how to do this yet?” But just in case you’re similarly confused about post-modernism, when I spoke with the seriously brilliant Picard about her celebrity-sprinkled book and the show she’s concocted in conjunction, I swallowed my pride (also my gum, but that’s another story) and asked her to explain post-modernism. Turns out even those who function within post-modernism are more concerned with making art than labeling it. As it should be. Now if only I can find someone to teach me how to pronounce San Luis Obispo.

Our Town Give me a one-paragraph crash course in post-modernism.
Caroline Picard I will fail miserably. [A teacher] showed me a Derrida art piece. He set up a chair in a gallery. Next to the chair he'd posted a photograph of the chair. Next to that he'd posted text: "chair." I think my teacher said, "This is postmodernism." I liked the teacher because she was an angry old hippy who cussed under her breath; because I liked her I believed I understood. The truth is, I wasn't exactly thinking about postmodernism when I wrote these stories. I was thinking about how you can take celebrities and use them like dolls.

OT You do, however deal with the issue of sameness, which is kind of postmodern, right?
CP I got interested in appropriating images and manipulating them. I was thinking a lot about Woody Allen's movies, how--particularly in his films with young people (like Christina Ricci and Jason Briggs, for instance) actors imitate Woody Allen's style of speech and behavior. In Anything Else, you suddenly have more than one Woody Allen-ite in every scene. When Ricci and Briggs talk to one another they reflect a similar neurotic affect back and forth. When that happens, I feel like the narrative of the story collapses; as a viewer I'm suddenly more interested in the directorial conversations that lead to this display of sameness than I am in the actual movie. I suddenly wonder about the actors' freedom [within this] narcissistic Woody Allen fantasy. Also, a book I was reading about Michael Jackson brought up this idea that everywhere he turned, he saw some version of himself. In a car, he would hear his songs on the radio, at the grocery store he might see himself in the tabloids. What happens to "the self" under those circumstances?

OT Why do celebrities fascinate us?
CP I’m into thinking about their placement, particularly in supermarkets. They’re all over the aisles before you check out--so clearly as a thing to consume. Also they're next to candy; these images of lifestyle connect directly sustenance. At the same time, the worldview perpetuated by magazines like Us or Star is really narrow--lots of white people talking about babies and the celebration or collapse of monogamy. Who got what new plastic surgery. I feel like celebrities also represent a particular and pervasive idea of success--one that spreads through other fields. Fame and recognition is a measure of achievement. The marketability of oneself is more important (in many cases) than the integrity of what is being produced. The actor is legitimized if he or she gets a spot on a glossy magazine. In a more general way, those ideas of success speak to a very basic desire to be acknowledged, recognized and known but that impulse has become commensurate with human capital. Something to be bought and sold. One sort of amazing example, celebrity perfume. You can buy J-lo perfume, or Jessica Simpson perfume. A kind of purchasing of essence to fulfill some deep desire to become them.

Joey Grant

This week, Mint Male a Chicago-based website re-launches as thequ.co. Formerly known as “the gay male guide to living in mint condition” (which I take to mean packed in an Altoid container because I’m kind of obsessed with Altoids this week), in its new incarnation, The Qu will promote queer artists of all stripes, as well as feature original shows, blogs and commentary. (Side note: my version of Microsoft Word must be from 1972 because it still does not recognize the word ‘blog.’) Teaming up for the overhaul are local charity coordinator and hair stylist Joey Grant and star of Knee Deep in a Bottle, Tony Soto. (Another side note: Why do gay men always have the best names while lesbians get stuck answering to Rainbow or Gertrude?) Our Town spoke with the duo about both their solo projects and their sparkling new site.

Our Town Mint Male was initially geared toward gay, male professionals, what inspired you to tweak the site’s purpose?
Joey Grant When we re-conceptualized the site to showcase artists, [we realized] we needed to invite all Gays, Lesbians, Queer, Bi-sexual, Trans, and even those who just adore us. It was like an Oprah "A-ha" moment. Now we can be more progressive, and have an inclusive platform for the community.

OT Tony, how did you become involved?
Tony Soto As an avid Mint reader, I realized they were missing a theatre reviewer, so I approached Joey about letting me contribute. I’ve been involved since, and when Joey told me what he was doing with Mint I just loved the idea. Now I am a partner in its amazing evolution.

OT What type of original web programming will the new site feature?
TS Our intention is to create programs featuring queer people, but [accessible to] anyone. Our first baby will be a ten to twelve minute current events chat show, featuring a panel of queer people talking about everyday topics.
JG We just green-lighted an animation series based on living in the city, with local animators and voice-overs. We are also looking into "around the town" segments, and an interview series of featured guests.

OT You’re interested in promoting queer artists, what sort can we expect to see on the site?
TS Queer artists who aren't doing gay-themed work aren’t always noticed by our own community, so we are opening this forum to any queer artist even if what they produce isn't necessarily queer-themed. We want painters, photographers, musicians, directors, actors, aspiring producers and so much more, to send us videos of what they are doing.
JG Basically if you’re a passionate individual creating something interesting, mind awakening, beautiful or satirical, we want to showcase your work.
TS Let us help you promote yourself!

Tony Soto

OT Why is Chicago a good place to be an artist?
TS The conservative Midwest doesn't always seem like the place to be for an artist, but there are so many open-minded people here, and amazingly supportive communities eager to help with the next big idea. We are a collaborative city and we know the meaning of ensemble.

The New Colony Artistic Director, Andrew Hobgood thinks lesbians are funny. And nuclear holocaust. And quiche. But then, who doesn’t, really? Originally a seven-minute sketch which stole the show at Collaboraction’s 2010 Sketchbook, Five Lesbians Eating A Quiche tells the story of The Susan B Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein, who, when catastrophe strikes, find themselves responsible for America’s future. Due to audience demand, the show is back, and more absurd than ever.

Our Town Describe the show.
Andrew Hobgood Whenever we're asked, "What's it about?" it's always fun to deadpan back, "five lesbians eating a quiche." But the show is really a dark absurdist comedy exploring America's obsessive over-active imagination which has fueled both the greatest achievements of the country and our greatest embarrassments. It tackles our sense of adventure, our fears, our idealism and our country's relationship with devout belief in a religious body. However, we take it one step further. To make the audience understand that they are just as much a part of the American persona, we have created a fully realized environmental experience. The audience walks in and is immediately treated like they are one of the fellow sisters of the society, all women in 1956.

OT What originally inspired the piece?
AH A couple years ago, during a New Colony party, Sarah Gitenstein, who is directing this show, jokingly gave me a pen and a notebook and told me to write down the title of a show The New Colony would produce someday. And as any well-intoxicated Artistic Director would, I wrote the first thing that popped in my head and found myself committing to it before I'd processed the absurdity.

OT Why remount it?
AH To develop our shows, [we ask] the actors to create their characters well beyond the needs of the script. The more that they have in their heads; the more realized the show is. The Sketchbook version could only be seven minutes; however, the cast developed enough material for a twenty-five minute show. Then reviewers and audience members started asking when we were going to do the full-length production, and then it won the Audience Favorite award at Sketchbook. This is the first New Colony show ever produced due to audience demand.

OT What went into developing it into a full-length show?
AH All the creative team members and cast [went] back into their notebooks and pulled material we’d cut from the seven minute version. The show became about specifically these five women, and what happens to them after they realize that America has been nuked.

OT How does FLEQ jibe with New Colony’s artistic mission?
AH The most valued part of our mission is the goal of attracting and educating a new arts-supporting audience. When theater is competing against film and television, we try to seek out the experiences that are impossible to recreate on film. So this show's fully realized environmental approach, performed in real-time, integrates the audience into the piece. Even though it takes place in the 50's, we work to align the vernaculars, thoughts and feelings of that period and our current times to make it emotionally and intellectually accessible. We want audiences to look at a lesbian in 1956 and say, "I totally know her!”

OT What’s it like to work both as a business consultant and in the theater?
AH Art needs structure to succeed. Business needs creativity to succeed. And both tend to believe they don't need the other. That's [how] my consulting career was born. I solve theater problems with my business expertise and I broaden businesses' imaginations to help them launch to the next level. Really, all artists are entrepreneurs. Most don't think of themselves that way. But that's the truth. You're your own boss. You handle your own marketing. You handle your own money. You handle your own sales. I wish theater departments in colleges would inspire a love of business in their students. They are doing a huge disservice by not making entrepreneurial passion, strategy, and business management a key take-away for any theater graduate. Hopefully I'll get to see that happen. And hot damn I'd love for TNC and me to be a part of that change.

Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche runs June 23rd through July 30th. Go here to purchase tickets.

A writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sarah Terez Rosenblum freelances for a number of web sites and print publications. Her debut novel, “Herself When She’s Missing," is forthcoming from Counter Point Press. She is also a figure model, Spinning instructor and teacher at Chicago’s StoryStudio. Inevitably one day she will find herself lecturing naked on a spinning bike. She's kind of looking forward to it actually.
IMPORTANT: the official Our Town site doesn't support comments. Join in the conversation by followingOur Town on Facebook and Sarah on Twitter: @SarahTerez

Photo by Patty Michels. Left, Darrick Malone.

Now that it’s summer and you can step outside without risking exposure, Our Town is introducing a new weekly feature: ChicaGo.

Each week, we’ll post a speedy little street interview with one lucky Chicagoan. Keep your eyes out for us, because next time it could be you!

Location: Andersonville’s Midsommarfest

Chicagoan: Darrick Malone

Our Town So what brings you to Midsommarfest?
Darrick Malone I’m here volunteering with Equality Illinois to help support marriage for all, not just for some. I’m also registering people to vote.

OT What’s your favorite summer activity?
DM The festivals. Anytime people are out getting rambunctious but staying safe.

OT Favorite Chicago restaurant?
DM What’s the name of that place? I was just there last night. Club Lucky in Bucktown.

OT What’s your favorite make out spot in Chicago?
DM Home.

OT Cubs or Sox?
DM Whoever is winning.

OT What’s the worst thing about Chicago?
DM There is no worst part of Chicago. Chicago is perfect!

To learn more about Equality Illinois, visit http://www.eqil.org/

Look out Chicago. Starting June 12th Links Hall presents a week celebrating improvisational dance. Curated by Columbia College instructor, dancer/choreographer Lisa Gonzales, the festival will feature performances, workshops, jams, and discussions with internationally acclaimed dancers. With artists including The Architects at The Dance Center, Nancy Stark Smith, Bebe Miller and more set to perform, the event will certainly make a splash on the Chicago dance scene.

Our Town So often artists wind up teachers. Is this a sensible overlap?
Lisa Gonzales So much of art-making in dance happens for an insular audience. While the making of art is of vital importance no matter the audience, teaching allows artists to make a difference in the larger world. Serious practice in an art form such as dance develops the entire person, not just the artist person. As a teacher, I feel very honored to be able to have that kind of impact in a person’s life.

OT How do your art and your teaching inform each other?
LG Sometimes they feel quite separate. But as an artist, everything I do finds its way into my art-making because life and art feel fluid. Of course, I teach components of what I use myself when making work—processes of perceiving, making movement, composing, proposing questions and answers through the body—things I find useful to consider when making work. My primary goal as a teacher, however, is to nurture a student’s own creative voice rather than impose mine.

OT What drew you to work with puppets?
LG I happened into the avant-garde puppet scene in New York through a dance collaborator’s husband who worked in puppetry and had the great fortune of being asked to puppeteer. They are not afraid of story, meaning or emotion. They also value turning meaning upside down, inside out and reconfiguring it in a new way. They work with many of the same tenets as we do in post-modern and avant-garde dance, but primarily through the visual realm to get to the physical/visceral experience. The puppeteer isn’t the primary conveyor of information; the puppet or object is, so the experience is once removed from the performer.

OT What’s the hardest part of working as a puppeteer?
LG As a dancer I am used to making myself the primary component of expression, so learning to disappear the self while animating the object/puppet takes some work

OT Take us through the process of choreographing a dance.
LG For me first comes the desire or impulse. Then I need to get into the studio (if the desire hasn’t come from being in the studio already) to begin physical research. This helps me to integrate into the body ideas that have emerged through reading, writing, or experience. I may improvise and use video to capture movement that I will then relearn and compose into a larger form.

OT How does improvisational dance differ?
LG People assume improvisation is about doing whatever one wants, [but] improvisation [requires] rigor, intelligence and serious preparation through committed practice. [Everything] must happen in the moment. It may go something like this—oh, I made that movement, then I will try to connect that with the section that came five minutes before. Oh, and this meaning is emerging. I like that, so I will compose with these elements with this meaning in mind.

Writer Sara Levine is stubborn. Though prolific, published in prestigious literary magazines like American Short Fiction and on edgy websites such as Nerve.com, Levine resisted the notion of putting out a book.

“I kept insisting that I did piecework,” Levine says, “an essay here, a prose poem there, a few stories, a series of aphorisms. I had been doing these strange short fictions for a while before it occurred to me that I might gather them together without any great damage to the universe.”

Once she heard that Caketrain Press planned to hold a chapbook contest judged by Deb Olin Unferth, whom she “admired on many levels,” Levine broke down and submitted some work. The resultant short story collection, Short Dark Oracles, is as incisive, intellectually probing and wryly funny as its author.

Levine spoke with Our Town about her writing process, her forthcoming novel and one unexpected consequence of childbirth.

Our Town Do you have a favorite story in the collection?
Sara Levine I don't subscribe to the idea that a writer has a "real" or "natural" voice that she needs to find—a superior voice, waiting, beneath the layers of awkward syntax and the crud of bad grammar, to be excavated. But I feel closest right now to the voice of "Baby Love." I'm sure there are other stories about the intensity of the mother-newborn bond, but when I wrote "Baby Love," I'd been reading around in the motherhood literature and hadn't found them.

OT You’re a parent, has parenting changed you as a writer?
SL Parenting is an exalted and humbling experience. It's changed almost everything about me, including my long-held scorn for people suffering from hemorrhoids. Honestly, it's hard to take this question on in short format; I want to start throwing bibliography at you. (See Jane Lazarre's The Mother Knot; see Tillie Olsen's Silences, see Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born; see Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work). Parenthood heightens my awareness of the larger world but also brings home my limitations as a human being. Many of the writerly habits I had before becoming a mother I chose to abandon. I've also made choices that make the cultivation of solitude harder. Because I'm aware of the clock ticking, I have less patience for bad work—my own as well as other people's. On the other hand, I suspect I have a better sense of where the story lies for me.

OT One piece in Short Dark Oracles, "A Promise," is a sort of magically realistic look at selfishness and child-rearing. What inspired that story?
SL My daughter likes that I work, but not that I work out of the house. She would prefer that I work at her school, or at least drive an ice cream van. So likely that story comes from my own ambivalence about rushing out of the house each morning. Also, here's the shocking confession the Sun-Times blog readers are waiting for: one day a conductor on the Metra Union/Pacific North line forgot to punch my ticket, and I let him walk on by. Now that I've told you this, I expect to be arrested tomorrow morning when I arrive at Ogilvie Station.

OT What’s your writing process like?
SL Slow and inefficient. I begin things and then put them aside. I look at the same run of sentences, or paragraphs, or pages, over and over, hoping to be able to read it through without feeling mortally offended. It usually takes years, since I'm a better reader than I am writer.

I worry about Slut Walk. You’ve heard about it, of course. Back in April (which in our age of social networking is like saying back in 1903), a group of Toronto protesters spearheaded by Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett, began rallying to protest a Toronto policeman’s thoughtless words. Speaking at a York University safety forum in January, Michael Sanguinetti advised women to “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” While he later apologized, the victim-blaming tenor of his statement may be a mixed blessing; it has spurred women across the country to action.

I’m more than familiar with taking back epithets. Just this week I took back neurotic and hirsute. I’m also aware of the peculiar wallop the word “slut” packs, having had it used against me in seventh grade by a girl I’d hoped would become my best friend. This was in the good old days, before sexting and vlogs when you could ruin a girl’s reputation without getting carpel tunnel syndrome. At the time, my sex life consisted of picturing Scott Bakula’s chest, so perhaps what set the girl off was my proclivity for wearing fishnet stockings while my classmates stuck with identical aqua Gap T’s and rolled cuffed jeans. Whatever her motive, the word kept me in modest attire for the next decade.

Letting the air out of the word “Slut” is one minor aspect of Slut Walk’s purpose. Chicago co-organizer Jessica Skolnik hopes the event, set for Saturday June 4th, will contribute to “a revised cultural attitude toward rape, [and change] the culture around victim-blaming, [allowing women to] exist in the world without fear of harassment and to engage in consensual sexual behavior without judgment.”

Writer Randi Black, who plans to attend, agrees. “Some people still don’t realize that rape is about power, and not sex,” she says. “Rape happens because people have a sense of entitlement. I hope spectators will realize those who commit sexual assault are ultimately responsible. Just because we might be dressed provocatively and calling ourselves sluts doesn’t give anyone an excuse to do whatever they want to us.”

Others, like Division|Collective curator Cortney Philip take a lighter tone. “Slut Walk,” she says, “is about having choices. When I stand in front of my closet in the morning, the last thing I want to hear is someone else's voice in my head telling me that I should dress to look attractive, but not so attractive as to invite assault. Or I could just be going because it looks like a good party.”

While organizer Jamie Lauren Keiles has no problem with any of these viewpoints, she believes “awareness-raising is important, but one event isn’t going to solve everything.” Known for “The Seventeen Magazine Project,” a blog she created in 2010 to document the month she spent living according to the gospel of Seventeen Magazine, Keiles credits the internet for “shaping [her] understanding of feminism. I was raised in a house with two working parents and a mom that kicked major ass, [but] I don’t think I started identifying as a feminist until I started reading blogs. I realized feminism was more than 70s-style bra-burning, [rather] feminists were a diverse group.”

And uniting that group is one of Skolnik’s chief goals for Slut Walk. Excited to gather “the broad coalition of people doing work for survivors' rights, sex workers' rights, and other progressive/feminist causes,” she believes “in order for culture to change, it's important that activist groups join forces. Right now, many groups are focused on direct provision of services (which is really important!) and don't often get the chance to join together like this.”