Wintergrass Festival with Wendy Tyner

Wendy: 0:00

Hi, this is Wendy Tyner. You're listening to One Hour to Doors.

Jon: 0:13

This is One Hour to Doors, a podcast about the business and soul of the festivals and events industry. I am your host, Jon Stone. Every episode of One Hour to Doors explores the people, issues, insights and trends impacting the enterprise of bringing people and communities together in common cause. We are recording today at the Washington Festivals and Events Association annual conference, this year taking place in Issaquah Washington. Our guest today is Wendy Tyner, former director of Philanthropy and Publicity at Wintergrass Music Festival, which is an annual Bluegrass and Americana Festival taking place in Bellevue, Washington. Welcome to the show, Wendy.

Wendy: 0:56

Thank you for having me, Jon, tell us about Wintergrass. Wintergrass is a culture, Wintergrass is a community. Wintergrass is a place where people get together and it is an indoor festival that is in its 32nd year, starting in Tacoma back in 1994. And fast forward, it is an event where people come to listen to Bluegrass music, Americana music. There's also a few country bands and Irish bands, lots of bands with young people and we have four to five stages so people can go from one indoor stage to another and all bands play twice. So you can come anytime between Thursday and Sunday and see bands that are nationally known, a lot of regional bands, and we really prioritize new and emerging bands and love supporting young people and part of that is our education programs. We have education programs that are from preschool all the way through adulthood.

Wendy: 2:04

What Wintergrass is is these children. You see them in their programs, you see them jamming in the hallways, they perform on stage and there's so much energy at Wintergrass. You walk through the hallways and the lobbies and all the suites and there's open rooms. You can go upstairs to any suite that has an open door and wander in and sit down as if this is your living room and listen to people jamming. So jamming is a part of the culture of who we are, and people come to Wintergrass to just jam. It's a little bit of that concept of same time next year. They come from 32 states and seven countries and they play banjo guitar bass. Can you imagine flying with a bass? They bring fiddles, various kinds of resophonic guitars, and you've always heard about Dobros, but Dobro is the brand, so we're always careful just to say resophonic guitars.

Jon: 3:10

I'm a musician and I did not know that Dobro is a brand.

Wendy: 3:13

Dobro is a brand and Eastman and Taylor and all kinds of callings. They make a lot of resophonic guitars. Like any festival, we also have a lot of exhibitors and we're very proud of our vendors. Many of them are music oriented. There's also a peril and jewelry and hats and some other local foods. But it's wonderful to wander through Wintergrass and see everyone picking up instruments and playing them. And the artists in the Bluegrass and Americana community are very, very accessible. They walk around Ricky Skagg's walks around and people like if you follow Bluegrass and Americana music, we often have the top 40. They may not be household names but in this community they are. So Tim O'Brien and Jerry Douglas no form. It's really wonderful. Young people like Ifa O'Sullivan, Sarah Gerose where they came as children and grew up at Wintergrass and you see them in the hallway sitting at vendor tables jamming. We had Billy Strings. If you haven't been following Billy Strings, he is this young adult that is now just sweeping the nation with his amazing guitar skills and Molly Tuttle.

Wendy: 4:28

They just hang out and I am a little starstruck from in being this business. I love being around musicians, but at Wintergrass everyone is equal, so it's a very accessible community which we're really proud of.

Jon: 4:43

It's a community that shares a lot.

Wendy: 4:46

Yeah, people leave very happy. There's a poem called On Blackwater Pond by Mary Oliver and one of the lines is what is that beautiful thing that just happened? And that is something that I strive for Whenever I produce or create any kind of event. I want people to walk away with this feeling of wow, what was that thing that just happened? I can't believe we experienced such a wonderful event. So People come back year after year after year. There's about 45 tickets that are sold, or 45 people buy tickets, but they stay for four days 4,500 people. We have approximately 4,500 people that buy tickets and they stay for four days, so it's about 12 to 14 to 16,000 people who attend Wintergrass.

Jon: 5:38

What was the genesis of the festival?

Wendy: 5:41

That's a great question. If you go back east, in the early 70s and 80s and 90s, there were a lot of outdoor festivals and there wasn't anything happening here. However, in Woodinville there was a small event and Erla Harding and Rob Folsom and Patrice O'Neill attended an outdoor festival and fell in love with this idea that you could have bluegrass music in the Pacific Northwest. So they decided to talk to the Sheraton Hotel in Tacoma. It was the first ever indoor bluegrass festival in the United States. That was founded in 1994.

Jon: 6:19

I'll insert for the benefit of our listeners and other regions and other parts of the world. The reason I presume it's indoors is because this is taking place in February, which in the Pacific Northwest, is not the time of year where you would do much of anything outdoors.

Wendy: 6:34

No, and that's correct, and think about this gig economy. It's a wonderful time for artists to come to the Pacific Northwest because back east there's not a lot of work, so artists love coming to us and we have always paid our artists well, so they love being at Wintergrass. We have to remember that people that are musicians, that is their profession. We don't ask them to work for pennies. We pay them market rate, we give them accommodations and we have a hospitality room that has lots of food that they can enjoy.

Jon: 7:11

I was a touring musician in my late teens and early 20s and food was just a glorious thing when we could come across it.

Wendy: 7:23

And when you have a hospitality room, it's where people get together. There's a musician named Dale Ann Bradley and another one named Frank Sullivan, and they're very social, so they like coming to the hospitality room and they'll hang out and talk to fans, and then when other artists come in, they talk to one another. But the hospitality room is also meant for the 300 volunteers, so volunteers who work 12 hours or more over the course of four days have access to this hospitality room, and that's the one benefit we could give to our valuable volunteers.

Jon: 8:04

Wendy, what I'm hearing you describe is family.

Wendy: 8:08

Family is absolutely who we are. We talk about the Wintergrass family. The volunteers come back. Year after year they become key volunteers, so some of them work year round. There's about 20 people that are volunteers that love doing what they do. It's part of their profession. They're retired, they're young, they want to learn, they want to understand how to become a stage manager, they work registration, they work the door and they love the music. These volunteers definitely come for the music, but they like to be part of that nucleus and you know this that it's just a great experience to be part of the production of an event.

Jon: 8:51

Yeah, first of all, I'm feeling really bad right now because I've not been to Wintergrass and now I'm kind of kicking myself because this sounds fantastic. Forgive me if you already said this, but do the patrons that come to the event, do some folks, bring their own instruments and participate that way, or how does that work?

Wendy: 9:09

The jamming is what is the signature of Wintergrass. Walk into the Hyatt on February 22nd of 2024. And there will be people jamming every 20 or 30 feet and within a jamming session. There are people that are brand new, some are experienced, some know one another or they don't know each other at all, and they'll play their instrument. They may sing and In a jamming circle, people learn how to take turns being the lead Right, and for people that are learning how to play, it's an experience for them to be able to play more efficiently in a jam. Those that know how to play often teach them various songs.

Wendy: 9:53

Then you go upstairs, as I mentioned earlier, to these sponsored suites. They're large hotel suites, the doors are left open and they're often regional bands that are showcasing. Or you go into jam 24-7, john. People are playing music until 6 am and that's what they come for. Some of the folks don't go into the shows. They want to play and they want to be with other people. So there's options. You can go to a show, you can jam. There's lots of workshops, probably 60 to 70 workshops led by the artists and other community members. Some people are trading instruments in their rooms. They bring their wear and they sell them in their room, and that's always okay with us. We want people putting instruments in their hands.

Jon: 10:46

It started in Tacoma, now it's in Bellevue. What was the switch about?

Wendy: 10:53

Good question. We were at the Sheraton from 1994 to 2010 and the hotel changed ownership. So the Sheraton turned into the Murano and they didn't believe Wintergrass fit their values in their marketing plan.

Wendy: 11:09

Yeah, sometimes that happens, I get it and the Hyatt heard about us. Who would have thought you could have bluegrass music in Bellevue? And in 2010 we moved over and we sent out an all-call to our members to see if someone wanted to write a song about music in Bellevue. So Kristen Granger, a performer down in Oregon, wrote a song and it's been recorded and performed at Wintergrass. I've played it at the City of Bellevue's City Council meeting. The City of Bellevue loves this festival. In the events business, all of us believe in arts and culture, humanities and whatever our mission allows us to follow. In Bellevue. They also love the economic impact of Wintergrass. So we bring in $6.8 million in value and people come to spend money with accommodations and travel and retail Recreation. $128,000 is spent just on recreation and, of course, retail and food and beverages. When we talk to people about Wintergrass, you know that they're coming from different backgrounds. They're either coming from the cultural side or the economic side.

Jon: 12:29

City of Bellevue is in the midst of a bit of a festivals and events renaissance right now.

Wendy: 12:35

in my experience, they have a lot of events. There's the arts festival at the end of July it's called Belle Red and over in the Bellevue Redmond area there are festivals over there. At one point about seven years ago or eight years ago, bellevue expanded its boundaries, so it includes another area towards the east and that changed the demographics of Bellevue and I believe that has made a difference. And now Bellevue is one of the creative arts districts that people can apply for through ArtsWa. That allows different organizations to collaborate and work together. There's a number of new creative arts districts and if people are interested in that, contact Karen Hannon, the director of ArtsWa, and she'll walk you through the process. I live on Bainbridge Island and we have a creative arts district and as a resident I am seeing the influx of educational and cultural events that are popping up because of this new concept of true collaboration between various nonprofits and for-profits.

Jon: 13:42

Is the Winter Grass Festival currently at capacity, in terms of how many tickets can be sold, or is it still looking for more?

Wendy: 13:50

Well, we have to decide if we're talking about pre-COVID or the one year after COVID.

Jon: 13:57

Let's start with 2019.

Wendy: 13:59

2019, we would call it a full house and we would stop selling tickets on Saturday afternoon. And it's not necessarily by numbers, but how it feels. It's always been a value to us that people can get into a venue, they can walk around, and Patrice O'Neill is our executive director, so she walks around and makes her executive decision, along with Stephen Rufo, our director of operations, to make sure it's safe, for one thing, and that there's this nice flow.

Jon: 14:29

Well, that's what I was getting at, because, as I'm sitting here processing the scene as you describe it it's, I have a beautiful image in my mind, but I can also see where it could get too crowded and all of a sudden not be so cool?

Wendy: 14:43

We don't let that happen. When we were in Tacoma at the Sheraton, we used a number of outside venues during Wintergrass. There was a Baptist church and the Pantages and the Rialto and the Sports Bar and people loved walking to these venues to listen to music. We have yet to do that at Wintergrass, but we've done an inventory of all the current and potential sites that people can go to. That is on the back burner for now, but it's something that we think about all the time. This past year we did use the Westin in 2023 and it's a short walk over an overhead bridge and we were able to have our education programs and a large stage over there. This year we're not going to use it, but it's an option for us to continue to find new space. The buildings are popping up in Bellevue, where there's a lot of potential.

Jon: 15:37

So then COVID happened.

Wendy: 15:40

COVID happened and we were one of the last festivals at operation, february 2020. We didn't know really much what was going on. We heard a few people got sick. We never got any stats on how many people got COVID that year as many people did. We did not operate in 2021. And then in 2022, we opened our doors following CDC regulations, which required us to have 50% capacity. But, Jon, you're in the business of production. You have to still have 100% of the people. You have to provide 100% of production registration, office management, volunteers, hospitality everything that you do for 100% of your guests you still have to do it for 50%.

Jon: 16:30

There's a lot of functions that do not care if there's one person in the audience or a million people in the audience. You still got to do what you have to do.

Wendy: 16:38

All the rigging, the lighting, the stages, it was all the same. My job is seeking charitable funds for Wintergrass and about 26% of our budget goes towards it comes from charitable funding. I never worked harder those two years securing additional funds from government grants and foundations and donors, and we did really, really well. People do put down the government for different reasons, but the federal government provided so much relief funds to various states that came down to various arts organizations like the ArtsWa, humanitieswa, artsfund, fourculture, Seattle Arts and Culture and even more, and we applied for them.

Wendy: 17:25

There was another large one called SVOG, and we were able to receive significant funding that kept the business running, and in retrospect, I would have offered to submit grants for other organizations. They didn't know that they existed. A lot of for-profit businesses didn't know this funding existed, nor did they know how to write and submit a grant. We have a dedicated person within the Wintergrass staff to do this. A lot of festivals and nonprofit organizations have fewer staff and it's not something they could do, so that kept the doors open. And then in 2021, we created a virtual program called Pocketgrass, and it was a monthly program that we did a very light variety show that had music and magic and other entertainers and food. It was 20, 30 minutes long Full production. You'd be proud of the production quality. That kept our viewers coming in and it was free. Our funders loved the fact that we kept people engaged during the COVID era.

Jon: 18:32

I've been thinking recently about how, in late 2020 and pretty much most of 2021, everybody we were all trying to figure out how to do something via video in response to COVID. We got to do something and none of us. We were just making stuff up and most of it was of questionable quality one way or the other, but we were trying right. I've had to thought about like what if, for some reason in the future, the only real data or information left about our era was like the COVID, like everybody trying to make something with video, not knowing what they're doing? That would look really weird. They would wonder what the heck were these people doing back then. This doesn't make any sense.

Wendy: 19:09

Well, it will be that memory. You go from generation to generation and they will wonder why we did that, why were they not out? That era was a silver. That era I'm going to talk in past tense we have to have our cup half full. We are moving forward.

Jon: 19:26

That's a great. That's the best idea I've heard all week it's been. We have to start talking in the past tense about that.

Wendy: 19:32

Yeah, it was a silver lining for a lot of musicians and people who sell instruments. Luthiers that make instruments and other large companies were selling them to the extreme. People were home. What am I going to do? Oh, I might as well buy a new instrument or I might learn to play a new instrument. So they're sales skyrocketed. They did really well.

Wendy: 19:55

Then, as we were coming back into the festival, some of them questioned whether they even need a vendor table. They learned that they don't need that for new customers or existing customers. One of our sponsors is Neckville Banjo, neckville Instruments down in Sisters, oregon, and he was okay with the sales but he came back to Wintergrass because he really believes in the culture and how we affect children and believe in education. And another vendor gave us a sponsorship value but because he has young children he decided to stay home. So from the perspective of my securing additional funds, even in 22 and 23, we did very well.

Wendy: 20:41

I have a crystal ball but I can't really see through it. I don't know what 24 will look like. We are hearing from people at the conference in which we're attending the Washington Festival and Events Association that many people aren't sure if they're going to have full capacity this upcoming year. That worries us. I talked to our director, Patrice O'Neill, and she feels that we might not have full capacity. We watch ticket sales every month and they're not at par right now. But if we're at 75% capacity, we're still going to have to run the festival at 100%.

Jon: 21:16

So from 30,000 feet in 2019, what's the rough breakdown of your revenue? You said I think you said you're around 25% contributed revenue.

Wendy: 21:26

The budget was around $550, $550,000 in 2019. Now it's closer to $775,000. And Wintergrass has never been an organization that makes a lot of money. If anyone is putting together a festival, it'd be wonderful if we were paid more, if we had more investments and reserves, but because we offer a lot of free opportunities for families and kids, we don't really come out with a high net gain at the end of the year.

Jon: 21:59

So you've got contributed revenue, You've got donations, whatnot? I presume you sell sponsorship ticket sales.

Wendy: 22:05

And the earned revenue. The ticket sales, the vendors merchandise. We sell registration, education registration. We also have something called Intensives and they are part of our education program. Guests will pay a different registration for the Intensives because they're intimate. You can go to a banjo workshop and there's five to six people there with a very well-known banjo artist.

Jon: 22:33

Well, it sounds like you've got a nice mix of revenue sources, but maybe that needs to shift. In the post-COVID era, the ratios need to adjust.

Wendy: 22:44

We are really proud of our diversified income. I presented at the conference yesterday about how to sustain your nonprofit it could be for-profit too organization and because we have donations coming from individuals, foundations, securities corporations and government agencies. If any one of them should show any kind of decline, we still have funds coming in from other areas. So for this past three years, if you throw an earned income of the ticket sales vendors and merch which we had tanked, it didn't do well, but we also had the money coming in from other sources and we also have this past two or three years we were able to create some small investments and our bequests went up during this era as well.

Wendy: 23:37

Winter grasses in our will my husband is Tom. We're proud to have winter grass in our will, so I know of six families that have winter grass in their will. Then they're probably more that people don't tell you about. The goal is to get through not only 24, but 25 in the next five or 10 years and our board is a very strong board and very savvy and also very conservative fiscally. So monies are spent well. Because I raise money, it's really important to see that our finances are managed accordingly Well and, in my opinion, I think that you're thinking about the restart.

Jon: 24:16

Well, you just said 2024, 2025. Here's the thing we all know that if you're going to launch any new event from scratch, you can't really analyze it until you've done you've gone through it three times. You go through it three times, then you look at your numbers and then you start to think, okay, well, how's this going? And I believe that the COVID shutdown is essentially the same as starting over again. I think 2023 was really year one. 2022 was such a mixed bag of stuff. I wouldn't rely on that data from any event, that I did in 2022. But you take 23, 24, 25, then I think you'll be able to deduce what the new normal is.

Wendy: 25:02

It is a new normal and I track all donations since I've been at Wintergrass from 2005, 2004 on and in 2008 and 2011. There was this economic downturn but that donations skyrocketed the following year. Both years it's happening again right after COVID. People want to support the arts and USA Giving is just showing now that the arts and humanities category increased in donations, where religion and education and the environment all declined. There is something about people wanting to be together experiencing live performances, plays, museums, whatever is part of your cultural experience, if you say that again.

Jon: 25:52

So religion and, which three declined?

Wendy: 25:55

Religion, environment and education went down. The one that increased the most was an international affairs. Without knowing the details, my guess is that would be Red Cross relief for people in Ukraine, those areas that might be related to weather issues, all those emergency related non-profits. That needs support.

Jon: 26:27

That's interesting. I hadn't heard those statistics that way.

Wendy: 26:30

It's USA Giving puts out a report every year and I follow it because it allows me to make better decisions of who I am asking for support. I love your comment about any new startup should run for three years to first you plan for three years and then you make decisions after year three. Although I'm retired, that doesn't mean I am sitting at home reading a book. I'm here at this conference. I'm the treasurer of International Bluegrass Music Association Foundation in Nashville.

Wendy: 27:06

I am now co-founding a week-long overnight bluegrass camp for children along with another person, Mark Schuster, and it's called Sound Pickers. So we are in the middle of doing feasibility, Talking to every possible person who might attend, who might support, looking at a proposed budget, what it would cost and it's the most wonderful experience, John, because Mark and I have all the experience. We just now have to put all these little puzzle pieces together Looking at various sites, knowing what the liabilities would be for us and what would year one look like, how many children, what kind of instruments will they learn, who will be the instructors. We know, with venues, you have to book venues months and months in advance.

Jon: 27:58

If not years, especially in this area.

Wendy: 28:01

Well, if it's an indoor venue with accommodations, yes. So there's a small team of us that are we're still at that 30,000-foot level. Now we need to bring it down and start filtering what we have heard from people and create an actual scenario. What would it look like? Scenario one, two and three and it's been a great experience when we went to IBM A's conference in Raleigh a few weeks ago sharing the idea. The amount of support that we received was phenomenal and we had people coming up to us.

Wendy: 28:39

People know me very well at IBM A and I had a number of people coming to me saying they wanted to participate. Anything we can do for kids is important to me that I taught Special Ed for years, so I really believe in providing various educational opportunities to kids, and at Wintergrass we have programs called Jams, j-a-m-z one, two and three, and there are various levels of opportunities for kids by age. And then we also have a program called the Youth Academy Teacher Training Program and they are mentors. What happened were these kids would attend their workshops between seven and 14 years old and then they might move on to our high school program, but they really wanted to help the young children.

Wendy: 29:28

Our ratio is one to four because we have lots of instructors and we have these young adults want to be there to help these kids learn. And then the Youth Orchestra. I believe we were the first organization to have a Bluegrass Youth Orchestra. It started by a man named Chick Rose back in 1994 and teaching kids to play Bluegrass instruments who come from a classical background. So they were coming from their band programs in high schools where they're reading music and they're playing whatever the classical tunes they were learning. Bringing these kids into our fold, they started to learn to play by ear and learn to play different songs. Now, fast forward, we have a culminating event. We have a Youth Orchestra of about 100 high school students who also play with students from Seattle Pacific University. They play together and again we've got the college students mentoring the high school students. That is a full house. It's a tear-jerking experience to see these young adults playing Bluegrass music with the lineup with Peter Rowan.

Wendy: 30:37

Oh yeah, I can imagine Peter Rowan and Vassan and Tim O'Brien and a young artist named Rashad Eggleston. It just depends on who our lineup is that year, and they work with them.

Jon: 30:50

Wendy, who is your most important mentor in our industry.

Wendy: 30:55

Well, actually my husband is my mentor and he is an attorney for the Trust for Public Land, and we are very, very different. He's quiet, reserved, very, very thoughtful, and then I am the one with lots of ideas. We've been together for 51 years as friends or we were dating and then eventually married. He has always been my sounding board that I will come up with an idea, and then he asks questions and he supports everything I do in my life. He has never been the person to tell me what I should or should not do, but he asks very good questions that allow me to discern what I want to do and so, yes, he's been my professional mentor in that respect.

Wendy: 31:45

I would say it's a compilation of people At Wintergrass. There isn't one person that leads the organization. Yes, Patrice O'Neill is the executive director, but it's always been this team approach from the very beginning. But I would say Patrice O'Neill has always been a mentor. She's a visionary, she's very creative and the ideas that come to Wintergrass always, or mostly, start from her beliefs and her values and then what she believes we should be doing at Wintergrass, and then the rest of us take it and run. And she is a founder, so she's been around for a while. She's also a musician, so she knows the profession from an artist's perspective.

Jon: 32:33

What is your favorite sound?

Wendy: 32:36

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. That one you don't have to question.

Jon: 32:39

That was fast.

Wendy: 32:40

So Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has been one of my favorite bands from high school on and I followed them like a dead head and we became dirt heads and my husband and I would go to any show, in every show that we could. Growing up in LA, in Whittier, california. I was born in Canada but we grew up in LA County and moved to the San Francisco area in Tumorin County and followed them. At that point we could afford to even fly to go see them someplace. Then in 1999, John, I was teaching, I had no background in production, artist management, talent buying, sponsorship. I had no background and I called John McEwen on the phone thinking it was his booking agent, and he picks up the phone and says John McEwen and I said hi, this is Wendy Tyner.

Wendy: 33:38

I don't know what the business really was like in 1999, but in 45 minutes we created a date, a price, a venue. I didn't have support. So it's a longer story that I won't get into today. But we did five shows from 2000 to 2005, including Trey Anastasio from Phish and no one could know it was a surprise guest in 2003. And I learned the business from the ground up and I did work for John McEwen and then Wintergrass came. A couple of people from Wintergrass came to my first show Patrice O'Neill and Stephen Rufo and they asked if I would join them. I quit teaching. I quit teaching to become a volunteer for Wintergrass in 2004 because Tom saw that I was struggling with the whole field of special education and how to get adequate support from the school district and county and state to serve kids who have inherent worth. Every person has inherent worth and there was never enough funding to support those kids.

Jon: 34:51

I have a dear friend who's been in special education for over 20 years and I'm very familiar with the struggles. One last question you are walking into an ice cream shop and you're going to get an ice cream cone with two scoops. What are the flavors?

Wendy: 35:09

Jamoka almond fudge, which, which no longer exists, so the other two would be cherry Garcia. It's the other Ben and Jerry's ice cream that I love, cherry Garcia, and the one with the chocolate and banana Chunky monkey Chunk. Okay, so the ice creams are cherry Garcia and chunky monkey from Ben and Jerry's.

Jon: 35:31

Well, you're just a person who knows what you want. That was fast.

Wendy: 35:36

Yes.

Jon: 35:37

That one. People have to think about that one generally. So, in the context of a two scoop cone with Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey, which flavor goes on top? Cherry, damn, you know what you're after.

Wendy: 35:51

There's an old joke from Laurel and Hardy that they have a glass of liquid and they have to share it and Laurel Stan. Laurel drinks the whole cup of the juice and Hardy was very upset and he said well, mine was on the bottom. So the only thing I want to say at the end is I love the banjo. It's a favorite sound of mine. I heard it for the first time when I was about 17 years old from a band up in Canada and there was a song called sweet city woman and then the Eagles had banjo and then the dirt band definitely had banjo. So I have a banjo and I don't play it enough, but I love the sound.

Wendy: 36:35

When I was young I told my mom that when I get older and when I'm an adult I really want to play the banjo. She said you can't do both. It's a joke. So that's what I strive for. That is a goal of mine now. I turn 67 in a couple of days, but age is meaningless to me because there's so much I want to continue to do in life, and one is now to pick up the banjo and play it more and especially inspire our two grandchildren, who are three and a half and one and a half to be exposed to music. It's important that all people have music in their lives, whether they listen or play.

Jon: 37:19

Here here. Wendy, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down this morning. I'm certainly going to be checking out the Winter Grass Festival this February. I can hardly wait.

Wendy: 37:29

Thank you. Tickets are available now, February 22nd to February 25th, at the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue. You can get accommodations right there. You can come one to four days and enjoy.

Jon: 37:44

Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you, John.

Wendy: 38:03

All call, one hour to doors.