Future Classic Women Awards – CHI – CHI NWANOKU

Hello and welcome to Future Classic Women Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte, on Women's Radio Station, the program where we search for the most amazing new female artists on the classical panorama. Today our very special guest is the fantastic double bass soloist Cici Nwanoku, OBE. She was for 30 years double bass of the Orchestra of Age of Enlightenment until she actually founded the fantastic Chiniqui Orchestra. Good morning, Chi-Chi. Good morning. Chi-Chi, the Chiniqui Orchestra is something so amazing. Well, you are amazing. Sorry, I'm such a big fan. That will come really through. So it's quite an honor to have you with us this morning, and you're here to actually talk about your upcoming concert with the Highgate Festival, and actually just last night you had this fantastic concert at Parcel Room, right? So how is it, I mean, one day you're in the concert hall, one day you're in the radio station, then off to another concert. This is the life of, you know, a freelance musician. One minute you can be sitting in an orchestra, the next minute you can be playing chamber music, the next minute I might be teaching, the next minute I might be on an aeroplane to go and play somewhere else, and, or, in a radio studio doing an interview with someone like you. Absolutely. So, you— it's not every day that you find a woman double bass soloist. How was it for you to start as a woman in the section of the double bass? Because it's quite a man instrument, isn't it? Although recently I've seen a lot of women taking over. Yeah, it's always something that's surprised me when people put a gender to an instrument. Absolutely. I don't understand why people do that or even suggest it because it's something that's very old-fashioned and maybe 40, 30 years ago, but when I took up the double bass, I was giving up a career as a sprinter. I had been a musician playing the recorder and the piano from a very young age as a hobby. I was really, really passionate about it, and, and, um, but I was actually following a career as a 100-meter sprinter. And stupidly, I— well, maybe not stupidly— I was invited to play in a women's football match when I was 17 and a half years old, and In that match, I got very badly injured and dislocated my knee. Oh, wow. So that it meant it was the end, because I was training to go— at that point, I was training as— I was competing at national level, getting prepared for the Montreal Olympics. Wow. And so in my final year at school, I was at a girls' grammar school. The school had a very active music department with an orchestra, and I was doing A-level music. So when my accident happened, I had an operation, I was in hospital for 2 weeks, and the day I came back to school, my head of music said, Chichi, you're probably the most musical girl in the school, but you don't play in the orchestra. And we are all devastated that your career as a sprinter is over, but we think you could have a career in music if you take up a very unpopular orchestral instrument. So it was at a girls' grammar school and nobody played the double bass. So I immediately had a job opening. Fantastic. It's funny, you know, the saying, you know, when a door closes, a bigger one will open. So that's what happened, isn't it? Yes, but I take that saying one step further. Absolutely. Because when, you know, we all grew up hearing, when one door closes, another door opens. Yeah. To me, that sounds a little bit passive. It's as though another door will just automatically open just by chance. Yeah, but life is so short. I believe, and I encourage young people around me, that when one door closes, open it. It's a door. That's what doors do. Mm-hmm. I.e., get on with it yourself. Absolutely. Well, my philosophy is to knock until they don't open. Until I don't knock it down. And then you don't just open that door, and if you do go through it, you've got to learn how to keep the door open for other people. Absolutely. That is what you're doing with the— That's exactly what I'm doing. With the Chiniqui Orchestra. Yes, absolutely. How long have you been thinking about this? Well, I've had already quite a long career as a double bass principal player in orchestras and chamber musician and soloist and teacher. And I always knew that I was the only person of colour in the orchestra. I mean, We haven't talked about what Chinneke is. It's an orchestra that is made up of— it is a majority black and minority ethnic professional orchestra and junior orchestra. And what it does is to offer outstanding opportunities to already established professionals and also shine a limelight on people on the underrepresented in the classical music world and to also be mentors and lead the way for young people to come into this industry who have otherwise not really been showcased. And I never really— of course, I always knew I was the odd one out, always in this sense, ethnically in orchestras. But I didn't know if I could— that I had the power to do anything about it. And it was when government started to call me in to talk about it that I realized actually people are thinking about it. And they are looking at me to get that ball rolling. And so when I had my lightbulb moment, I decided I was going to create something that could, you know, to take care of this underrepresentation of Black and minority ethnic classical musicians. This is something we're going to listen later. Now we're going to listen to the Van Halen double bass concerto that you recorded with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Paul Godwin. Conductor. How was this experience? Well, this was really exciting because double bass players very rarely get to play solos. It's not very usual. And so one evening I was having a meal with a friend of mine who was an oboist, and he's the director of the— he's the chief executive of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. And he said to me, Gigi, have you ever recorded any solo concertos? And I said, No, no, of course not. I've played them, but I've never made any recordings of these pieces. He said, why not? And I said, well, nobody's ever asked me to make a recording. He said, well, you're supposed to make the suggestions. I didn't know it was that way around. I've never asked to do this. And so the next morning he phoned me very early and said, I've got 3 recording companies who want to make a recording with you. And so we went with the English recording company Hyperion, and he said you can record whatever you like. So I chose to record 3 concertos by 18th-century composers, and I used the special Viennese tuning for these particular concertos. So let's listen to Vanhal Double Bass Concerto in D major. Welcome to Women's Radio Station. I'm Sarah Louise Ryan and welcome to Love Lessons Live on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Future Classic Women Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte, on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Julie May Is Listening. Hi, this is Anna Kennedy and we're at Women's Radio Station supporting women's well-being and we're talking all things autism. Women, the possibilities are endless. That's what makes us different. Hi, I'm Lauren Mishkon. I'm a birth doula and mum of 3, and I'm passionate about supporting women to have empowering and positive birth experiences. Please join me for my brand new show, From Tummy to Mummy, here on Women's Radio Station. Every week I'll be here with an expert guest talking about women's reproductive health, everything fertility, pregnancy, birth and baby related right through to the menopause and beyond. Please join us for an informative and fun hour. Hello, my name is Ingrid Marsh on Women's Radio Station, and coming soon is the Radical Wellbeing Show. To help support women's wellbeing, each show I share the airwaves with ordinary women like me and you doing extraordinary things. Women who have overcome huge obstacles in their lives who are now here with me to empower you. On the Radical Wellbeing Show, you'll be inspired to kick away the roadblocks and live your life to the fullest. If you're ready to get radical about your wellbeing, then this is the show for you. Hi, I'm Hazel Butterfield, a blogger, book lover, and mental health advocate, and you can listen to my show Get Booked here at Women's Radio Station daily at 5 AM and 5 PM. Throughout my shows, we'll talk about the books I've read, new releases, chat to authors, publishers, and book enthusiasts, all with the theme and aim of supporting women's emotional well-being. If you have a book to tell us about, get in touch at presenters@womensradiostation.com. 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Welcome back to Future Classic Women Awards on Women's Radio Station, the program where we search for the most amazing new female artists in the classical panorama. Our guest today is legendary Chi-Chi Nwanoku. I mean legendary, you are young still, but you've done so much in your career. I mean, it's impressive. So nice to be called young. It's a long time since I've heard that in front of my name. So, Chi-Chi, how was recording the first double bass Concerto de Tiftane with the orchestra? It was an amazing experience because, as I said earlier, it's not something that we normally do as double bass players. So when I got the call, I prepared these pieces intensively, and only one of them had I ever performed actually in concert. And so it was a great opportunity to learn 2 other pieces in the Viennese tuning. So I had learnt already the Dittersdorf Concerto No. 2, which most students learn that. But the Vanhal concerto and the Dittersdorf Concerto No. 1 was an opportunity for me to learn those. I flew to Sweden to Örebro, which is the area where the Swedish Chamber Orchestra is based. And we had, I think, 3 days or something to to record these concertos. And they have the luxury of their own concert hall, which doubles also as a recording studio. So it's fantastic facilities there. And acoustic. And yes, and the acoustic. And we didn't— we weren't doing rehearsals, we weren't performing them, we were just recording straight off. And I'd never played with them before. So, you know, from First thing in the morning, the red light was on. And actually, I found— what I found very difficult to do as a soloist was, for example, when you— when you're— when the producer wanted to tweak, he'd say, right, oh, Chi-Chi, could we go from bar 27 to bar 45? Because I want that B-flat in bar 29 or something, you know, or something like that. You could bet your bottom dollar that the one note that I would get wrong would be the one that he wanted. And so I realized that I could only do long takes. So most of this recording is complete takes of movements. It's a sort of live. Yes. And, and, and we ended up finishing the recording session almost a session early because I did it in a sort of record time. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, the orchestra was very happy because they got to go home early, but, but I mean, I'm used to doing tweaks when it's short takes with orchestral things, but when you're playing the solo line, I found it really very hard to break it down into little snippets. Absolutely, because also the meaning of the phrase that you're, you know, singing with your double bass, it changes completely, isn't it? Exactly. Depends how you're arriving there, the mood. There are so many factors. The next tracks we're going to listen now is going to be from the Schubert, the Trout Quintet. That's a completely different thing. It's chamber music. So how different, let's say, to the audience, because we have an audience that is not specifically classical experts, if you like. So what's the difference between performing chamber music and performing as a soloist or performing in the orchestra? Yes, well, when you play chamber music, it's— that's music in the camera, which is in a room, and it's very much more intimate. There's not a conductor, for example. And so this is like a little conversation or a big conversation between a small group of gathering of musicians, which is lovely and is much more spontaneous. It's how it was born as well. It was something that, you know, would happen at the parties. People would just sit down and pick up the instruments and just read something together, although it's not really readable, isn't it? It's so virtuoso, the Trout Quintet. Well, this particular piece is— this particular piece is quite virtuosic. I've actually recorded it 3 times, and my very first recording, which was with a group called Domus, is— still remains my absolute favourite. We recorded it at Abbey Road Studios in 1988. I think it was at the end of 1988. And Sue Tomes was the pianist, Krysha Ostrovich the violinist, Tim Bolton the viola player, and Richard Lester the cellist. A wonderful experience. And this, it's a very famous melody. And the one that, the movement that I've chosen to listen to today is the theme and variations, which is, it tells the story of the trout in battle with the fisherman who's determined to catch the fish. And yeah, it's, it's It's sort of man against beast, really. So that's called— it's quite programmatic in a way, right? It's really telling us a story. Do you have any other favourite chamber music piece that you like to perform? Oh, gosh, I wouldn't know where to start. I've recently discovered the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and, you know, we'll hear some of his music a bit later, but I love playing wind ensemble music, actually. There's the Mozart Grand Partita, which is for 12 wind instruments and a double bass, and the Dvořák Wind Serenade, which is for, I think, 12 or 13, or 11 or 12 wind instruments and a cello and a double bass. Čineke recently performed that. And I think after about 12 players, 13 players, that you then— it ceases to become chamber music. But it's absolutely fantastic. It's thrilling to be, you know, to sort of take ownership of your musical language and performance and bounce off each other, listening to thematic bits of material and see where you take up the conversation and play your part and hand it on to the next instrument. And when you're supporting each other. Wonderful. So we're going to listen to the theme and variation from Schubert, the Trout Quintet. Would you like to tell us who is playing with you in this recording? I just told you. Yes, it's the very first one. It's with Domus Quartet. Perfect, with the Domus Quartet. Welcome to the Women's Radio Station, supporting women's well-being. Women's Radio Station is all about diversity, from opinions, career, ethnicity, education, and most importantly, women's well-being. We aim to celebrate the individuality of every woman everywhere. Providing opportunities and the platform for your voice. Visit our website womensradiostation.com for more information. I'm Tamina Zaman, founder of Empower and Enrich. When it comes to money, do you clam up or get confused? Do you wish you could save more money, or are you hoping you have enough for retirement? You are not alone. Many women want to be smarter with their cash but just don't know where to start. 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For more information on how you can sponsor a show, go to womensradiostation.com. Women's Radio Station, supporting women's well-being. Welcome back to Future Classic Women Awards on Women's Radio Station. Today we're talking to double bass soloist Chi-Chi Nwanoku, OBE. Chi-Chi, who was your most inspiring artist that you can think of when you are performing, for example? As a double bassist? I don't know. My main influences, I would say, would be Franco Petrachi, who I studied with in Rome. I studied with him for 2 years after I graduated at the Royal Academy of Music. I graduated in 1981, so I was with Franco until '83. All right. And he absolutely liberated me on the instrument. And I think it was— he was the first real soloist on the double bass that I ever saw or heard. Absolutely opened my eyes to what was possible on the double bass. And then my other big inspiration was a wonderful Englishman called Francis Baines. He was a virtuoso hurdy-gurdy player, but he played violone. And hurdy-gurdy is like a sort of— it's an ancient kind of almost like a sort of bagpipe kind of thing. And he played Baroque music. And so when I was getting a bit involved in— starting to get involved in Baroque historical performance, he was the person to go to. And he was like a sort of eccentric old English gentleman, but the most incredibly free and expressive one. And I literally only had 2 lessons with him. But it was enough to sort of complement what I'd learned from Peträki and the information that I could apply in the orchestra, whereas Peträki, I mean, that was about solo playing and virtuosic technique. Do you think it's changed the view of the double bass as a solo instrument in the past years? That's a really good question, that's a very good question, because You know, I, during the time that I studied the bass at the Royal Academy of Music, things have changed so much. I started in 1977, and during my first term at the Academy, my parents came to see me play in my first orchestral concert at the Royal Academy of Music in the autumn term of 1977. And one of my tutors went to my parents and said, your daughter will not have a career. In classical music because she's playing a man's instrument and freaked out my mother. Oi! Freaked out my mother. And my father just said, just watch her, she's going to do this. And so that was these preconceived restrictions that are, A, trying to block women from playing in the industry, and let alone the fact that I was of color and only 5 foot tall. And so I had a lot of preconceived ideas to handle and to change perceptions. Then the only thing that we studied properly, double bass players at music college, was the orchestral repertoire. We were not encouraged to study the solo repertoire, and it's probably because our teachers couldn't play it and/or they simply weren't interested in it. Yet every single end of year we were expected to perform a recital which included solo sonatas and concertos. So how, you know, we had to learn them somehow. And by the time I got to the end of my last year at the Royal Academy of Music, I had already been a founder member of the Endymion Ensemble and which was a chamber ensemble, in fact, Sadly, we just lost the main founder of this ensemble, John Whitfield, the most incredible bassoonist that this country has seen, had seen at that time. He passed away a few days ago. But we were playing standard repertoire and then new contemporary repertoire. And quite often I would see a solo for a double bass in a septet or an octet or something. And there was technique that was required of me that I was not learning at the Academy that was taking me beyond the orchestral limitations. So by the time I reached my 4th year, I realised I needed to go study with a soloist. And I'd heard about Franco Petracchi in Rome, and that was why I went there. And, but since then, since I left the Academy, they've created this thing called the mini double bass. So people can now begin to play the double bass at the age of 6 because they make small versions, you know, 10th size, 12th size, 8th size. So small children can start the double bass. So they learn at a younger age where you are fearless. Yeah. And they learn the solo repertoire as well from a very young age. And so it's completely changed what the double bass is now capable of. It's fantastic. In my lifetime, I've seen a huge transformation of the instrument. It's fantastic. So what would you say if you could go back in time, or, you know, to yourself or to a younger student? Say about what? About, you know, to take with you when you're starting this career. Well, I mean, life throws at you what it throws at you, so, you know, in an ideal world, if I knew that I was going to be a double bass player, maybe I would have started the double bass a little bit younger. Okay. But it was not something that I knew about at the time. And one of the things, you know, obviously people are obsessed with technique and things that you've got to have a good technique in order to be able to play. Yes. But it's really important to think of the word play because play suggests some kind of freedom and abandonment. And quite often, I think students are often— they're so terrified of technical errors that they start to perform it in a very academic way. And we have to remember that it's music that has to be played to communicate with people. Absolutely. Well, the next piece we're going to listen to It's Summer College Taylor, the nonet, and that's— yes. Welcome to Women's Radio Station. I'm Sarah Louise Ryan and welcome to Love Lessons Live on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Future Classic Women Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte, on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Julie May Is Listening. Hi, this This is Anna Kennedy and we're at Women's Radio Station supporting women's well-being and we're talking all things autism. Women, the possibilities are endless. That's what makes us different. Hi, I'm Lauren Mishkon. I'm a birth doula and mum of 3 and I'm passionate about supporting women to have empowering and positive birth experiences. Please join me for my brand new show From Tummy to Mummy here on Women's Radio Station. Every week I'll be here with an expert guest talking about women's reproductive health, everything fertility, pregnancy, birth, and baby related, right through to the menopause and beyond. Please join us for an informative and fun hour. Hello, my name is Ingrid Marsh on Women's Radio Station, and coming soon is the Radical Wellbeing Show to help support women's wellbeing Each show I share the airwaves with ordinary women like me and you doing extraordinary things. Women who've overcome huge obstacles in their lives who are now here with me to empower you. On the Radical Wellbeing Show, you'll be inspired to kick away the roadblocks and live your life to the fullest. If you're ready to get radical about your wellbeing, then this is the show for you. Hi, I'm Hazel Butterfield, a blogger, book lover, and mental health advocate, and you can listen to my show Get Booked here at Women's Radio Station. Daily at 5 AM and 5 PM. Throughout my shows, we'll talk about the books I've read, new releases, chat to authors, publishers, and book enthusiasts, all with a theme and aim of supporting women's emotional well-being. If you have a book to tell us about, get in touch at presenters@womensradiostation.com. Join me on my show and share my love of books and writing. Do you want to be a doula? Would you like to support families through pregnancy, birth, and the postnatal period? Do you have qualities of compassion, listening, caring, and empowering? At Nurturing Birth, we offer approved doula training courses across the UK which are facilitated by an award-winning doula. Here you will learn more about the support you can offer, explore the doula role, and think about how to set up your business. No need for previous qualifications. Find out more at nurturingbirth.co.uk. You're listening to Women's Radio Station, supporting women's well-being. Women's Radio Station's creating a global network for the empowerment of women, and we want you to be involved. Join us on Instagram and Twitter at Women's Radio Station, that's Women's Radio STN, or Facebook Women's Radio Station to keep up to date with all our exciting programs. Welcome back, welcome back to Future Classic Women Awards on Women's Radio Station. Our guest today is double bassist soloist Chi-Chi Nwanoku. Chi-Chi, we heard fantastic chamber music, and we're going to go back to listen to some orchestral concerto. This is the session for the odd questions. So I'm going to ask if you have any hobby to free or relax your mind that is not thinking about music, classical music, if you like. So do you listen to any other style of music? I do, but not often enough, probably. Okay. And because I'm one of those musicians that, that as soon as music is playing, I don't switch off. So I don't think— when people say, oh, I love classical music, I can, I can relax to it, I can go to sleep to it, it's the opposite for me. I go to work when my ears are alerted. Yeah. So I don't, I don't particularly relaxed it. The only thing I do with music really when I'm not performing it or studying it or teaching it is dancing to it. I love, I love to dance, and, and so that's something that I do usually with my, my family and that side of my life, you know. And I'm in a book club, although since Chinookay started I've not managed to read as many books as I should have done because I'm sort I've kind of got my hands full and I'm very much enjoying other aspects of the music industry, actually learning other aspects of the music industry, like advocating for music education and public speaking and that sort of thing. Actually, I've seen one of your speech about the Chiniquy Orchestra and it was so inspiring to see, you know, telling the story. How different it is to talk to an audience instead of playing to an audience? Well, for me, to begin with, that was really very intimidating, very daunting. And, you know, when you're a performer, you walk onto the stage and you deliver everything. Your message comes through your instrument, and it's almost abstract because there are no words. And then you have to become suddenly articulate. And it's very hard to express a feeling that you might get from playing a particular piece of music. And so you have to— there's other ways that you have to find to talk about music and what you do. When I talk about music and it's— or what I'm doing with Chineke, for example, it's more to do with the importance of every child learning music and access points and starting points for every child, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of their wealth and privilege, that the importance of learning music because it's so good for the brain, it's so good for cognitive thinking, development, coordination, all of those things that we know about. And, and it's the only subject that you learn where you're— where you learn how to listen. No other subject teaches you how to listen, not just listening to yourself, but to listen to each other. Absolutely. And so this is very important. And, and so I've— I still get very nervous about public speaking, but I think it's quite important to, to talk to people because one of the things that Chineke has developed is the audience. Now, I, you know, we walk, for example, last Thursday we performed, the orchestra performed at the South Bank Centre at the Queen Elizabeth Hall to a packed audience. And the audience looks nothing like the audience that I performed to for 35 years around the world. And I don't just mean a diversity of ethnicity, of which we have a lot of. But diversity of age. We sometimes— it's like going out for dinner in Italy or Spain where, you know, the whole family goes out from, you know, grandmother down to great-grandchild. 4 generations go out for dinner. That's what we get in our audiences. Our audiences are so lively and vibrant and soaking up what they're seeing on stage. There was— I came to see one of your concerts and that's a compliment. I saw a tiny child, he was too little, and it was very late, the concert was really late, so he fell asleep. But he was so sweet, and it was so peaceful because I know he was dreaming with the music, isn't it? Because sometimes people are afraid, they think, oh, I can't bring my children because it's too late, they're gonna fall asleep. But actually, while they're sleeping, they're taking in so much more, and, and that's perfectly fine. You're there to enjoy the concert, you can enjoy with your closed, you can join with your eyes open, it doesn't matter. My teacher, when I was having lessons, she was always with her eyes closed. I think she was sleeping. I'm sure she wasn't. No, I'm joking. But it's absolutely right because it's important that people, you know, we've— I think one of the problems in the classical music industry is that we've made it so prescriptive. You go into the concert hall, you sit down, you do not move, you hardly breathe until the end of a whole symphony. Yeah, which might be 40 minutes long. Yeah, 50 minutes long. In between movements where— or concertos where, you know, a soloist might have done the most incredible cadenza in the first movement, and it feels sometimes absolutely spontaneous. You want to clap or show your, um, show your, uh, reaction. Yeah, yeah. And how you feel. And we've stifled that. Yeah. Well, that's all changing with, you know, in Čilike audiences. They clap when they feel something's come to the end of a movement, and it's fine for them to clap. We're not only developing who's on the stage, also whose music we play. You know, every concert we play, we include a piece of music by a composer of relative ethnicity. The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Nonette that we just heard is something that we play a lot, and that's what I'm going to be playing at the Highgate International Music Festival, which is why I wanted to hear some of it today. That was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Taylor's Opus 2. Wow. He was 19 when he wrote that. He— when he went to study at the Royal College of Music, he went on a violin scholarship. He is half Sierra Leone, half English. The principal of the Royal College of Music was Stanford, the composer. Stanford felt that every student, regardless of what instrument they played, should all study composition. As well as the composition students. Yeah. And so Samuel Cory Taylor began his composition studies while he was a student at the Royal College, and that was just his second piece. It was homework. So amazing. Incredible. It's incredible what, what he produced. And so every concert that Chinook plays, we always include a composer like him. And, and we are also by default developing who comes to the concerts and also Audiences' responses is also being developed because we're not straitjacketing our audiences into behaving in a particular way. It's kind of like cultural leadership in a way, cultural development, because we are not trying to be a BME image of the existing orchestras and their behaviour. We come on as one with the conductor at the very beginning of a concert, for example, and nobody sits down until we've all welcomed the audience and the whole orchestra bows together to acknowledge the audience and thank them for being here with us. And thank you for being here with us today. We're going to finish our interview with the beautiful last movement of Dietersdorff Double Bass Concerto No. 2 with the Chi-Chin Manoku as soloist with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Paul Godwin, conductor. And this was Dieter Storff, Double Bass Concerto No. 2 with Cici Nwanoku and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. If you have any questions that you would like to ask to our guest or nominations for our Future Classic Women Awards, please email presenters@womensradiostation.com or tweet us @WomensRadioSTN. A big thank to our guest Cici for the great chat and the beautiful music played today. Thank you very much for having me. It was fantastic. You've been listening to Future Classic Women Awards on Women's Radio Station, live every day at 10 AM and 10 PM London time. If you want to listen to it again or catch up on our previous program, you can head to the presenter page Stefania Passamonte/Future Classic Women Awards on womensradiostation.com. Thank you for listening. Welcome to Women's Radio Station. I'm Sarah Louise Ryan and welcome to Love Lessons Live on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Future Classic Women Awards with me Stefania Passamonte on Women's Radio Station. Hello and welcome to Julie May Is Listening. Hi, this is Anna Kennedy, and we're at Women's Radio Station supporting women's well-being, and we're talking all things autism. Women, the possibilities are endless. That's what makes us different. Hi, I'm Lauren Mishcon. 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