Danielle Cozart-Steele Interview on the Transgender Singing Conference-Transcript

Beth South

Beth: All right, my name is Beth South, and today’s date is May 11, 2020. To start can you please tell me your full name, your date of birth, and your current job title.

Danielle: My name is Danielle Marie Cozart-Steele. My date of birth is 1-20-82. I’m an adjunct instructor of music for Indiana University East, where I teach Applied Voice Lessons and the Indiana University East Richmond Corral 00:32.

B: Okay. Can you tell me where your born and a little bit about your family background?

D: I was born at Community Hospital in Anderson, Indiana, but I live in, or lived in Alexandria, Indiana, and Alexandra is a town, umm, at the time I was growing up was a town of about 4,000 people, umm, and 4 stop lights, its primary, I would say my impression as a kid, was that its primary interests were umm corn and basketball. And so, high school sports were a very very big deal where I came from. Umm most folks, umm, most folks who were there grew up there and stayed there. Umm, and my, my parents lived right on the main street in town. My dad was a dentist for 47 years in Alexandria right in the downtown. My mom was a homemaker, but then went back to school and became, got her teaching license and was a title 1 reading teacher01:40. Umm, and part of the context for how they, you know, how they tie into all of this is that they are the ones that initially exposed me to classical music, languages, poetry, umm, arts and culture, and that kind of thing. So, they are really what, what, they nurtured my talents in music and then ultimately, umm, encouraged me to pursue that as a career and supported my education.

B: Great. Where did you receive your education?

D: So, I went to Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I started Butler as music education major. Umm, I knew that I loved music, umm, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do something like performance and so I thought music education was probably the right way to go. And 3 or 3 or 3 1/2 years into it, umm, so when you are music education major at Butler, you have to take 4 years of applied lessons in your primary instrument, mine was voice. And the opera faculty, umm, got a hold of me 3 years into my degree and convinced me to start singing in the opera workshop and then convinced me to change my major, like right before the finish line. So, I changed my major to vocal performance. Umm, because I did, I had this big, umm, I had this really big, really rich, really mature instrument and, umm, from their I got into Cincinnati Conservatory for performance, and, umm, at Cincinnati Conservatory, which is housed in the University of Cincinnati, I was there for 2 1/2 years getting my masters in music and I walked out with a specialization in art song. And, umm, from there on I went to be a free-lance gigging musician, and recently I have, well recently in the last 4 years, I started my doctorate at Columbia University Teachers College, and I will be writing my dissertation this year, and I am doing my doctorate in Music and Music Education.

B: Great, so when did you join Earlham College?

D: I came to the faculty of Earlham College in, umm, July of 2012, right before that Fall Academic Year started, and I had previously been working in Indianapolis Opera as the Director of Education, and then, umm, moved into an Assistant Director of Choral Activities position at Earlham which became a full-time position by my second semester.

B: So, kind of jumping a little bit. Umm, what inspired you to kind of start the Transgender Singing Voice Conference? How did that come about?

D: So actually, it goes right back to the beginning of my… umm, my son is in a play pen…the story of how I started the Transgender Singing Voice Conference, really goes back to my very beginning at Earlham. And so I want to say…I want to say the Fall of 2013, we had a student in our program and…that student ended up coming to me and saying “I would really like to start wearing women’s clothing to class, and I would like your support, I’m only going to wear women’s clothes in choir… nobody else really knows, and I just, you know, I just want to be somewhere I feel comfortable and I feel like I can be myself”, and I was like “yeah that cool, that’s fine, you know, just tell me what you need, you do whatever you want, my classroom is a safe space for you. Do you want me to use she/her pronouns for you?” And the student was like “no, no, its fine.” Well, 2 months later, we’re using, you know, she/her pronouns for this particular student. This student is, is wearing women’s clothing 100% of the time, and she has been completely embraced by the choir, umm, and really by the whole Earlham community.

And, so second semester her freshman year, she came to me and she said, “okay, I…I want to sing alto in concert choir, I don’t want to sing base anymore.” So what we done for the first concert, her first concert, she had worn a dress, so for the first concert, she had worn a dress and I want to insert like a little anecdote here: Our Administrative Assistant for the department at the time, was this wonderful, very sweet, kind older lady, but also… was very conservative religious and, what was so beautiful is that even within that first three months, this, this conservative religious gal who had to fit our, our student for her first dress, she never once… she never balked at fitting the student, she never made the student feel awkward, and when the student didn’t know how to pick out a pair of nice dress heels to wear at the concert, our secretary took her shopping. Just, oh my gosh, just so wonderful.

So, in that first concert our student… and I am going to call her Charlotte, that’s what she, that’s what her pseudonym in all of my research papers, stood on the edge of the alto section, between the altos and bases so that she could wear a dress, but then also sing the part. The voice part that she… that she was comfortable singing at the time, but by second semester, she said I want to be an alto… that really where I feel more at home in terms of my identity. Ahh, could you help me? And, what we did, I wish had, I wish I had perfect memory for this… or that I could go back and watch, but what we did initially is we just put her in the alto section, because usually people who have lower voices who sing bass also have this really serviceable higher register that is very pure, sometime it can almost be a little like ahh [holds note], like flute like or reedy, but usually… like, its, its, usually very…pleasant and useable, and so we just thought, okay Charlotte will sing in the higher register, the typical musical term for that is falsetto although those terms, I just want to say for the sake of posterity, that terms describing registers of the voice are under dispute in the vocal pedagogy world and so for example, Charlotte singing like [sings a note], Charlotte singing up here like I do, umm, for a base voice, that would be called “falsetto,” but for me that’s what we would call “head voice” and so… in the vocal pedagogy world, there is now a push to unify the way that we talk about voices and for some people, its talking about how high or low a voice is. So in terms in registration only talking about essentially what notes they are singing and giving names to the registers, that are the same for everyone, male or female, whatever voice part you sing, and then there are other people who want to change the terminology to talk about the actual anatomical function of the voice, and so although it’s not totally pertinent here hypothyroid dominant or thyroarytenoid dominant duction, is another way talking about these things and so.

So anyway, we, Charlotte was using a cricothyroid dominant function, a high voice function to sing, and she, her voice would crack and her voice would pop…she would try to start singing and then she couldn’t, so we called it “unreliable onset.” She would get tired, vocally tired, just minutes into rehearsal, and you could see that she, she deflated. And so my colleague, so the head, the head of the department, department, program at the time was a man named William Cover-House10:37 who is no longer, he, he nor or I, are at Earlham any longer. Bill came to me and he said, “hey would you work with her, give her voice lessons?” and I was like, “yeah, sure” but then I, you know I, I was like well, I don’t, I don’t typically train assigned male at birth voices and I definitely don’t know how to train a falsetto, but I guess I’ll be in, and then I was like, well guess I’ll try to train her the way I would train a mezzo-soprano or a counter-tenor, you know and I’m thinking through all the ways that I will like try to help Charlotte access her sound. And we get in the lessons and again I’m expecting a false, expecting to hear a falsetto and I hear essentially nothing. Charlotte sounds like she has either experienced some type of vocal trauma or… that she maybe has been a chain smoker, she has hideous allergies, like there is, the sounds was unreliable and so honestly and so unpleasant, right? Just, it strained, she was straining to use her voice and…and she couldn’t blend quality of her voice using all these unflattering terms which I feel, I feel bad saying, but I think Charlotte would also tell you, like, yeah, the start we had was super rough.

And so, I said Charlotte, I was like, “okay look, there got to be literature on this, I’ll just go read it.” And that’s when, at that time I was not a researcher, I was not doing my doctorate, I was still several years away from my doctorate in fact, and I discovered nothing. There was nothing. There was nothing in any choral research…database. There was nothing in any vocal pedagogy database, nothing that I had access to in the vocal realm, you know performance, or choral, or music ed[ucation]. Had anything…you couldn’t even get a keyword hit. Trans, the word transgender…at that time in music education was so…like no one had, no one even thought about, thought about it, like you would do a keyword search on these national databases and I, I even assumed that the word “transgender” would be mentioned under the umbrella of LGBT, right, you know like, oh, we must make choir welcoming to our LGBT students and that stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. Nope, nothing, and…the first, so anyway. So anyway, I was tremendously surprised and I went back to Charlotte and was like, “look, bad news, we got to do everything from scratch” and I said “I am willing 100% to just get in the deep end with you and we will figure this out together, but that is going to require a lot vulnerability on your part and it may be really uncomfortable, so if you want to do this, you know, great, but if you don’t, I understand we can stop whenever you want.”

And that kind of launched this journey of discovering and best practices for helping Charlotte access her voice, and…in order to help her strengthen the function of her vocal anatomy. I started having her do these exercises called “vocal function exercises” which were designed by a man named Joseph Stemple whose actually, who at the time was out of Dayton, and I had done them as a singer when I had…had a vocal nodes and I had done them to rehabilitate my voice. They make your voice stronger, and she started doing these exercises and slowly began to access her voices, but these exercises are from the realm of speech language pathology. They’re not music education tools, and the other things I had her start doing were glides and slides and finding… she had a hard time matching pitch too. So, I used all of these techniques and I pulled techniques from any…any area of our discipline that I could. And so, what I discovered is that this blend of techniques from vocal pedagogy, music education, you know, sorry, choral music education, speech language pathology,… psychology. That this was really a blend of disciplines that came together to create the method we use to train her voice.

And, of course I started…I was posting about this on Facebook like you do, not using her name, just saying, “I’m working with a transgender student,”…and some days I would be “like this is what’s really hard” and other days I would be like “we had a break through” and I had a teacher from New York State contact me who said, “I’ve seen the work you’re doing and I’m following it. I have one transgender student, could we have a phone call?” And I suddenly was fielding phone calls from all over the United States of teachers who had one transgender student or 2 transgender students or wanted to make their programs accessible to trans students. And I was, I was becoming kind of like this…unofficial consultant on these issues and I thought, “you know, if there really are that many people around us creating a wheel, we need to create the wheel together.” And so, I suggested to, I think I built up a list of like 80 people I had talked to and I sent an email and I said, “Hey look…Indianapolis is a great city for hosting conferences, let’s just meet for a weekend. You know, there’s a lot of great food, there’s a lot of great beer, lets rent a conference room together and you know decide what are interest sessions will be, but essentially will just get together and like barf out all the things we’ve been doing, right.” Have, you know, talk about ideas. And, Welling Hall, of Earlham College had just been named to the head to the Center for Social Justice, and she saw my Facebook post about, like “Yeah, you know were going to get together in Indy” and, and…she contacted me, and she’s like “hey, this is social justice work, this is something that like, this is the type of event that the center is looking to support, have the conference, or make it a conference and have it at Earlham and I’ll give you money.” And it just happened, right, like, I wrote up a, you know, a 3-page proposal for the Center for Social Justice and they bank rolled the whole thing. And so, again all of this, all of this just…came together, serendipitously, and there was no like, big advertising team, it was just, me, and a couple of student interns, you know like sending personal emails and using Facebook, and the first Conference ended up with 125 attendees.

B: And, when, when was the first conference, what year was that?

D: January… it was January, opened January 20th of 2017, which initially, which is the day that our 45 president took office and, so the conference went from being like this niche, special interest research conference, to this active resistance, because we knew immediately what having, that person in office would mean for the rights for the LGBT people. Umm, it didn’t take a whole lot of logic to understand what was going to happen because of his social influence. And so, umm, the first conference to be able to host that and give my opening remarks on the day he took office was, umm, like this massive active resistance against the coming tide.

B: What type of participants did the conference have? Like who was the target audience for this conference?

D: Umm, so the conference was, it’s called The Transgendered Singing Voice conference because ultimately, we want to serve the transgendered singing voice, and, but it’s a interdisciplinary conference, so anybody who would intersect the singing voice, umm who works with transgendered people was invited. So nominally these types of specialty conferences, umm, are aimed with like, a voice teacher who, you know, who have this niche interest all get together and only talk about voice teachers, things. Or speech language pathologist, or you know, whoever it might be, and I wanted all of us in the same room. So I had I curated the list of presenters myself the first year because, the first year, so 2017, I think Charlotte was Junior, yes, Charlotte was a Junior, umm, and so we had been working together for about 3 years, but the most recent, the research, the first research article came out in 2016, yeah, yeah it had only, I think only in the year prior had the word transgender even come up on some of those national databases that I had mentioned, like the American Choral Directors Association, The National Association of the Teachers of Singing…only had just started to even have an article or even the word “transgender” on their site. So, I started the curated the list of presenters the first year because there simply were not enough researchers…working in the field to do juried submissions and…the cool thing is though we had all the innovators in the field right, we had everybody who was like leading the way, and it was phenomenal, like, star studded cast of….folks working with trans, and we had composers, speech language pathologist, choir directors, voice teachers, Alexander Technicians, voice coaches for theatre, people who worked in the discipline of Feldenkrais, which a body of work thing. We had, see, I am trying to think, umm, historians, and, who else might be part of that. We didn’t have many surgeons that year. Yeah, I would say, yeah, voice teachers, choral directors, composers, yeah, that’s the majority, and we didn’t have many music therapists that year.

…It was a really, it was very diverse cast of presenters and then we ended up having…we ran the conference this way. The opening sessions were sessions on terminology, so cultural competency, and then the next session was on the legal landscape for transgender people in the United States, so that care providers and educators would understand what their clients and students were dealing with. Right? So, it’s one thing to be able to like, help a transgender student sing, but if you, you know, if you aren’t abreast of the legislation, you don’t know whether or not you are legally protected at your school for doing something like, using your students preferred pronouns, that will end up being a big issue. So, we wanted all of our attendees to be educated so we had, umm, the ACLU come in, the Indiana branch, the ACLU come in and do a legal umm, legal session, and then we had several cultural competency trainers come in and work with the audience.

And then we went through things, like, the vocal care and hygiene and what happens to the transgender voice on hormones, and what happens to the transgender voice if they, if there is some type of surgical intervention, and so really what we were doing was educating our audience from the ground up. Right? So…that they knew the landscape and then we broke off into specialty sessions, right, so like if you’re interested in training, umm, assigned male at birth people who are now wanting to use their higher register, go to this session. If you’re, if you are wondering about.. you know training the voice while someone is taking testosterone, go to that session. If you want to go to a reading session of all music by transgender composer, then go sing, you know, then go to this, go to this room. And…so the first conference was 2 1/2 days and ended with, the final session was “New Directions and Research” where we intentionally paired multi-disciplinary people together to advance research across disciplines, not just within disciplines. And, the results of that was that the following…at the following conference, we had like 250 attendees, and we had 50 submissions for presentations, and we had, we had to… have a committee to select presentations and the conference was…the conference was 3 days long and included… we had at least twice the number of offerings for sessions, plus we had a poster session, plus we had a choir. It was really awesome.

B: So how many times did you hold this conference?

D: Conference was first held in 2017, one moment, the first time is was held was 2017, the second time it was held was 2019, and its 2021 home, both those times it was held, sorry, in at Earlham College, but its 2021 home will either be in person in Chicago, or online for that iteration of the conference.

B: So, it’s every 2 years?

D: Um-hum, yup, bi-annual conference.

B: And then, even though its not longer at Earlham and it kind of started there, it’s seems like it going to be a continuing…

D: Um-hum.

B: Thing?

D: Um-hum.

B: That’s really great. Umm, do you actually have like the programs from the first 2 years?

D: I certainly do. Yup, I certainly do. Actually, Earlham has them in their archives.

B: Okay.

D: So, I don’t know how they, I don’t know that I have any physical copies. I have pdfs. And if you wanted, like, I don’t how much, how many artifacts you want, but the Earlham Archives would have everything.

B: Okay. Good. Yeah, I mean, I think as long as we know where, if there is an archive of it, because I think this is really great. So, yeah, that’s perfect. So, you mentioned there’s a lot of support at Earlham for this conference. Did you, what about outside in the community, did anyone in the community, Richmond Community know? Was there any backlash?

D: I expected backlash because of where I grew up, because where I grew up, the first gay kid that we had, like got beat up, got his car keyed, and you know, like made the national news because he took another kid, you another man to prom. Sorry, and I laugh, because I just think about how ridiculous it is to key somebody’s car because they took, you know same-sex date to prom. And, so I was really expecting backlash, but there was none. The first year we held it January 20th, and so it was right when school started again, so we got a lot of, the students were really thrilled. We were hosting this kind of thing on campus. In the community, we did not, we didn’t do, I am trying to think if we did any outreach directly into Richmond. I don’t think we did. We didn’t really understand what a big deal the conference was. When it initially happened, it was more, it was more like, “no we have these students right now, there are very practical reasons for convening these people together.” Umm, and so, we were more focused on serving the existing attendees and providing them with information, then doing some big push into Richmond.

The second time around, we advertised to all of the Wayne County High Schools and, we advertised to all of the, all of the, I’m trying to think, Wayne County High Schools…and to a lot of the churches, and we had a couple of sessions the Sunday morning of the second conference that were about inclusive practices in worship for LGBT, specific as they relate to music,  because the hymns that we sing in the praise courses we sing can either provide, solace and comfort and… welcome or they can be a source of exclusion and erasure, and so, we actually ended up with a Harvard, Harvard div 29:08 student who was an Earlham grad, her name is Amanda Rice, Mandy Rice, she/her pronouns…and Mandy came and gave fabulous presentations on being theologically welcoming to transgender people in your church, in your congregation, and in your worship, but we didn’t have a ton, we had some, some, some clergy involved, but they were, I want to say they were Quaker…it was yeah, the Quaker clergy from Richmond, what is great, right? Quakers are traditionally the more… forward thinking, the more inclusive, the more tolerant, umm, but we really fell short of our goal to try to at least, my goal, honest to god was I just wanted to get the pastors for the cultural competency part of things and then for the music in worship portion. All I wanted them to do was think, right, about this population of people and to understand what words you can, you know, that you use so that you are talking with and about them respectfully, and we did not achieve that goal at all.

B: How many participants overall do you think this conference has had, and has, I’m assuming it’s grown over the last…?

D: Umm, yeah, the first time it had about 125 and the second time it had about 250. So, 375 people. Umm, its national reach, and international reach though has been really, really cool because as a result of the conference like for example, umm, after the second conference, I was contacted by a journal in the UK that wanted to feature content that had been at the conference. Umm, and we had a researcher in Germany, wrote her dissertation on our conference. Umm, yeah, the conference has been the subject of multiple, umm, case studies, research studies, and the conference has spawned a ton of research collaboration. So, you know, we may have had like close to 400 attendees total, but the reach, the impact of the conference nationally has been truly outstanding. I think that the biggest victory of the conference is that, umm, were seeing the fruits of labors in very direct ways all over the United States, umm that things like, umm, I want to say this is small, but it’s not, it’s big. Choirs changing their audition requirements so that, umm, transgender singers can sing the voice part, that aligns with their gender, umm, and changing attire requirements so that transgender and nonbinary people feel more comfortable dressing in a way that, again aligns with who they are. Umm, and that’s huge from a mental health perspective for that particular community. umm, but then other things, again, like, research papers and dissertations, have umm, have all been either written about the conference, or about attendees of the conference, right, because attendees, umm, would often be willing to serve as like case studies for researchers at the conference, umm.

B: Are you talking about like student attendees?

D: Student attendees, but also, umm, so our attendees, we had undergraduates through doctoral students at the conference, and so, umm, the age of, yeah, the age of attendees was really really, was really broad. Umm, I’m trying to think of other examples. Oh, yeah, umm, so like speech language pathologist who are now running group therapy sessions for transgender people to come together to work on their voice, and their vocal presentation, umm, in the same room, in an affirming space, that’s one of our impacts. Umm, I’m trying to think of all of the. Oh my gosh, umm, there are now choir directors that are programming, umm, really specific, really programming music by trans composers and on trans issues. Right, so they will either, umm, you know, so they change like how they theme their concerts, they’re changing their concepts of what music, if they aren’t programming, you know, music by, for, or about trans people, they’re reexamining the literature that they do use to make sure at least what they doesn’t erase trans identities, that’s really really important, umm. Yeah, yeah, so I am super, super delighted with the impact of this conference on a national and international level.

B: That’s really great. So, even though the sounds like the conference is kind of moving out of Earlham or out of Richmond, during the rest of the time, are you involved in any other LGBTQ initiatives in or around the Richmond community?

D: So, my…no. I’m not involved in LGBTQ initiatives in Richmond. I support Speak Out Richmond, and Rainbow Richmond, but not Speak Out Richmond, Rainbow Richmond, sorry. Speak Out Richmond is that horrible Facebook group. I support Rainbow Richmond, but I am not an organizer or, frequent attender of any meetings elsewhere because what I do, I weave into every part of my work. So, my scholarly research, the way that I program music for my ensemble, the way that I theme my concerts, the way that I write my syllabi, the way that I interact with students, the way that I vote, the legislation that I write to my…you know congress people about, all of the aspects of my life have social justice as a focus and, so for example, one of the side projects that I have is that I work in the Ohio prison system providing music for inmates at 2 different prisons, and musical experiences and education. but then of course I would bring my, my whole LGT self into that and so that would be, it’s not just about like, “oh expose inmates to pretty music, right?” it’s also about exposing them to ideas about social justice and equity through music, right?

And I work for 2 different churches and I make sure that the music that I program, never erases or disrespect trans identities and if there is music that does that I talk to my choirs and my pastors about it. When I got hired at, I am now at First English Lutheran in Richmond as their director of choirs and the first thing I said when they were looking to hire me was like, “I’m…not only am I pro LGBTQ, I’m loudly pro LGBTQ and if that’s not going to be a good fit for your congregation I want you to know that now, because I will not work for you, if that’s an issue.” And, you know they hired me anyway, and said “You’ll be good for us.” So, I feel like my work, umm rather than being a member of Rainbow Richmond in some active way, I’m actually more affective in the cisgender and straight community by being a really vocal ally and I have a lot of resilience emotionally and I don’t back down. I just, I feel so strongly that our LGBTQIAA+ friends should not have to be on the front lines all the time, and I simply do not have as much to lose as they do. And so, for me, like yes, I could a lose job, but, but realistically for me the worst thing that’s going to happen is that I’m going to be in a really uncomfortable argument, but the likely hood, that I will have something happen to me physically, you know like, is much, much more slim. So it really helps that I am a cisgender female presenting, umm, white woman. Right so my positionality, and this is important, and I try to leverage that as much as I can as an ally.

B: So kind of circling back, umm, because I don’t have to many other questions, but I would like, just cause I am, out of curiosity. Charlotte, I am assuming she’s graduated…

D: Yes!

B: Has she, were you able to kind of help her achieve her goal ultimately?

D: Oh My Gosh! I’m just… That Charlotte is like the biggest success story, but also totally fascinating. So Charlotte…went from wearing women’s clothes, to using she/her pronouns, to umm, training to sing as an alto, and then she petitioned for entry to the Women’s Chorus, and at the time the Women’s Chorus was all cisgender women, and it had been started by kind of, umm, like, kind of rabidly [39:20] cisgender women, surrounding cisgender women’s issues. And so we had to have a talk about how trans women issues do tie in to ciswomen issues, and it’s not a competition, and, umm, that trans women do experience a lot of the same sexism that cisgender women do and, you know, so, umm, we had to kind of like, there was this like of third wave feminisms, umm, you know that was very trans exclusive, that was not intentionally part of the group at all, because I would have never have cultivated that, but the original founders of the group, umm, again, not intending to exclude trans women, but just like rabidly [40:06] pro ciswomen. You know “The Sisterhood!” Umm and so, when Charlotte petitioned for entry into that, it initiated a several months long discussion about the function of our ensembles vocally and the function our ensembles socially, and, umm, so we ended up making Women’s Chorus open to all, umm, all self-identified women, whether they were trans, nonbinary, or cis, who wanted to sing in their upper register. Because we wanted to continue to preserve the unique timbral sounds of soprano, second soprano, alto, alto 2. That a very cool sound, and we wanted to showcase music written by, for, and about those voices.

Charlotte entered into Women’s Chorus. Within a year, she was a section leader. She became one of my best sight readers because as her voice changed, she had to, she went from alto 2 to alto 1 to soprano 2. And so, she had to sight read music, she was always learning new parts and sometimes she couldn’t sing high enough for a second soprano and so she would have to dip back down into the alto part, so she would be reading between two parts. Umm, so she became a fabulous vocal leader, she became a music minor. And she ended up her senior year singing in a master class for Kenneth Griffith, who is one of the head coaches at Cincinnati Conservatory, absolutely one of the best vocal coaches I’ve ever worked with and it changed him. Like he cried, and this is, this man is like a short little Napoleon, you know, who’s just snarling ankle biting, you know [growling noise], kind of coach. And I say this with deep love, I adore Ken, umm, but Ken is very much, “Art for Art Sake” right, and to see him to be able, you know, and this man is in his late 60’s now he’s in his 70’s, umm, to see him change his approach to voice and art because he so desperately wanted to help Charlotte succeed in her vocal goals, was one of the most beautiful things I had ever witnessed. It was was absolute gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.

So umm, Charlotte after, after that you know extraordinary successful run at Earlham, Charlotte moved to Indianapolis, umm, and began a job there. I actually cannot remember in what, umm, and then Charlotte decided that instead of using she/her pronouns, she would use they/them pronouns and change, she changed her name again and she has started singing again in her lower register. So, Charlotte’s vocal journey is not over, and I’m really, umm, I’m really interested to know what’s going to happen next.

B: Well Danielle, I would just like to say, thank you very much for your time, I really appreciate you doing this with me. I know this is a crazy time. Thank you.

D: Thank you and thank you for dealing with non-ideal interview circumstances that include a 2-year-old, so.