Making Art, Creating Mind

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Als. One of the things it does is it takes your voice. And so by the time we even knew that we needed to ask dad about als, he was already beyond being able to speak about it. And I'm not trying to speak for every ALS patient. I'm trying to speak for my dad. [00:00:29] Speaker B: Welcome to the Age of Aging, a show about living well with an aging brain, recorded in the Michael Nadoff Communications Hub at the Penn Memory Center. I'm Jake Johnson. If there's one theme I didn't expect to come up again and again while producing the Age of Aging these past four seasons, it's the importance of art in aging. It seems as though there's something fundamentally human about crafting and creating that it can improve brain health, keep us motivated, and help us come to terms with the complicated feelings that often emerge with aging. If you want to learn more about the impact of making art on the brain, please check out our second episode of our third season, Diet, Exercise and Doodling. Today's episode will look once again at art creation through the stories of three artists. Each artist is distinct from one another in their form and style, but all have had their lives deeply impacted by brain disease. Joe Vanek is a stage designer living in Dublin, Ireland. His over 40 year career was abruptly halted when he experienced a stroke one morning in his bathroom. Scott Lamaskis was finishing up his MFA in poetry when his father's ALS diagnosis brought him back to his family ranch in Oklahoma. And finally, Nisa Becker Proconcino withdrew from illustration after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. While each of these artists work were interrupted by brain disease, it was ultimately their artistic pursuits that would allow them to heal and make some sense of their personal tragedies. We'll go through each story individually in three parts and start first with Joe Vanik. Vannek will first read the preface of his essay Dispatches from the Dark side of the Moon before we hear more of his story from an interview I conducted with him. But first, a word from our sponsor. [00:02:29] Speaker C: Understanding longevity can better prepare individuals to make thoughtful decisions not only about their finances, but about their health and lifestyle too. Matching lifespan with healthspan and pairing both with financial readiness has become a defining challenge. The TIAA Institute wants to help build Longevity literacy to better support outcomes for. [00:02:52] Speaker D: All. [00:02:57] Speaker E: Throughout my career I may have had a stroke of luck now and then, probably a stroke of inspiration on occasions and on certain days. Not done a stroke of work, but a stroke per se. The chance that at some point in my life I might experience one in all honesty that the thought never entered my head for much of my life. A stroke has always conjured up an image of my right hand wielding a brush, crayon or pencil. After all, this was the essence of my day for almost five decades, drawing and painting set models and costumes as a designer or the European expression is scenographer for the stage. [00:03:37] Speaker D: But stroke is a word that has. [00:03:38] Speaker E: Multiple meanings and perhaps the second most common. A repeated gentle caress thankfully transports me back to childhood. Brought up within a farming family in the hamlet of Walton Delville, on the edge of the English Cotswolds, one of my abiding memories is of happy days spent in the company of a motley collection of cats, teasing the wild ones with twitching lengths of baler twine. I would often sit for hours stroking Molly, coddling those of a more acquiescent nature. I also recall that as an infant, during days when fractures or distressed Sheila, my mother, would take my hand and as a soothing distraction, gently stroke the. [00:04:23] Speaker D: Palm with a circular motion of her thumb. [00:04:26] Speaker E: When in her 80s and in a care home with dementia, as verbal communication faltered and I feared she didn't recognize me, I would offer my palm and following a critical look, she would take it and repeat the stroking motion, reassuring me in her confused silence that I was still known and loved. These vignettes are offered a testimony to the enduring power of memory, that profound human attribute which my stroke could easily have obliterated. Despite delivering a massive shock to the psyche, I was shown some degree of mercy. Even as it colonized and impaired the left side of my body, it allowed me to retain my speech, sight and cognitive abilities. [00:05:14] Speaker B: Again, that was the preface to Dispatches from the Dark side of the Moon, read by Joe Vanik. The son of a Czech father and an English mother, Vanik grew up in a small town five miles outside Stratford upon Avon, known famously as the birthplace of William Shakespeare and the home of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which Vanek said was his first introduction to theater. Around 12 years old. [00:05:41] Speaker E: These were relatively early days when I. [00:05:44] Speaker D: First started going there. I was very fortunate because the acting company was a lot of up and coming performers who turned out to be massive stars, one of which was Judi Dench and the other one was Diana Rigg, and probably the best known of the lot was Helen Mirren. So I consider myself very fortunate that I was able to see these three remarkable actors in some brilliant plays. [00:06:08] Speaker B: Vanek first studied at the University of Sussex and then earned his MA in stage Design at Manchester University. He spent his early career in London Designing productions, first at an art center called the Cockpit, and then small theaters across the city. The work of a stage designer, he said, is one that requires extreme focus as well as a vast array of artistic knowledge. [00:06:32] Speaker D: The theatre designer has to be a jack of all trades, but a knowledgeable master of everything else. The skills that are required are that of an architect, an interior designer, sometimes a sculptor. I mean, the list is endless of the skills you have to have to become a designer. [00:06:50] Speaker B: By 1990, Vanek's career was taking him to cities all over the world. [00:06:55] Speaker D: I worked on a lot of new plays by Ireland leading playwright Brian Friel, one of which was the massively successful international hit Dancing at Lughnasa, which opened in Dublin at the National Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, transferred to London, transferred to Broadway, and then I did a production of it touring Australia. It was endless bouts of being frantic about something. But of course, at the same time, I needed to focus on what I was doing. I was there to do a job and make sure what was produced at the end of it was exactly what we expected. [00:07:31] Speaker B: Fast forward to 2019 and Vanek was still intensely focused, traveling the world and taking on the biggest projects of his career. [00:07:40] Speaker D: In fact, the very last opera I designed just before the stroke was Aida, and you couldn't get a bigger opera than that. And that was for the new Irish National Opera. And it was in the Bald Gosch Energy Theater, which is a huge, huge 2,000 seater theater down in the Docklands in Dublin. And after that, I was doing a contemporary dance show for the Dublin Dance Festival and we were taking out on road, on tour, and I just fortunately done all the technical drawings for the tour. And then one morning the stroke happened and that was the end of everything. I was in the bathroom. I can't remember. I was looking in the mirror. What? I shaved. I can't remember. But suddenly there was this thumping great thud on the right side of my head, like I'd just been punched. And everything sparkled for a minute and I couldn't stand. I just collapsed on the floor and. [00:08:33] Speaker E: My head felt like it was a ton weight. [00:08:37] Speaker D: And I tried to stand up, couldn't get up. But strange enough, I got on hands. [00:08:43] Speaker E: And knees and found I could move. [00:08:44] Speaker D: Around despite feeling terrible. So I crawled on my hands and knees out of the bathroom, through the kitchen, up the stairs, into the front door. But what was extraordinary was that everything was distorted. Every straight line I looked at was bent, and everything that was a horizontal line was like sloping away. [00:09:02] Speaker B: What doctors thought first might be an Inner ear infection, Vanik said, was quickly confirmed as a stroke from his level of impairment and a later MRI scan. At first, Vanik couldn't walk without the help of a walker, and his left arm moved erratically, often requiring him to grab it and guide it with his right hand. But for Vanek, it was the visual and mental changes that truly scared him. [00:09:27] Speaker D: I was in an acute ward for a week, and every time I looked up at the ceiling, which was like Styrofoam panels with lots of lines, they looked like colliding train tracks. And I had to look at the floor. When I looked at the floor, the lino on the floor, the floor covering had like a mottled pattern on, and everything was moving around like water of a shingle on a beach. [00:09:53] Speaker B: After three months of physical therapy, Vannek was remarkably able to walk again and had even regained some control of his left arm, though it still didn't always do what he wanted. But something had seemed to fundamentally change for him. Mentally, the focus that defined vanek's life for 40 years had been greatly diminished. [00:10:12] Speaker D: I couldn't focus enough to think, oh, God, go back and do some drawing, or just couldn't do it. It was impossible. The focus is there just on getting out of bed, getting in the shower, getting dressed, getting downstairs, getting breakfast. And after a couple of years, I was asked to do an opera, a very simple opera, sit in an airport. And I said, okay, I'll have a go. I had a very good assistant, and I got on with the director. I'd worked with him before. And then one day I woke up at like 3 or 4 in the morning, just thought, can't do it, can't do it, can't do it. I can't face the future of going to rehearses, going to workshops. I just thought, you know what? You. The last thing you did was I eat the biggest opera you've ever done. That's it, you know, finished. [00:10:57] Speaker B: For the first time in his life, Jo Vanik was not creating. Alone in his house, he said he became profoundly existential, finding solace in Irish poet John o'. Donoghue. [00:11:09] Speaker D: John is extraordinary spiritual writer. He was a priest and suddenly died at the age of 52. And his most profound book is called Benedictus. And what I'm just going to read now is a tiny portion from. It is only a couple of lines. [00:11:27] Speaker E: You barely noticed how each day opened. [00:11:29] Speaker D: A path through fields never questioned. And that is so true. You know, I shot around here then everywhere, doing this, that and the other. Okay, across fields, across roads, across continents, across seas. But I never stopped to consider really what was underneath my feet. And then when the stroke came, that's what it did to me. The body stopped and it suddenly was saying, hang on just a minute, you haven't been giving me enough attention. So now I have to give it a lot of attention in order to even do a tenth of what I used to do, which I'm still trying, but it isn't easy. [00:12:04] Speaker B: Following the stroke, Vanek began going to a support group for stroke survivors run by the Irish Heart Foundation. [00:12:11] Speaker D: A lot of people weren't able to communicate as well as I was and a lady came up to me and said she was the digital editor of, of the Heart foundation and how was I finding all this these days? I said, you know, I find them a bit hard and. And then I said, you know what? Sometimes I just feel like I should write my whole experience. She said, okay, write it. She said, we'll put it online. [00:12:36] Speaker B: What came out of that writing was Dispatches from the Dark side of the Moon. And Van continued to write. He now has nine essays that he's hoping to turn into a book. In 2022, the Irish Heart foundation put out a call to people who use their centers to submit artwork for Christmas cards. [00:12:55] Speaker D: And the Christmas card I designed was the Nutcracker from the Ballet for Christmas. And I was given a first prize for it. And that started me off, I thought. Then they asked me could I would I like to do anything more? I said, well, what do you would you like? [00:13:07] Speaker E: They said, what about Valentine's Day? I said, okay. [00:13:09] Speaker D: And then I said, what about St. Patrick's Day? So I designed all these and it started the ball rolling. [00:13:15] Speaker E: Then I thought, I'm going to do. [00:13:16] Speaker D: Some of my own stuff in now 2026. [00:13:19] Speaker E: I'm doing masses of stuff, hopefully for an exhibition next year. [00:13:23] Speaker D: And the stuff I'm doing is combination of costume designs and also large scale works of all the operas I've designed and plays. Some of the plays I've designed large scale illustrations of elements from them. [00:13:36] Speaker B: We will link to some of Vanek's drawings in the episode Show Notes. Drawing can still be very challenging for Vanek, particularly when it involves his left hand. When a ruler is required for straight lines. He said he will use his left hand as a kind of clamp, pushing down hard on the ruler, paper and drawing board so that his left arm doesn't move. While his physical difficulties may be more noticeable, it's still the mental impacts of the stroke that Vanek said, can be debilitating. He currently sees a psychiatrist who is helping him treat the anxiety caused by the stroke. [00:14:12] Speaker D: Even though I can do all these things and I can get about underneath it all the time is this sense of anxiety because I feel vulnerable. Am I going to fall? Am I going to drop this? Am I going to Even crossing the road's a nightmare because traffic coming so fast. If you turn left and right to clock it as you normally would, if you do it too fast, you go dizzy and you feel like you're going to fall over. Restaurants are difficult. You know, the noise factor of glasses slamming on tables and open kitchens, that kind of thing. It's just what is strange. My hearing is more acute than it's ever been, and it drives me crazy sometimes, vanix said. [00:14:48] Speaker B: The only time the anxiety seems to subside is in conversation and when he's creating something. So we will end with two more written pieces of Vanix Being from the birthplace of Shakespeare, where he first fell in love with art, Vanek pushed himself to write sonnets limited to just 14 lines about his daily life. Here are two sonnets from another one of Vanek's pieces titled Hesitant Light. [00:15:15] Speaker E: Some days in the darkest hour, feeling the weight of the coming day stacked against me, my eyes spring open. I am still here, ungrateful for rest. [00:15:27] Speaker D: Some days I cannot fix my mind on anything. A dissonance in my head neutralizes off. [00:15:33] Speaker E: Stimuli that jostle endlessly for attention. Anxiety hardwired into my psyche descends uninvited. [00:15:42] Speaker D: Like a smothering cloud, obscuring rational thought. [00:15:46] Speaker E: And natural responses, leading to another day lost, another day dedicated to unrest. Other days since my fall from grace, I am living in someone else's body, nursing a heavy heart on other days despite the passing years, acceptance still remains the hardest pill to swallow to maintain. [00:16:11] Speaker D: A grip on life. [00:16:13] Speaker E: Loitering in the slow lane on the bleak roads of endurance was never on the cards for me. [00:16:18] Speaker D: Or so I thought. [00:16:20] Speaker E: Yet I strive to steer a steady course through a gray borderland, eyes on a distant horizon of myriad possibilities. [00:16:34] Speaker B: For part two of the podcast, we transitioned to an artist who himself did not experience brain change, but watch neurodegeneration progress in a loved one. [00:16:44] Speaker A: My name's Scott Lamaskis. I did an MFA late in life. It was my career change after 35 years in higher education. I've been a writer, really, all my life. I ran from it for a while in my early years, and then I finally realized, okay, I'm a writer. I got to accept this and so I quit my job as a journalist and went back to grad school and became a humanities professor. I have a PhD in American literature, and I've been a small college professor of humanities. So I've taught poetry for 30, 35 years to undergraduate. But I just asked myself, what do I want to do if I'm going to retire? And when I looked at what most fed me and fed my soul as an artist, it was the short work, the poetry, that was really the thing speaking to me. [00:17:35] Speaker B: Lamaskis grew up on a family ranch near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent most of his adult life in Oklahoma, frequently checking in and helping out his mother and father on the ranch during haying. [00:17:47] Speaker A: Season, which is a lot of physical work. Even if you have the best machinery, it's a lot of work. And we have really old machinery on this farm that's been in our family for now three or four generations. And we're sitting at the top of the hill by the hay barn, looking out across the farm. We have about 450 to 600 acres. And dad says, I just can't get my breath. I just can't. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I can't get my breath. I said, dad, you're 85. It's okay. You don't have to get out there and buckhei like the young guys, it's okay. And so for a long time, dad was getting diagnosed. He's like, richard, you just have seasonal allergies, or then he started experiencing weakness. And they said, well, we think that's just normal aging. And then he started having trouble swallowing. And they said, well, we think maybe you're having some kind of muscle loss in your throat or your neck, but that's kind of normal. People do that. But my dad was a pain denier. You know, he nearly chops his finger off working on the farm. And he says, yeah, I took an aspirin, but it's okay, you know. And you're like, most people would be in the hospital, right? And so dad was not the kind of patient who would document and observe his own body and his own symptoms in such a way to help a primary care physician arrive at an accurate diagnosis. So anyway, dad suffered through a couple of years, but we didn't understand until that fall, fall of 2023 that something was seriously wrong. He couldn't eat, he couldn't drink. He couldn't even drink or eat small amounts of things. [00:19:27] Speaker B: Two years after Lamascus started his MFA program, his dad was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known commonly as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that results in the progressive loss of muscle control throughout the body. The disease is fatal and there is no known cure. [00:19:49] Speaker A: I find myself with this diagnosis and this circumstance where maybe only creative writing, or in my case, only poetry, could touch the experience, the drama of getting a fatal diagnosis and knowing in advance, this is going to kill you, and it will be starvation or strangulation, it will be lack of air or it will be lack of nutrition. One of those two things is going to get you first. [00:20:17] Speaker B: Lamas began writing more and more poems about his father's als, which began to take on a documentative quality of his father's decline and his final days spent with him. The resulting collection reads as a kind of memoir, as well as a meditation on Lamascus, father death and the nature of suffering. [00:20:37] Speaker A: The first few are just absolutely what was happening at the moment of diagnosis. Day three was a really big winter storm, and I'm sitting by the fire and I'm waxing philosophical about, wow, I'm observing my dad's deathbed, you know, and I don't know how long it's going to go. And so Shakespeare came to mind, the seven stages of man, you know, kind of thing. My mind springs to W.H. auden and a poem called Musee des Beaux Arts in French Museum of Fine Arts. And it's a pretty famous poem about a equally famous painting, the Fall of Icarus, by a painter named Bruegels. And Auden, the poet is looking at Bruegels, and Auden says about suffering, the old masters were never wrong. And then he goes on to say, suffering happens. Ordinarily, it happens Prosaically, it just happens. It's every day, you see it all around you. And, you know, in the painting by Bruegels, there's a horse plowing a field and a farmer, and the farmer's back is to the incident. So Icarus is having this tragedy that thousands of years of readers are going to read about, but the farmer's just going along, you know. [00:21:55] Speaker B: Lamaskis explained that one aspect of ALS that makes it unique from other neurodegenerative diseases is that it often takes a person's ability to move and communicate before it changes their perception or mind. For Lamaskis, giving a voice to his voiceless father's experience and suffering became a central goal of his poetry. [00:22:16] Speaker A: Als, one of the things it does is it takes your Voice. And so by the time we even knew that we needed to ask dad about ALS and he was already beyond being able to speak about it. And I'm not trying to speak for every ALS patient. I'm trying to speak for my dad. Lightning. [00:22:36] Speaker F: The mirror petals of my lips won't curl after the dentist, though they spark alive as I eat my cheek sore prickles in ways I suddenly find silly until remembering. Dad is eating lunch, too, probably. He coughs and grinds between his sharp mind and body, seeming electric with shame and anger, spirit and breath in sudden conflict as his muscles waste and twitch too fast. We lost first his throat, voice, breath and lungs. The very heart of being, we usually say unruly viscera now pincer him rendered grunting and grimacing for gulps of air, labor of spirit working through mystery we do not know why any more than. [00:23:33] Speaker C: How. [00:23:37] Speaker F: We find first breath, new voices wild and groping the path out into this air, a fog upon the dusty mirrors of deity. [00:23:50] Speaker A: One of the poems is about a funny thing. You know, he can't shoo flies off of his face because he can't use his hands, but he loved being pushed out on the porch. And so we would go out there and he could hear the birds and, you know, all that. My dad is still there. He's in there totally mentally himself, but he can't do anything. And so one of his last jokes was written on this little Walmart marker board. And he writes, even the flies think I'm already dead, you know. And we laughed, we took pictures of it, showed it to my wife, showed it to our friends. You know, that kind of thing, because it's telling a joke. My dad loved to laugh. And of course, that's the. One of the great mysteries and the feeling of tragedy and loss is that we don't know how his brain was changing at that point. [00:24:41] Speaker B: Lamaskis's father lived for six months following his ALS diagnosis. It was a period that Lamaskis described as being incredibly difficult, living in his childhood bedroom and taking turns with his mother and sister caring for his father. But he also said it was an experience he wouldn't trade for anything for the time spent with his family and being with his dad in his final days. If you want to purchase Lamaskis collection of poems titled the Edited Tongue A Family's Year with als, we will link it in the show notes. It's short, but a really deep, beautiful read. Lamaskis said that in the process of writing the collection, he felt poetry ultimately did help him understand his father more deeply. But he also said he found the limits of his art's ability to represent his dad. How could words fully portray a man who used them so sparingly throughout his life? [00:25:36] Speaker A: The Carpenter's Son riding on Father's Day. You know, I go out into my dad's shop and I'm supposed to be riding his obituary, and I'm like, I can't face it. And so I go out through the part of the barn that's a storage place, and I look up there and all my dad's tools are hanging on these pegboards. And I look at all that and I realize words are going to fail me. And my tool is an ink pen. And my dad's tool were all these amazing tools. He was a great carpenter and and workman. And when it comes to art as therapy, and particularly poetry as therapy, we know that words are ultimately going to reach a place where they can't touch the experience of the person who's suffering. But we can only get that close, you know? [00:26:24] Speaker F: The Carpenter's son riding on Father's Day 2024, Day 152. My father's obituary appears on the shop wall hung with tools in rows. What's missing? Outlined like the body at a scene of grisly murder, Hammers claw their weight against a row of nails, handles out and ready. A few strange things shine polished by the oil of scarred hands. A stack of wooden yardsticks lying by the wall measures only itself while I gawk and grope my way between the rows, peering into labeled bins of possibilities, shelves of half repairs left sleeping neatly in this quiet I yearn to open the builder's eulogy with a key. I seek among his tools, imagining what he built, what life. I would grasp that handle and wield it to nail or join. I would build pound. I would accept my handle's pins, my feudal godforsaken pins. [00:27:46] Speaker B: Our final piece for this podcast will feature a segment from a longer video created by member of the podcast team Daliel said. A few weeks ago, Dr. Jason Carlos and I visited the home and studio of artist Nisa Becker Proconcino. Becker Proconcino was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and has since undergone infusions of the anti amyloid therapy lecanemab. Becca Proconcino worked previously as an illustrator and her work appears in a few children's books as well as an ad for the juice brand V8, which you may recognize when watching the full video. After her diagnosis, Becker Proconcino's art changed, working mostly in watercolor and becoming more abstract as a way to represent her Alzheimer's. Since her work is visual, we encourage everyone to watch the full video on the Penn Memory Center's YouTube page. Just Google Pet Memory Center, YouTube. Click the link to our page and the video will be right there. Her work is really amazing, so please go check it out. But for now, here's a clip from that piece. [00:28:56] Speaker G: What I do is I take water and paint, and then I just play with it and then look for birds or little airplanes or something that looks like creepy birds. [00:29:12] Speaker H: If you had to explain to someone what is birds of the mind? [00:29:15] Speaker G: Well, a lot of people do bird pieces. I'm not doing beautiful birds. I'm doing birds of the mind. It's in my brain, and it's something not real, but it is fluid. And each one is different. [00:29:29] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:29:30] Speaker H: And there's something both real and unreal about them. [00:29:33] Speaker A: Right. [00:29:34] Speaker H: I guess the word might be surreal. [00:29:36] Speaker G: Yeah, very. [00:29:38] Speaker H: If you had to sort of give advice to other people living with the diagnosis based on your experience, what would you say? [00:29:47] Speaker G: Don't panic. But it's a different time now. [00:29:51] Speaker H: The stereotype of people with Alzheimer's is just one of just loss. Nothing new, nothing. You defy that, though. [00:29:59] Speaker G: Well, I did, and I should have done it sooner. I should have come back to my art sooner. I think it would have made me more social. I was depressed. [00:30:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:09] Speaker H: Now you're being nisa. [00:30:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:11] Speaker H: Which is the artist. [00:30:12] Speaker G: Yeah. [00:30:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:14] Speaker B: Again, you can watch the full video on the pen Memory Center YouTube channel where you can see all of the work that she's describing throughout the piece. If you want to see more of Becker Proconcino's art, we will link to some in the show notes. One of her pieces, titled ALR Creatures, is located on the south side of the first floor of the Clifton center for Medical Breakthroughs, commonly known as the Pavilion at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. ALR Creatures is a part of a larger collection from the center for Emerging Visual Artists featured throughout the first and second floor of the Pavilion. I take away a few things from hearing these three artists tell their stories and share their art with us. For this episode, I'll preface by saying that I'm only 26, so I have a limited perspective on aging. But what sticks with me the most after listening are the personal tragedies each of these artists faced as they aged. I think back to what Scott Lamaskis said about suffering, that it happens all around us every day, most of it invisible to us in many ways. It's the human mind's incredible ability for self awareness that causes this suffering. When our mind or body changes, we know something has changed, that we are limited in some way that we once weren't, and that it will last the rest of our lives. And there's no real reason why these things happen, they just do. But it's also that innate ability of the human mind that allows us to create, to make meaning if we so choose to. What I admire most about the artists in this episode is their continued effort in that very human pursuit to create meaning and come out the other side stronger and wiser in a society so terrified of old age that tells people that getting older is the end. These three artists continue to grow and change and express themselves even when they feared others had stopped paying attention. I didn't want this episode or this podcast to be a sugar coated portrait of aging or brain disease. What these individuals went through and are still going through is impossible for me to comprehend, but I do feel their art gets me closer to their experience and I hope that even if we do suffer at times, the human mind's ability to create and connect can make that suffering a little less invisible. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Age of Aging. This show is made possible by generous support from the Michael Nadoff Communications Hub Fund and our sponsor, the TIAA Institute. The Age of Aging is produced by the Penn Memory center in partnership with the Institute on Aging and the Penn FTD Center. Our team includes Dalielel Said, Terrence Casey, Jason Karlewish, and myself, Jake Johnson. Contributors include Nicolette Calcovecchia, Emily Largent, Alison Lynn, and Megan Sharp. Special thanks this episode to Joe Vanik, Scott Lamaskis, and Nisa Becker Proconcino. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast, leaving a review or giving us a like. These types of things really help others find the show and if you know someone who might be interested in these conversations, share this episode with them. We also love hearing from our listeners. If you'd like to reach out, our contact information is in the show. [00:33:47] Speaker E: Notes.