This is very impressive - all of you.

Thank you all so, so much for asking me to be here today. I know by virtue of the achievement that earned you these seats down front today that you are too smart to take advice from anyone who hasn't earned it; let alone from an erstwhile Northampton morning radio show D.J.

I do, however, have a story to tell that I admit is a little woolly. But I hope you'll think that it's worth it so here goes.

In June of of the year 1900, a self righteous, by all accounts quite unpleasant woman in Kansas had a religious vision. Or at least she said she had a religious vision. Her name was Carry Nation. And years later when she wrote her autobiography in which she all but named herself a saint, she said that while she was praying in June 1900, she said she was lamenting, weeping, trying to find a way to be a better Christian, she said that God spoke to her in a clear voice and directed her to go destroy saloons. God told her to leave the town she lived in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and go to 20 miles away to Kiowa, Kansas, and to destroy any saloons she found there, and she did.

She stormed these turn-of-the-century bars, these saloons with their long wooden bars, long mirrors, and she had a big rock and she used the rock to smash bottles of liquor - she just laid waste to these barrooms.

Turns out Carry Nation had a, sort of, hankering for this. She lustily enjoyed destroying property and terrifying people.

She soon made both a habit and a career of it. She traveled all over: Kansas first, and ultimately all over the country, destroying barrooms, smashing bottles of liquor first with a rock and then ultimately with a hatchet. She adopted the hatchet as her symbol. She called her saloon smashings "hatchetations," which is probably the one really cool thing about Carry Nation: "hatchetations."

Carry sold these tiny pewter hatchet pins and fundraising souvenirs. You can still buy them on eBay. I have one. It looks like a labrys though. It's a nice idea but different.

Carry Nation's fundraising was actually for herself. It was so she could promote herself as essentially a sideshow act, a