There is a Place
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- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
This inspiring new film takes us to a place...a place where the healing power of music transcends Alzheimer's, loneliness, and confusion to usher in a sense of happiness and belonging. The film follows singer-songwriter Lior Tsarfaty as he visits Alzheimer's care communities and engages the residents in music, song, and dance. "Your heart is a reminder that you are not alone," he tells one group, "You are connected to other hearts, and other hearts, and other hearts, and other hearts. And we are all beating together, just like a big, big drum." And the residents smile, and sing, and play instruments, and dance–and belong to that particular moment. Caregivers will be encouraged to boost the overall quality of life for persons living with Alzheimer's through the inclusive and engaging power of music and movement.
Citation
Main credits
Ku, Tania (filmmaker)
Tsarfaty, Lior (performer)
Tsarfaty, Lior (interviewee)
Distributor subjects
No distributor subjects provided.Keywords
WEBVTT
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Is it time to wake up the
whole building? Alright.
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[music]
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[music]
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See if you can find one word that describe
how it feels to sing together like that.
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[music]
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Peaceful. Peaceful. Friendship
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All this friendships. What\'s your
word Maureen? Cheer. What else.
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Togetherness. Togetherness. Love.
Love. Sharing Sharing.
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My name is Lior Tsarfaty and I am going
all over the San Francisco Bay Area
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and playing music with
Alzheimer communities.
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I go to about fifteen sometimes
twenty venues a week.
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What happen during the session is,
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is the moment where we
drop in into this place
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for me it\'s a place of connection and
belonging and some of it is something
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that I\'m doing and some of it is
something that the music is doing.
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He meets with us every once in awhile
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and charges up our batteries.
I\'m Joy Voytek
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I don\'t know how old I am I do know
that I was born in nineteen forty nine
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I struggle with energizing myself
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to sometimes just to get
through another day.
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[music]
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One of my goals in those classes is
to create that deep togetherness
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which I think lot of those peoples are belonging for it
so I think at some level because that\'s of a loneliness,
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because something about getting
old and about not remembering
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is spending a lot of
time inside by yourself.
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It\'s not all calm and wonderful
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I feel a lot of loneliness
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and I look forward to being with people
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particularly my wife, she work
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so she isn\'t able to come
very much turn a week.
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What they want the most
is not to feel alone,
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they want to feel like there\'s someone there for them,
they want to feel connected to people around them
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and that\'s the most important thing
is not to feel alone or abandoned
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at the final stages of their life.
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What I want is
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just the calm
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friendship of other people.
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[music]
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[sil.]
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If I look back in time and all the songs I wrote
it\'s kind of stepping stones of parts of my life
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if it was a time of sadness or
depressed or joy or happiness
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there\'s always a melody from that
place always a song from that place.
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Music is like it\'s always
there in different ways.
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It helps finding all those places in me
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and there\'s something important about
that and something healing about that.
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[sil.]
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When I come to the venue
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where I am most of the time the energy is very
scattered and people are doing different things.
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They remember me but not because it\'s me but because
what happens when we sit together in that circle.
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[music]
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Take your hand put it on your heart
that miracle that heart that
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you have that personal drum that you have
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and notice the sound of your heart,
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the rhythm of your heart.
So we tend to forget this
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but your heart is a reminder
that you are not alone.
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You are connected to other hearts
and other hearts and other hearts.
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We\'re all beating together
just like a big, big drum.
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[music]
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I see people changing right before
my eyes with Lior and the music
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and all of us working together it\'s, it\'s amazing
the way that people want to be part of it
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they want to participate, people
start smiling they get in the mood.
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They dance, they\'ll start tapping their feet, they
forget about what it was they were worrying about.
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The music kind of brings
you odds still who you are
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but suddenly you feel like, \"oh, I don\'t have to do
this by myself, I don\'t have to get old by myself,
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I don\'t have to carry all this confusion
by myself I can use the music
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and use that circle around me to hold it together.\"
I don\'t think we have budding stage stars
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but we have people who
put themselves out there
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and try to encourage rest of people
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where lot of us it\'s a
central part of living here.
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They remember the feeling, they remember
the ecstasy, they remember the joy,
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they remember the place where they get connected to
others so they remember that which is interesting.
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Everybody take a big breath altogether.
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Imagine well when you exhale when you
make that sound you\'re saying goodbye
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and you\'re letting go of everything you don\'t need
any more. If its pain or suffering or worries
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to say goodbye to it with a
very, very loud long sound
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ready one, two, three here we go.
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[sil.]
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Got it,
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from what I see lot of them are struggling
with the fact that they are they\'re dying yeah
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and the culture that we live in
doesn\'t really know how to hold that.
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Almost every month I have somebody who passed
away it\'s magnifying the circle of life.
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I get sad about it and it touches
my heart and it\'s a practice for me
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to learn how to just be in this
role almost like a train station.
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New people are coming, some people
are dying and becomes this lazy life
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where I\'m showing up and you
never know who\'s gonna show up
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and really who\'s good alive and who\'s dying. So being
a part of this place of transition for them is a,
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is a unique place that I\'m
learning a lot about.
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[music]
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Go inside for a minute and
just study your experience.
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[music]
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Knowing that we all go back and we all
come from the same thing together.
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I learned from them that it\'s okay
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it\'s okay to be in those places and you
know when you look at the tree rottening
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or you look at nature is the all those thing
dying and we can see how beautiful they are.
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We all know this is a society
we are crazing their beauty
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and we are crazing their youth and we are crazing
beautiful skin. I had to really change the way
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I think about those things that I can love them
and I can be with them and I can hold them
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and not get away from it. And I\'m going
to think how important it is for them
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to hold them into love them even though they
are falling apart even though they are ending.
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May we all be together?
May we all be together,
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may we all live for many many more months.
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Maybe years.
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[music]
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I was born in Israel
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I was a very grandfather child (inaudible).
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I was a confused twenty years old
looking for what to do with his life
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but something happened to me when I came to the state,
I came here to school to study music and healing
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and how those two things meet together
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and there was a moment there when I realized
that what Music did for me was so important
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how music helped me and supported me
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there\'s a lot of learning about
yourself through music. By doing music,
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by being a part of it not just to listen to
it but is an active participant in music
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and been as wild as a real gift for me and
when I was thinking of what ever I do in life
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I, I hit that moment being very
clear that disciple I wanna do
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I wanna create a place for other
people that they can be musicians
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and play music and be a part
of that and bring that healing
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thing that happened to me to them.
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Mostly what really, really start working
and started to be a business was the music
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and the Alzheimer\'s and music and the
elders in about a year or year and a half
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I had a full-time job doing this. So I have
many, many friends over ninety years old.
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There was a need for there was a need
for it of all those people are in there
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end of their lives how music
can come and help them.
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[music]
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You got it I can quiet I\'ve done my job.
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What is it that we do when we sing
together? Expand. Expanded right.
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[music]
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Good job guys. That\'s you cased us a lot of
magic you tweet thank you. Brother Thank you.
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There\'s something special about music
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and its ability to get to those deep and important
areas of somebody\'s existence as a human being.
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There\'s some recent studies suggesting
that people who sing together
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might have a similar respiratory
rate or similar heart rate,
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so there might be some of the synchronization of both
the body movement and emotional expression and feelings
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and that happened in a group that you don\'t
get when you\'re creating music by yourself
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and there\'s a body of literature
that goes back about thirty years
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suggesting that persons who have Alzheimer\'s
disease might have a preserved ability
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to both perceive music
and also create music.
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There is some spirit, there is some
life it\'s a matter of trying to
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help people reconnect to that. You see
those people who has no memories,
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who have no history, who have
no story to tell anymore
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but you can see how the music really helps
them share this precious moment together.
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You think all those ancient technology
about singing, dancing and drumming
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which (inaudible) since the beginning
yeah it still worked, it still worked.
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I don\'t think we really
understand what happens
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in this very elusive creative expression and
it\'s something that\'s very difficult to study
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but you can see it with your eyes right.
Life is stronger than anything.
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[music]
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What lights them up like that is music and children are those
two things that just brings an big smile to their face.
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Is it gonna be a boy or a girl?
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Do you know the baby\'s gender? We don\'t know the
gender, we don\'t know it, we don\'t know (inaudible)
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I\'m having a baby so they are excited they all want to
know when and how and what so they have a very involved.
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Maybe your baby will sing Thank you.
Along with you
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Hope so or maybe he\'ll just tell me Lior
shut up with all your music, probably.
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At the end of your life you will become
closer to being a baby in some level.
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Besides that helpless part of giving support
(inaudible) things that makes sense to baby like
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making weird sounds and weird
gestures and funny faces (inaudible)
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way to communicate into way to be in relationship
with the world. What\'s happening outside?
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It\'s sunny. Sunny so let\'s sing a song just
to welcome the spring and it goes like this.
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[music]
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It\'s feels like the space of dying
space of the end of the life
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it\'s a very, very similar space towards
space of birth and the beginning of life,
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that energy feels very familiar the place
with no rules the place on (inaudible) trust.
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There\'s a sacredness in a
there\'s a place of a ritual.
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[music]
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It\'s amazing to see how
much support we need
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how much we need that (inaudible)
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and really how much we need each other.
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[music]
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One, two, three
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and so shall we go in the row together now.