OK,that was incredible. I can't tell you how much easier this all just got. Thank You Awkwafina for taking that beautiful bullet for all of us , and thank God I wrote my speech down. Hi Ellen, we got to keep the best friend stuff on the DL. OK, because a lot of my best friends are here. OK, I mean you would think after 30 years of being in this industry getting up here would be easy, and it's not It's it's terrifying It's not that often we're surrounded by people who have found their voice and who are using it, and using it to hold people up, and bring people together, and that to me is, true power I mean it's funny because I've never actually thought about myself as "powerful" I mean, strong, yes , but powerful, not It's a distinction I've actually been thinking a lot about lately because theword "power" and its counterpart "abuse of power" keeps coming up in light of what is happening in our country and in our industry a rebalancing of the scales I guess you could say And I've been thinking about my own relationship with that word, with the word "power" which got me thinking about my earliest associations with my own sense of power Something I believe comes from using our voice And I remembered a parental figure saying to me at around the rather criticalage of about 11, after the dinner party, that I was excused from the table because I didn't have anything interesting to add to the conversation And it's stuck with me, it stuck with me like painfully woeded sentences can And if I'm being honest because I'm 50, and you know that comes with the territory That's right So I carried that sentence with me into adulthood And I always felt incredibly comfortable giving a voice to the words of others But put me at a dinner table with strangers or a podium like this, and I go right back to being 11 years old The last two years has made me think a lot about the messages we send young kids—little girls especially， how the things that we say and do can either build them up or tear them down and make them feel like maybe their voices don't matter And it wasn't until Friends took off that I started seeing myself in a different light I started meeting all of these people who expressed to me how much the show meant to them， how it lifted their spirits during a bad breakup or got them through an illness And I was just so incredibly moved by that And I began to change the way I thought about my own voice, and what it meant to have a platform to use it Still no prompter, and then enter Marlo Thomas Marlo Thomas，as some of you might remember， she was my mama on Friends, and I remember one day we were on set and she said to me “I'mgoing to this St. Jude gala tonight, would you like to be my date?", and I said, yeah I'd love to be your date and go to that So there we are at this big elaborate gala There's tuxes and gowns, and tiny little food on toothpicks that you can't eat in any dignified manner, and I sat down at the table, and they started to roll this tape of the hospital, and I sat there watching it moved to tears, and that was it for me I wanted to be a part of this extraordinary organization And that was 25 years ago, and I am very honored to be a part of of St. Jude, and I've been in love with him ever since And right around this time every fall, we shoot the PSA, for the holiday PSA, and I get to spend a day with a family of St. Jude I always say it's the best day of the year in the hardest day of the year, and a few years back I met a little girl named Sawyer who I still think about to this day, she was seven at the time, and I remember she had this pink little dress on, and these big angelic eyeballs, and the chemo had taken all of her hair, and she had these tiny little tumors on her body that she called her "bumps", her "alleys" and she just sat on my lap and smiling and cuddling with me the whole time as we ran through the script again and again and again And at the end of the day after hearing the word repeated over and over again, she looked up at me with those big blue eye balls, and she asked me "what is cancer" And I just looked at her and I was like "oh god! I'm not equipped to answer this question. Birds and the bees, oh you're too young for that" But so I never sorry, but seriously I never forgot about that moment Here was this little girl who was fighting this deadly disease every single day, and she didn't even know what the word was for it, and it was just part of her reality, and she was just making the absolute best of it And that's what's an unbelievable about these children Despite everything that they are up against, and as much pain as they are often in, they are vibrant, they're joyful, they are fearless And that's part of the magic of St. Jude, and why I'm so honored to support their work because they're giving children the best care on the planet, so that they can reclaim their childhood, so that they can find their little inner superhero, and they're doing it at no cost so that the families can focus on their little ones live without worrying about crippling hospital bills, and their pioneering cutting-edge treatments that will soon one day find a cure And that is what every child deserves to know that they are seen, that they are powerful, and they are loved and that they deserve a seat at the table, and that anything they have to say — or any question they have to ask — is of value， even if we don't have all the answers for it So thank you very much for recognising the work of this remarkable organization and for celebrating the power in each and every one of us Thank you!
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