RUSH: We closed the program at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, and by 3:30, two women, who I know, and I do not mention any names here because all donors’ identities are kept confidential, but two women who are sisters of the Great Northeast matched my $300,000, so that put us at $920,000. There’s a man that I met out in San José, California. We did our sort of Rush to Excellence Tour, KSFO, in San José a couple, three years ago. His name is David Sant. He doesn’t mind being identified. He is a lymphoma survivor. He lives in northern California. Three years ago he made an independent — I don’t think it had anything to do with our Cure-A-Thon — huge donation three years ago to leukemia and lymphoma. Since that time he’s become committed to the work of the society, and so we went out there and he was in the crowd of people I met before the performance out in San José, and late in the day on Friday he sent in another huge donation, the amount of which we’re going to keep confidential. But it was substantial, and so this put us just under $3 million and the amount of money from — well, you gotta count all this in the audience.
It was just incredible, and even without that, we were at a record. Without that, we were at like $1.9 million, without all these things I just told you about — and not counting me, either. That’s all from you, the members of the audience. So, a huge thank you to everybody, and especially to me because without me (laughing). I’m just reading the note they sent me. No, thanks to all of you, and I spent most of the time on Friday thanking all of you for all the research that you’ve made possible and the expanded survivability rates and the inching closer and closer to cures for some of the four blood cancers that the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society works on. It was just a fabulous day, and I’m still stunned. I have to tell you, we like to share things here that we’re proud of. We did this in three hours, one day a year — and again, not the whole three hours because we mix regular program content in with the Cure-A-Thon. So in that three hours, the combined amount of time I talked about it might have been an hour, maybe a little bit more than an hour, but certainly not the entire three, and that’s just mind-boggling. We were all floored. I got the note about two friends out in the Great Northwest and David Sant late on Friday afternoon after I got in from a grueling game of golf. They’re all grueling because you walk, and walking is grueling to me.
Golf was great. I’m still knocking the cover off the… (interruption). What? Well, it depends on what the other people in the group do. Even if the other people cart, sometimes I walk. Yeah. It depends on how much time we have; how quickly that we are trying to play. If three people are in a cart and one’s walking, the one walking is going to slow everybody down, so you generally end up walking. At any rate… (interruption) Well, it is exercise, but it’s walking, and you stop. It’s not (interruption). Don’t give me this! (interruption) Of course it’s exercise, but it’s not treadmill or elliptical cardio! Don’t start, Mr. Snerdley, trying… (interruption) I know you guys are trying to ruin my diet. You think I’ve done the diet here, lost the weight without exercise. Well, walking… Look, compared to the amount of exercise I get, walking is exercise. It’s all relative. (sigh) Now they think my credibility is shot because I told everybody I’ve lost this weight without any exercise, and I have.
I’m not out there walking four or five miles straight. You gotta walk four miles or five if you walk a golf course, but you stop, and of course you puff on the cigar as you’re walking around. You’re not going to do that in a gym. You’re not going to do that on a treadmill or on the elliptical machine. Sometimes you bop in a cart that somebody has and you speed off to where your ball is, because you say, ‘Screw it. I’m out here to play golf and hit the ball, not walk,’ but it all works out. So once again, just an official thank you to all of you from everybody here at the EIB Network and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. By the way, we had ten individuals who wanted to get in on the bone marrow registry. That was led by the guy in Troy, Texas who got that all started. So it was a banner day, and it sent us into a great weekend, and I couldn’t wait for the program to start to share all this good news with you because obviously the news is all about you. You are the ones who made this happen.