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Hi everyone. My name is Pat. I'm a grateful alcoholic.

Please excuse my voice. I've got a bad cold. Come from the north and it's cold up there.

I want to thank the committee for inviting my husband and I here and John our hostess and our host.

And Victor for all the letters and phone calls back and forth for getting us here.

We enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun.

As I said, I'm an alcoholic. I came in these rooms in 1980, April the 29th, 1980.

I'll be coming up on 25 in December.

Thank you.

And you can clap for yourselves because I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for people like you in these rooms

that kind of pushed me along and stayed with me through the whole thing.

I did my drinking down here. A lot of these will know this. I did my drinking in North Beach and Chesapeake Beach.

Where else can you have a good time? You roll out of one bar into another.

And it took me down many strange things.

I didn't drink for a long time. I didn't drink much growing up and my teens are in my 20s.

I didn't start drinking till in my middle 30s.

And I have to tell you that I truly believe that the little bottle sits right here on my shoulder

and just waits very patiently for me because he did all those years.

And when I picked up my first, my drink, it was like I had been drinking all along.

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