You don’t get to script your endings… Willie Mays as a Met, Dwight Evans as a Baltimore Oriole, Joe Montana as a Kansas City Chief – I actually couldn’t tell you what colour Jerry Rice was wearing when he stopped playing football.
It doesn’t change their story.
Not really.
Not in any material way.

But it’s narratively disappointing . We’ve been well trained to want our fairy tales to end with a wedding not a marriage.
I didn’t really get to script my ending with Austin theatre. The timing just didn’t work out. We’re decamping earlier than I thought, so making Trouble Puppet’s Frankenstein my final show as intended simply wasn’t feasible.

Instead my final curtain call in Austin will be as Falstaff.
It was an honor unlooked for and there an end.

I don’t know that there is a more suitable end than playing a galactically outsized dirtbag Shakespearean clown outside in the Austin summer heat.

But I am sentimental bastard and endings get me every time. I didn’t want to deny that and wanted to build that into the show a little bit, so with costume designer Lindsey McKenna’s help (and blessing) there are bits of my Austin and Austin theatre history traveling with me on this final trip.

My shirt is one purchased and used for my one Hot Night with the Exchange Artists
My boots were given to me by the late Mike Ward for Summer Shorts Crossed Wires at the Exit in San Francisco and were part of Elektra, Titus Andronicus, and Story Seekers.
Red Sox from my wedding.

And I’m carrying  an arrowhead made for me by Austin Shirley as a gift after my first show in Austin (Art Spark show “Who is Aram Chaos”), the coin from Richard II, and the frog prince toy Liz Watts gave as cast gifts for Transformations.

In the final scene of my final Trouble Puppet show, Wars of Heaven (Part 1) Iarath the Fidelis and Cyrus the Fallen gather them selves after Archangel Michael restores “order” to the world the are messing with and:

Cyrus: What are we going to do?
Iarath: I don’t know, we’ll come up with something, this isn’t the end of this…
Cyrus: Don’t say it…
Iarath: It’s ONLY THE BEGINNING [caps and cheeseball reading mine]
Cyrus: Jesus, you are such a cornball…

…and lord I am. I really am. But this decade has been really great and I wanted to celebrate it in my little way. I hope you’ll join us in Ramsey Park for a show that is a hell of a lot of fun no matter how insistent it is on exploring the politics of fluvial geomorphology.

I get to take swing at one of the greatest fictional men ever made and carry pieces of my Austin with me through to the finish line.

I couldn’t have scripted it better.