With Spoleto wrapped, I’m left with a blur of memories, impressions and observations on the festival. Here are just a few of them.

An audience member filming Harvard Sailing Team’s opening night with her cellphone, distracting the people sitting behind her (including me) as she emailed the hilarious sketches to her friends…

Oversized patrons at the Chapel Theatre, trying to squeeze into the small seats. Some of the grossest guests had to ride side saddle.

Rodney Lee Rogers sitting patiently behind a small curtain for 45 minutes, the audience gathering around him before The Tragedian.

Two old dears I met at the first performance of A Devil Inside who’d been to so many shows that they couldn’t remember what they’d seen the night before, and started arguing about it. The festival had been running for two days.

The miserable actors in This War is Live who were fed up with the show and its technical hiccups… one complained about his simplistic character, while another called the whole experience “torturous.” He should have counted himself fortunate – he wasn’t sitting in the audience…

Sitting next to two of the playwrights of Under the Lights: 10×10 – and trying to make mental review notes without making them feel uncomfortable…

Jay Clifford courageously performing at the American Theatre despite suffering from some debilitating lurgy. After the first night, he conked out in his truck… on the second night, his manager Vance McNabb picked up his bug. They put on a great show, they’re both feeling better now and they’re no longer contagious (I hope).

Watching rehearsals with Chen Shi-Zheng, director of Monkey: Journey to the West… and being invited to look at the aftermath of The Great War after Hotel Modern’s show was over. I witnessed chaos on a model train scale.

One of my favorite elements of the festival, though, was bumping into the various local and national theatre performers, artists and filmmakers who collaborate to help make the festival function. Without their hard work and the overwhelming enthusiasm of the audience, there’d be no festival… thanks to them all.

There’s two more videos from Geoff to come, here’s one of them - some quick clips from the Piccolo closing ceremony on Saturday.

Who hasn’t heard of “The Have Nots!” ??? Its seems they are everywhere…including all over this year’s festival, calling their shows “Piccolo Fringe” and “Piccolo Cheap Laughs”. Last night I got to see the latter in the last running of “Big Dicktionary” (” Stars Bar”; American Theatre) put on by funny men Timmy Finch and John Brennan, who not only hung out greeting every single audience member as they strode past with their tickets and beer in hand, but afterwards offered up an invite to anyone interested in drinking with them (”So…uh…we like to drink…“).

Sitting on a plush over sized blue couch with their comrade, fellow “Have Not”, Andy, and “Have Not in Training”, Meaghan, I realized how much of a family these guys really are. It isn’t all about the laughs. Its about performing, learning from, and supporting the whole troupe.

“Big Dicktionary”, I learned quickly, was entitled as so because the entire show was based on words randomly selected from a (guess?) big dictionary. Ahem, and please note the spelling. I was simply amazed at how two people could keep an audience in an uproar over the words (in order) Physiological Psychology, Quasar, and Emissary.

Favorite quotes:

“I was down at Eric Clapton’s place in Jamaica where its okay to smoke reefer…just as long as it’s not heroine.”

“Here at Outback we offer the ‘Dingo’ (drink)…it’ll kill your baby.”

A theme throughout the entire show was the significant discovery of the irreversible ailment caused by drinking “Dingos”: Thinking Through Your Thighs (which also in turn causes talking through them as well). Don’t ask…I wouldn’t do it justice.

Best parts?

Eight people arriving late, being put on the spot, having imaginary roses strewn at their feet, and watching Timmy and John recount for them the entire show thus far…in fast-forward (it involved several fabulous impressions of the space monkey who’s head exploded and later was transfered through a telescope, “Coco”)

A standing ovation and the “first ever experienced” improv encore for Timmy and John, rightly deserved because I think they possibly played 15 different characters each, interchangeably, and with great gusto.

If you can’t fit in any laughs in the remaining few days of Piccolo, don’t forget that Theatre 99 regularly hosts improv. Check them out at: www.thehavenots.com

After a few schedule changes, I wound up devoting my evening to Theatre 99, where we said goodbye — literally, if you were standing out in the hall before the second show — to iO Theatre Chicago, which had 40 percent of its five-person cast on stage for the final performance of The Reckoning. Half of that crew was improv star Jet Eveleth, who closed-out a strong festival run with a relatively low-energy performance. The topic was artichokes, and let that be a lesson unto us all: Don’t work with kids and animals, and never take a vegetable as your long-form improv subject.

Show No. 2: Frankenmatt, two very funny guys from Los Angeles. They also worked the long-form game, improvising a road-trip from Charleston to San Francisco. This was only the barest of plot-devices, though, as they spent most of their hour creating a dark comedy about alcoholic fathers and vomit monsters, playing stoners at a 7-11, and flossing llamas. They got big laughs.

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