When you live in Europe, you often wake up to the news. I’ll never forget Kiki startling me awake one morning with “Will Smith slapped Chris Rock!” Of course, sometimes the news is bad—occasionally very bad. So it was to wake up to texts from Brad and Lampe telling me Cortney DeAngelo had suddenly, shockingly passed away in her sleep.

When I told my friend Rahel that an Austin improv friend had died, she asked “Were you two close?” I started to type three different responses:

First I wrote: “Yeah, she was one of the best techs in the Austin improv community.”

Cortney was one of the three so-called “tech ninjas” (along with Lindsey McGowen and Cindy Page) who formed a tight mutual bond while producing professional-quality work around the Austin theater scene for little-to-no pay. Like so many improvisers who’ve experienced the ninjas’ work, I’ve become dogmatic about how good tech can elevate a show: “You’re going to love this show and you won’t even know why!”

Cortney’s comic timing onstage was good, but her comic timing on lights was phenomenal. With nothing more than a few sliders she could make or break a show (usually make it, unless she was doing her usual brand of mischief).¹

Lindsey, tech ninja #2, is actually in Amsterdam right now for the IMPRO Amsterdam festival. In a weird coincidence, on Sunday night—perhaps right around the time of Cortney’s death—I made a social-media post to highlight Lindsey and Emil running the boards, saying: “The technical improviser Avengers have assembled.” Cortney would have been an easy, first-ballot addition to those Avengers.

Then I wrote: “Yeah, we were in a troupe together for years.”

The passion for good tech extended to Cortney being a part of ¡ZARZAMORA!, my long-time troupe with several other old-timer improvisers that hopped around to various festivals.² Cortney accompanied us on many of those, and was never less than an official full-time member.

I keep coming back to the promo picture that ¡ZARZAMORA! took for one of our formats. It’s admittedly hard to look past certain other elements of the picture, but there in the background is Cortney in her green wig, just as I imagine her: a sassy goddess. (In this show format, she *literally* played God.)

But finally, I wrote: “Yeah, she adopted my cats when I moved to Amsterdam.”

Cortney wore her heart on her sleeve, where it radiated in every direction like her trademark perfume (man did she love that perfume). Imagine my luck when I needed to find a new home for my two cats, Suitcase and Sabado, and Cortney and her husband Jonathan agreed to take them.

(That’s an oversimplification; they’d actually only agreed to take Suitcase, with Sabado coming along to Amsterdam; and then with less than a week until the big move, when it became apparent that Sabado was in too fragile a state to move, they agreed to take them both.)

(And that’s STILL an oversimplification; they only agreed to foster the cats until I came back for them; but they got along so well that we mutually agreed the cats would stay there.)

This of course promoted Cortney to our inner circle of friends, with a Facebook chat called “Cats!” where she would keep Kiki and I posted on how damn happy she and Jonathan and Suitcase and Sabado were in their little apartment.

Sadly, Suitcase and Sabado both preceded Cortney in untimely deaths—I fucking hate this being the *third* tribute I’ve written in as many years for that single household. Our hearts go out to Jonathan; they’d just moved into a new house, and Cortney’s last message in the “Cats!” group was “I can’t wait for y’all to come visit!” There’s just nothing to say about something so awful.

Cortney’s final Facebook post was so eerily perfect that, when I checked her page after hearing the news, I thought it was a memorial from somebody else. She’d just finished coordinating this year’s FronteraFest, one of Austin’s longest-running theater festivals. Again, the picture captures her perfectly: photogenic, exhausted, and happy about a job well done. And such a goddamn pro that her body told her fatal condition to just hang on a second while she finished flying and landing a whole festival. 

This week we’ll head back to the IMPRO Amsterdam festival, because the show must go on, as Cortney would be the first and last to tell you. She should still be here, taking a break on the couch with Suitcase and Sabado before jumping into her next creative endeavor. My best tribute to her is to be pissed off that she’s not.

God save the Queen.

---

1. One of her signature improv formats was called Tech Nightmare. You can imagine what that was like.
2. Including our why-the-hell-not trip to the Finland Improv Festival, which later led to my attending the IMPRO Amsterdam festival, which is why I’m now Dutch.