As Green Shirt moves into its new home at 4001 N. Ravenswood Ave. and closes shop at 4407 N. Clark, Co-Founder/Owner Andrew Gallant and Managing Director Jack Schultz are thinking a lot about what they think is most important about beginnings and endings.

Join us to celebrate our next beginning at our housewarming party on Thursday, September 5 at 7:00pm in our new home 4001 N. Ravenswood Ave. Unit 303-B!

Beginnings

Andrew:

A great beginning, to me, is about meeting mystery. We see an RV crash out of which a panicked middle age man in his underwear emerges, picks up a gun and squares off to face cars that are quickly approaching him on this desert road. From the mystery, questions bubble up: how did this seemingly normal guy, Walter White, get here? Who is following him? Is he a hero or a villain? And most importantly, a great beginning hooks with that other core dramatic question: what’s next? A great beginning, whether an adventure, a romance, a comedy, a tragedy plants a seed of mystery in your mind, a mystery rooted in past, present and future. We encounter glimpses of all three at once, never fully sure of what any of it means, but we are enticed enough to spend the time and energy to uncover and unlock this new, vexing and extraordinary world we’ve just met for the first time. When I see a truly great beginning on screen or in the theater, I always turn to whomever I’m with, and find in their eyes the acknowledgement that we are in for magic, and that wherever it takes us, we will go together.

Jack:

I like beginnings that get straight to the point like George Denbrough chasing his paper boat straight to It and his death in Stephen King’s It. That opening tells you immediately where you’re at and there’s no question that you should keep paying attention. And like George’s death in It, I think beginnings are best when you can trace them throughout the story. George’s big brother Bill fights It for 1,138 pages because It took his little brother. The beginning should be so powerful that it stays important to our story until its end.

Endings

Andrew:

Endings need ambition and audacity. This is one of the reasons I usually feel unsatisfied with TV series finales: most of the time they are simply too clean, too wrapped in a bow, unworthy of the depth and complicated meaning a show has built up over time (I’m looking at you Game of Thrones). An ending shouldn’t explain itself or meet expectations and I rarely love a twist. They should reach further, higher, deeper. Film and theater usually do endings better. The endings I love most are the ones that reach out past that confines of the narrative and open up new territory rather than just closing out the old. The beauty of Eliza taking back the narrative in Hamilton’s last bars, demanding her shot to finish the story with the love she still has in spite of what she’s been through. The Chief smothering McMurphy and then throwing the previously insurmountable water fountain through the asylum’s window and running into the night as the rest of the ward cheers. The chorus in that great meditation on art and legacy, Sunday in the Park with George, singing out loud in the final moments the one word every artist and human being has wrestled with at some moment of life: “Forever…” In that one word, Sondheim manages to sum up our fears and ambitions and desires: hoping to last, knowing that we can’t. To know that we are temporary beings in the stream of eternity, hoping we will have mattered. What a miracle of an ending. Moments like that reach through, transcend the story and speak to the very nature of being alive. And then we walk out into the night, knowing that the questions we wrestle with in life are not our own but something greater, of which we are all a part.

Jack:

Great endings rap up loose ends while giving the audience a sense that the deeper meaning of the story they just experienced could continue on in their lives. Guillermo Del Toro’s Shape of Water ends with a poem. “Unable to perceive the shape of you I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love, it humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.” As the lights turned on in the movie theater, I felt like I further understood what I want love to look like in my life. Sitting there in the theater as the credits rolled, I looked up the poem on my phone and shared it with my girlfriend as soon as I got home. Not only did the poem rap up the story by offering a picture of the future Elisa and the creature might share at sea but it inspired me to to think/feel more about how I want to live my life.