On July 1st Chris and Tami, founders of TNM, are relocating from Austin to their hometown New Orleans. While we will be splitting our time between New Orleans and Austin, our home address will be in NOLA. Some of you may have questions about this, if so – read this letter! We’ll do our best to explain our plans and motivations. If you don’t have questions – OK, cool!

Regardless, JOIN US WEDNESDAY NIGHT @ TNM FOR A CHRIS AND TAMI SAY “SEE YOU IN A COUPLE WEEKS” PARTY! We’ll be there all night, from 7p-post megaphone show and into the night.

So: In 2005 we lived, worked and were performing members of a comedy theater in New Orleans. When Katrina hit, we relocated to Austin and opted to dive into the study and practice of improv and comedy as full time jobs. We helped to grow the improv scene in Austin from twice weekly shows to a full schedule of improv performances at multiple theaters across the city. We felt terribly guilty about not returning to NOLA immediately. But we felt our work and circumstances seemed to keep pulling us deeper into developing our business and our creative selves in Austin. We always knew in our hearts that all of this work was motivation spawning from the storm. We were given the worst possible circumstances (losing our jobs/flooded out theater and not being able to return to our homes in NOLA) and we were hellbent on making something beautiful emerge from all the shit. We used Austin as the strong surrogate city we needed to do the thing we loved for the place that we loved. And then we fell in love with Austin along the way…

A note on leaving New Orleans: if you had asked us a week before Katrina if we would ever move away from New Orleans we would have looked at you confused and said “…..wait……..what?”. New Orleans is a love or hate city. For those who love it, they love it with a profound, obsessive depth. People get starry eyed when they talk about how the city strikes a cord that resonates unlike anything else – it’s closer to the feeling of being in love than just being a fun place on a map. We are those people, being New Orleanians has been a part of our adult identity, has defined us absolutely.

We have had opportunities over the past few years to return to New Orleans but it never quite lined up right. We wanted to bring something special back with us, prove that we had earned being away during these delicate years after Katrina. And now with all of your help we have built the strong soaring rainbow hawk that is TNM! To be able to share something as strong as our TNM community with NOLA is a dream for us and for our friends who have continued to work comedy in New Orleans.

Since 2005 we have consistently maintained our vision – To build an improv and comedy community in the South that is competitive with the meccas of Chicago/NYC/LA. And we are doing it. Each month we get bigger and are doing more cool shit. Even though we will not physically be at TNM Austin every night, we’ll be back every few weeks. TNM is the most important thing in the world to us. It’s all we do, it’s all we have done for years and we are not abandoning it, we are leaving to help make it stronger. We will do what it takes to maintain a strong and healthy environment in Austin as well as continue to nurture the scene in New Orleans. If that means we revisit how often we are back in Austin, then BOOM. We will have a physical location, full schedule of shows and events, full schedule of classes in New Orleans very soon. We scouting property as soon as we get to New Orleans and breaking ground on the marketing and community building machine that TNM reps.

For those of you who joined us in NOLA for the megaphone marathons, you understand how exciting it is to bridge these communities and strengthen their bind. For those of you who have not yet taken the NOLA trip, this is your invitation!