ALL THINGS SHINY AND ROYAL — We hear somebody or other is getting married. OK, OK. So we tried to keep our site a ‘royal-wedding-free’ zone.  But if you’ve got an invite to Willy and Kate’s hitching, the DMA’s Uncrated blog has some helpful gift suggestions from the permanent collection — a silver wine cistern from the 1760s would be nice — as well as tips on what to wear. The sixth-century, gold Etruscan earrings come highly recommended.

AWARDS, AWARDS — Casa Manana has its Betty Lynn Buckley Awards, which have “celebrated high school musical theatre across Tarrant County” for 11 years. And now Lyric Stage is starting to do the same with its first annual Schmidt and Jones Awards (named for the Texans, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, who created The Fantasticks). But this award includes any North Texas high school, not just Tarrant County, and TheaterJones has the nominees.

MOCKERY?— Speaking of Casa Manana, it and the Dallas Theater Center are going to stage To Kill a Mockingbird next season. Now a new memoir is coming out which says Harper Lee, the novel’s reclusive author, actually spoke with the author about why she quit writing. No she didn’t, Lee says.

CURATORS, CURATORS – You may not have noticed the Texas Biennial. Despite its name, the “independent survey of contemporary art” is more an Austin thing. And this year, it got very hot in Austin because contemporary space Arthouse moved into a new home, shut down a teen video exhibit which had some sexual content and then eliminated funding for the curator in charge of the video exhibit, which kinda looked like double-double censorship. Conveniently/inconveniently, Glasstire reports, the Biennial then hosted a scheduled curator’s meeting at Arthouse, where everyone talked about/didn’t talk about the controversy. North Texas speakers included Christina Rees of TCU’s Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Dallas artist Noah Simblist and Terri Thornton, artist and education curator at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.