IRISH-ING UP SMU. “I was looking for people who are on the cutting edge, who are doing something next,” Meadows dean Jose Antonio Bowen says.. Dublin playwright Enda Welsh and Dublin choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan were the winners of this year’s Meadows Prize. They just finished three weeks at SMU,  reports DMN‘s Lawson Taitte (pay wall), collaborating on Highland Park, a dance piece with words. If you’re curious about Welsh’s work — he’s best known as the Tony Award-winning writer of the Broadway musical, Once, which doesn’t reflect his darker dramas at all — the Undermain will present his North Texas premiere in January with Penelope, his ‘most difficult’ drama, he says. Yes, it’s about that Penelope.

ART + THERAPY + ADVOCACY. After 21 years, the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center has outgrown its home and is moving to a new one — with more art therapy space (pay wall). Last week, the DCAC held its annual art auction,  Art + Advocacy, and raised more than $500,000 for the project.

A MILLION PUPPET PROTEST MARCH. No, really. They were protesting Mitt Romney’s promise to kill funding for PBS and Sesame Street. OK, so it wasn’t a million, but a lot of felt and fur showed up last week in Washington, D.C., with hundreds of protestors chanting such slogans as “EL-MO, we won’t go!” and, a personal favorite, “What do we want? COOOOKIES! When do we want them? NOW!”

HERE, THERE: Fair Park may be getting a little year-round surf for, well, surfing – a FlowRider, in fact. . . . The mayor of Denver hails his city’s robust ‘Scientific and Cultural Facilities District’  and the 310 arts groups that delivered $1.76 billion in economic activity last year. That’s up 18.4 percent from 2009. Wonder how we’d compare? . . .