Surprised I cannot access vars in the head's script tags elsewhere. Have tried tossing the second script tags in the body, creating 'App={};' in script tags in head, and declaring the Controller an App.Controller (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10093835/coffeescript-class-not-accessible-in-main-javascript) and just creating a bucket to toss to the rest of the html (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/881515/javascript-namespace-declaration). This resource (http://www.pageresource.com/jscript/jvar.htm) seems to indicate what I'm doing should work on some level.