How to get first AND last element of tuple at the same time

Question

I need to get the first and last dimension of an numpy.ndarray of arbitrary size.

If I have shape(A) = (3,4,4,4,4,4,4,3) my first Idea would be to do result = shape(A)[0,-1] but that doesn't seem to work with tuples, why not ??

Is there a neater way of doing this than

s=shape(A)
result=(s[0], s[-1])

Thanks for any help