So, this puppet company called me up in 2003....

(Above: Princess Little Girl and the Gunniwolf)
So, we moved to a new town and I was looking for work, and I got a mysterious voice mail from a woman saying that a mutual friend had told her I just moved there, and asking me if I would be interested in doing some work for their puppet company. When I called her back, it turns out she’s been friends with a former coworker of mine from when I was sewing costumes for Berkeley Repertory Theatre a few months before. My contracted period was up, but my friend had remembered me and my work, and gave her my name and number when asked if she knew anyone to help construct set pieces and props for a show the company would perform in conjunction with the Toronto Symphony. After my first foray into set pieces, they had me begin to help make the puppets as well..... and now it’s been over 18 years of a wonderful partnership with some of the most incredible people I’ve ever gotten to know. ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

Why they wanted me to help: The puppeteers have been around over 40 years and survived all this time by bidding on grants to provide many educational programs for county entities, state entities, school districts, children’s centers, libraries’ Summer Reading Programs, museums, and also birthday parties and other private events. Just writing the grant applications can be an enormous task, and after so many years, they wanted to share some of the puppet-building work.

#artcrawl
(So, these puppets I built are not in chronological order, but I hope you like them!)

This is the Gunniwolf, an Earth Spirit in a myth of a South American Native People; his character looks fearsome and appears very suddenly in the show and startles the children in the show’s audience, but after he is on stage for a while it becomes clear he is a very gentle and peaceable being. He’s one of the most challenging puppets I’ve done for them, but possibly because of that, he’s probably one of my very favorites I’ve made for them.

They give me drawings of what they want, approximate dimensions (for instance, he’s called a “big-mouth puppet” for obvious reasons, and needed to be about 10” from one side of his mouth to the other) and if the puppet needs to do anything special during the show so the build can accommodate the action. This fellow’s teeth are made of glow-in-the-dark Fimo clay, so that’s a fun option I added myself.

Here’s the remake of the Gunniwolf more than ten years later; after 40 years of holding both arms above his head, Joe needed lighter and lighter puppets to continue to work, so Gunni got a lightweight makeover. He’s still impressive, but I’m still very much more fond of his first incarnation. (When my first Gunniwolf was “retired,” they gifted him back to me, and he’s lunging out of my sewing room wall)

Back of Gunniwolf II

This mouse wearing a beret and an artist’s smock is an artist and is the “pre-show” for when they perform at birthday parties or library shows or other functions; Joe the puppeteer is a very talented visual artist, including a caricaturist, and while the children are getting settled in front of the stage, Joe brings out this puppet and asks, “Who wants their portrait drawn?” and, while wearing the puppet, uses the mouse to draw caricatures of children in the audience who request them.

(His profile seems to resemble my English Bull Terrier dogs..... could it be a COINCIDENCE....?) ?

His whiskers are made of weedwacker string ?

Our town, being in the great state of California, is part of our Mediterranean climate — that means that even tho we are coastal, we don’t always get enough rain. Water conservation and care of the watershed are both very big concerns, and are often subjects of the county’s educational outreach. This duck is a character who appeared on flyers, posters, the county’s website and other media to remind kids of the programs they see performed in schools and court events; Joe also walked around Farmers Markets meeting kids and handing out trinkets like pencils and rulers with the logo and slogans of the program. “Only Rain Down The (storm) Drain” and to be sure to conserve water. Kids like being able to meet the puppet they’ve seen and to ask him questions and pet him.

They also asked me to make several stage “skins” — removable covers for the stage frames so the stage could look different for different shows; sometimes a playful fabric, sometimes more formal like this.
The gold pompoms are on the top and bottom edges of the Playboard, or the stage part that has the action for the show. The hanging fabric panels on the left and right of the playboard are to give the stage more width and gravitas and backstage space to work in, and sometimes puppets pop up above the stage or stick out from behind the side panels to deliver lines.

This photo has four panels I made to suggest location for the action, and usually only one of those would be up at any time. They’re to show that the puppets are at (L to R): a creek bed, the San Francisco Bay, the Pacific Ocean, or at school.

This shows the “skin” I made for the outdoor stage. I wish I could tell you which puppet is that brownish blob on the Playboard in this shot, or what they’re doing, but alas, I can’t.

This is Joe practicing with Princess Little Girl and the Gunniwolf from the first photo — you can get an idea of how the stages are simply frames for the removable skins to cover, and in the extreme upper right you see the board that holds one of the side panels.

Another fun project was to get to re-make their (VERY) ollllld goat puppets for The Three Billy Goats Gruff. This one is the Smallest Billy Goat Gruff, and I love how he turned out!!! ♥️♥️♥️ The puppeteers wanted the goats to be rod puppets, and gave me free-rein on what their design would be; the only stipulation was that the goats should be in Nordic sweaters, possibly because Trolls are found in Nordic countries.

Smallest Billy Goat Gruff, profile; he has little leather hooves and the noses, eyebrows and eyeliner on the faces are made of cut and shaped leather.

Guess what? BILLY (GOAT) BUTT! ?♥️

This is the Middle-Sized Billy Goat Gruff. I wish I knew why her photos are not very clear.....

Medium Billy Goat Gruff again

This is Biggest Billy Goat Gruff — he definitely says to me that he’s the biggest, baddest badass Billy Goat in town.

Big and Badass!

They wanted the Troll’s Bridge to be Steampunk, so this is what I came up with. The lights on each end are insulin vials with LEDs in them.

Closeup of Bridge light

Joe loving on my Three Billy Goats Gruff when I delivered them

Another show series was “Mister Froggy Radio Show” — they needed a panel to put on the stage that represented an old-time radio. Joe sketched me an idea, and I cleaned it up and scaled it to be about 30” and cut a template to use for the plastic corrogate base.

Corrugated plastic base covered with batting and a layer of textured brown fabric. Marzipan is helping. ?

Radio with part of Mister Froggy’s image superimposed over the grill

Completed radio; I set the radio’s dial to one of the radio stations from the Bay Area, KCBS, 740 AM. ?

The radio dial had a small flickering LED from a Dollar Store LED candle — when it was turned on for the show, the dial glowed and flickered like my granddad’s old console radio did.

Mister Froggy needed a microphone, so this was the first draft — I made it to be more in line with the period of the radio, but it was decided that today’s kids wouldn’t connect that it was a microphone, so this one wasn’t used in the show after all.

The replacement microphone — more modern-looking.

Sometimes the shows capture the kids’ attention more if some of the kids in the audience participate in the puppetry. These three characters are rod puppets for them to help tell the story in the show. They are all big soft-sculpture puppets about 15” across.

I was also asked to make a puppet from the drawings in this book written and illustrated by Joe’s grandson, Chris. Chris is a very highly functioning man with autism who goes to schools and speaks about his experience living with autism; he wants kids to know that autism means he’s a little different, but essentially he loves his life and contributes to society and is a valued human, like anyone else. He wrote and illustrated a book (available on Amazon or to order from your neighborhood bookstore!) named “Danny the Dragon” that parallels his story.

Back of Chris’ book

Danny puppet — some of the drawings changed Danny the Dragon’s shape from page to page, so I needed to try to choose which of the different drawings to replicate that would best represent the character

Danny the Dragon face-on

I love how his sneakers turned out!

Drawings from within the book

Another drawing from within the book

They asked me to build a kind of suitcase to carry Danny in; I got the idea to make it so that Chris could set it on the table in front of him, slip his hand into the puppet so he was “alive” when he’s first seen (instead of Chris pulling on the puppet in front of the audience) and Danny could pop out of the top to participate in the presentation.

I’d need to build a hole to put his hand in, but it should also close so it wasn’t seen, and a way for Chris’ arm to come free so that Danny wasn’t just stuck performing in the bag. Sooooo.....

Here’s the trapdoor and hidden hole to access the puppet, with medium-weight narrow Velcro to hold it

Here’s how the bag would look after Chris has Danny on his arm and removes the active puppet from the bag to help present.

The show they did before COVID quarantine licked everything down was, “Captain Polluto” — this is his character sketch.

Captain Polluto is an alien being who comes to Earth to steal our water because all the water on his planet has become polluted. A helpful Earth girl shows him how we clean our water and prevent damage to our watershed, and teaches that he doesn’t need to travel to get water if he knows how to stop polluting his planet and to care for the watershed at home.

Captain Polluto is kind of a caterpillar-critter alien.

He has fat-rolls, antennae and a tail.

I think I got the expression from the first sketch pretty well!

And because my first calling was costumes, here are two — this Egyptian Queen is 98.7% effort on the headdress, and 0.3% effort on the gown, and 1% effort on the makeup, because I was sooooo, SO late to the costume party. The headdress really should have its own post because of the hours I spent on it (and that is nearly completely unseeable in this shot), and the shift/gown was flung together in half an hour with raw, unhemmed yardage for the pleated gold drapery.

It ain’t over until the Fat Lady sings, so.... here I am! I wanted to be a Valkyrie like in the Wagnerian operas (ah, yes, part of my life -before- working for a living).

Don’t even start in the horned headdress when I KNOW Valkyries had -winged- helmets.... I wore the costume to two parties with the winged helmet and everyone smugly told me I was supposed to have horns. So this is me wearing my costume to work and caving in to peer pressure, ......wearing horns.

Dog tax: The first night we brought home the puppy, Marzipan, in late 2010. You can see her older sister Dori (the sadly now-departed love of my life) is reeeeeally freaked out by this strange creature and is appealing to the heavens after trying unsuccessfully to be as far from her as possible. But it all worked out .....eventually.

Send... YOUR fun artistic photos! And dogs! And cats!