A Post about Puppets

The public school that I attended had an art teacher and a well-equipped art room. One of the things we learned to do was make marionettes. I remember it very well as I loved doing it. We started with lightbulbs and used paper mâché to form the head. The body was sewn and stuffed, with joints. We used a T bar, the simplest form of manipulating a puppet like that, with strings of fishing line. My puppet was Queen Guenevere; she had a velvet dress that my mother helped me make from scraps left over from my Christmas dress. As I recall, she was strung from the shoulders, wrists and knees, the last with the line running through the dress. And we did shows for the school.

This introduction gave me a taste for theatre. I did not much enjoy performing, but making the costumes and scenery and setting things up was fascinating. I carried this into high school, working backstage for musicals (We did a cutdown Mikado, for one) and on sets and decorations for assemblies and dances. My favourite memory from this time is dressing the biggest guy in our class in a hoop skirt and white wig as Snow White. As I recall, my mother sacrificed a double bed sheet for this skirt. It was not all good fun – at one point purple dye from the Angel Gabriel’s wings got sprayed onto my father’s white shirts and my mother was Not Amused.

In university, I also did stage and musical crew work. I recall ordering enough light brown grease paint to turn all of the principals plus a chorus of Canadian girls in February from white and pasty to brown and shiny. Getting it all off again was another matter and I appear in the university’s year book holding a cast member by the hair and scrubbing his face. My worst moment? A Shakespearian character was getting his eyes gouged out when his wig came off and went thump on the stage.

But back to puppets. My next venture was to teach my daughters and their friends – age about five to seven I think – to use hand puppets. They were avid Sesame Street fans, and some of my husband’s work socks became dragon heads. Other puppets were also single arm, but flat of the hand with the head stuck onto the middle finger and the other fingers folded to make shoulders. We used an ironing board for a stage and my mother’s discarded drapes for curtains. JG had a good quality tape recorder and that also was useful.

I got into costuming again when the ED was in gymnastics. I recall a whole set of leotards for a team and a set of costumes for a Christmas pageant. And somehow the YD needed a costume for a school play. And a uniform for a choir. Also, there were, my delight, Hallowe’en costumes. The height of that – a Monarch butterfly that the grandkid’s mother used for an adult party, costuming her spouse as the caterpillar.

But, the most fun. I joined a group called “Kids on the Block”. It is still extant and you can read about a version of it here. My puppet had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair. She had speech difficulties. The puppets were full body and we stood behind them dressed in black and spoke for them, after taking a class to learn what they should say in answer to questions from the audience. The audience was mostly composed of public school children, although we did some adult presentations as well, usually to acquaint teachers and parents about the program. It was really rewarding and the group was composed of some very skilled and caring people.

That’s about it. In my house are two beautiful marionettes, gifts from my daughters as adults, and a third, a lamb with floppy legs on a T bar. This last of my toys went on outings when I was working with a small child on basic English skills (and if the father learned the difference between “in” and “on” with his daughter, score one.)