What. You're wondering where the blog went? You thought I'd post more? I'm a busy woman, you know. I've got TV shows to watch, and sunburns to peel, and puppet shows to make fun of. You're lucky I even take the time to type all this out. Next year, I'm replacing the puppet tour blog with a twitter feed. The puppets will tweet at you, and you'll be sorry you ever doubted me.
Yeah, we spent a whole week in a Georgia Tech dormitory, and it was puppetastic. "Oh, a puppet festival," you say, "that sounds like fun!" Well, those are the words of one uneducated in the puppetry arts. Let's get our college on and go to puppetry 101.
Lesson #1: There are more kinds of puppets than you could possibly imagine. Most people are familiar with marionettes and moving mouth puppets, but those are only the tip of the iceberg. There are hand puppets, rod puppets, shadow puppets, found object puppets, giant body puppets, black light puppets... there's all sorts of things you can wiggle around in the name of theater!
Lesson #2: There are all kinds of puppet shows. Kids shows, adult shows, puppet rock operas, puppet art installations, etc. More importantly, there are good puppet shows, and more often, bad puppet shows. We'll get to that later.
Lesson #3: There are all kinds of puppeteers. It's shocking to me that there's enough of these guys to hold a festival. And boy, do they love each other. I very quickly learned that the puppet community is one big crazy happy family. Gross.
SO, now that you've learned a few things about the world of anthropomorphized objects, you won't be surprised that we were only a day into the national puppetry festival before we decided we needed some beer. After going to morning workshops and 4 shows per day, our friend Sean suggested we drink a few ahead of the shows, so that we might enjoy ourselves more. This is the puppetry equivalent of drinking until she's pretty. How many beers would I need to enjoy this show?
While that scale really measures the subtle differences between a terrible show and an awful one (4 vs. 5 beers), I prefer a binary system. Essentially, I ask myself this question: Would I rather be watching episodes of
my drunk kitchen in the dorm room? Usually the answer is yes. Often I'd turn to Matt in the first few minutes of a show and mouth the words "drunk kitchen" to indicate my displeasure. Meanwhile, Matt has the same appetite for puppet shows that he does for Chinese buffets. After one plate, I'm done, but Matt goes back for seconds and thirds! Full disclaimer: Matt's review of this festival is considerably more rosy, but he's not the blogger, so you get my version.
I've decided that if I'm going to continue dealing with these festivals, I need to create a reputation that precedes me. I will be Matt Sandbank's b****y wife that finds puppets mildly amusing at best. Then, during the open mic night, I will do my own puppet show, called "The Puppeteer's Wife," that makes fun of all of it.
Aren't you so glad we're going back on tour? I'll post some of Matt's puppetry in the next blog.
The red line illustrates that, in the event of an emergency, you are to run chaotically around the library, screaming in terror. I think this diagram is a little confusing, so I drew my own, more simplified version.
We visited Dad for a few days in Rogers before heading to the great city of Wichita. The people of Wichita (Wichitans?) seem to enjoy choice, 50 choices to be exact. Would you like a restaurant that serves 50 different kinds of hotdogs? Wichita. Need 50 different flavors of donuts for dessert? Wichita. Want to wash it down with 50 different margaritas? Say it with me, Wichita.
Besides the surplus of hotdogs and donuts, Wichita has a poop load of surprisingly great museums. The Museum of World Treasures has so many priceless artifacts that we honestly thought it was a hoax, but it's not. Who would guess that Wichita would house, among other things, the world's largest display of real dinosaur fossils, 4 royalty mummies, a shrunken head, and a piece of the Berlin wall?
Even with all of these attractions, Wichita has a surprising lack of... people. The downtown sidewalks are empty, save for the bronze statues of playing children and wandering adults. It's like a scene from the movie I am Legend. I asked a native if the heat wave was keeping the good citizens at home, but he informed me that this was typical downtown foot traffic. Wichita: lots of stuff, no people.
Now I'm sitting backstage as Matt does the summer's last performance of his new show, the Legend of Walter Weirdbeard. This is a show about a crew of pirates that finds a treasure chest full of old books. Dismayed, the crew mutinies, but the captain keeps them at bay by reading them story after story, until they fall in love with literature. Fueled by their new passion, the pirates head to the library to steal the books, only to discover that the library loans them for free. This show is newly minted, and Matt is riding it until the wheels fall off. After the first summer, a new show always needs some repairs and changes, but this show is going to need some serious attention. Matt literally did the last 5 performances with the stage duct-taped together and a hot glue gun on hand. Still, the show has been well-received, I think mostly because the stories the captain reads are so great. Please enjoy the tale I've linked here, "My Big Fat Mermaid Wedding". Note: I accidentally deleted Matt's video of this from the computer, so I filmed this one on the hotel wall. Just for you, readers.
