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.
Sounds a bit like the bloom is off the rose; or since hops and yeast are your new master, like the head is off the beer! I only THOUGHT I wanted to read about your tour. It's apparent you could write about cutting your cuticles, and I would STILL be spellbound! Brava, b****y wife. m.dawg
ReplyDeleteI would go see "The Puppeteer's Wife!" The show, I mean. Since we didn't get there until later in the week, I heard we had missed some colossal pieces of crap earlier. And then there was teh W&S show...*sigh*...
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