Lobster Salad

Last Thursday found me sitting on a tall wooden stool at a table by the window at Michelle's Brown Bag Cafe in Bar Harbor, Maine. There on the table before me was a steaming bowl of New England Clam Chowder in a sturdy cardboard container. Some oysterette crackers waited patiently to take the plunge. Along side of that was a HUGE lobster salad sandwich; ginormous hunks of buttery lobster in a dill-flecked sauce fighting for space with crisp lettuce and bright red tomatoes, all crammed overflowingly into a crusty French baguette. A tall, cold bottle of Orangina and a giant Claussen-esque dill spear completed the feast!

I was in Bar Harbor as part of The Maine Puppet Festival, sponsored by the ultra-cool Criterion Theatre and hosted by the also ultra-cool Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers. What a great weekend of puppetry! Along with performances by Grey Seal and Frogtown, the Criterion Theatre's Rob Jordan brought in Perry Alley Theatre, Nappy's Puppets and Crabgrass Puppet Theatre for a cavalcade of puppetry by the rugged Maine coast! I was so honored to be a part of this inaugural festival and Rob Jordan is a great advocate for puppet theatre!

While I was there, I was really happy to get to know Erik, Brian and Robin Torbeck of Frogtown Mountain Puppeteers better too. They were so very kind to me during my stay. Erik and Brian gave me a wonderful tour of the nearby Acadia National Park. Fantastic vistas and views! We stepped atop the peak of Cadillac Mountain just as the sun was setting. Too cool. Frogtown does this hysterical show called Everybody Loves Pirates, but now I know why everybody loves the Torbecks. They are just super-nice people, the best!

Back to the lobster salad. With my show all set up for an evening performance, the afternoon beckoned for a stroll around Bar Harbor with a goal of finding some good indigenous food! I love food, and I love to find cool places to eat when I travel. No chains for me! I'm always amazed at the intriguing places I end up at, all because these little foam puppets take me there.

So, there I sat, at the window table, relishing every bite of the lobster salad and watching the world go by in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Ain't life grand?

Artistically Flip Flopping!

I couldn't stop reading the article by Charlotte performing artist Hardin Minor that recounts his recent trip to the Burning Man Festival 2008. (Charlotte Observer Carolina Living Section, 10/19/08) He spoke of the restorative powers that the festival had on his approach to life, both personally and professionally and therefore artistically.

I think this article was so transfixing to me because I've been giving a lot of thought to my own artistic journey of late. I had a great conversation with Vania Reckard about this just last week. Vania, an amazing puppeteer in her own rite, runs the workshop here at Grey Seal. What a wonderful environment she has created; it's truly a pleasant place to design and build. A pastiche of personalities gather each day to create amazing characters amid conversations that run the gamut from plastic people in Star Wars costumes to vampire books to morning-long discussions on where to have lunch. All this while "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" quietly plays in the background.

Back to my conversation with Vania. I was telling her about how my views on my own puppetry have been changing over the last 5 years. Looking back to when I started out as a professional puppeteer, I think of all the opportunities to learn and grow that I must have missed because I was close-minded and unwilling to consider another way beside my own. I can think of occasions when I was filled with a silly self-induced bravado; unwilling to believe that what I had envisioned and realized was not the only perfect approach.

This is so amazing to me now because at this point in my puppetry career I realize daily that I have only scratched the surface when it comes to the possibilites of the puppet. The opportunities to learn and grow and become better surround me. They're everywhere! Our recent collaboration with The Children's Theatre of Charlotte on a production of Roald Dahl's "The BFG" invigorated me, I was overwhelmed by the capablities of my fellow collaborators.

Recently I've seen puppets from a full blown opera of Hansel and Gretal by Paul Mesner, a side-splitting "Cinderella" by Great Arizona Puppet Theatre, an impromptu shadow play by puppeteers Sarah Frechette and Ceili Clemons and got a pure shot of adrenalin from "Quintron and Miss Pussycat;" all of these performers amaze me and leave me tingling with the power and possibilities of the puppet.

So, I plow on, alive with a new-found vigor for what I do! The current puppetry palette is fantastic and it's absolutely great to be immersed in it; and to be soaking up as much as I can!

A Chicken Crossing the Road

I was clipping along at a jaunty pace through the sand hills region of Eastern North Carolina, heading towards the next performance. It was a beautiful day. The sky was that Tarheel blue. I tell you true, a prettier sky cannot be found. Highway 74 stretched out ahead with tobacco plants off the port side and soybeans off the starboard. Driving is inherent to the life of a puppeteer like me and I tend to enjoy it.

Suddenly I looked out the passenger side window to see a chicken flying straight towards the truck. The chicken was side-view mirror high and accelerating.

I never knew that chickens could fly. Not like this. I also never knew that a chicken’s face could display such angst. Eyes penetrating, beak ajar, chicken feet splayed wide open; it is an image that I cannot erase after all of these years. I felt I had looked into the eyes of terror itself, albeit for a fleeting moment.

Then the chicken was gone. She went up and over the truck and did not re-appear. Nothing on my side of the truck, nothing underneath, just nothing. The bird had vanished, like a chicken banshee racing away from some unknown hell close on her heels.

I rolled on in silent awe, wondering what I had just seen and wondering why. I rolled on past the tobacco, past the soybeans. I rolled on towards the next performance.