Life with a touring puppeteer: 1998, Day 15

Ah- life on the road… Sungura broke again. But it was a new problem this time! How exciting. He has two joints in his neck. One at the base of the head and one at the base of the neck, where it joins his body. Up until now I’d been dealing with the fact that the bicycle cable, that controls the first joint, kept pulling out of his head. Now the joint at the base of his neck gave. He was spending the entire show looking not just down, not just at me, but slightly upstage as well. It’s hard to deliver the line “Do you know why I’m so happy?!” when your puppet can’t look up.

So between shows I opened up his neck and this is what I discovered. The surgical tubing which acted as an elastic stop had torn. You’re looking for the grey and beige tube that’s almost exactly in the middle of the picture. Notice the grey color. That’s not original, it’s just how old this tubing is. It’s also supposed to loop around the key-ring and back up to the hose clamp.

Fortunately we travel with some useful supplies and I did have tubing to replace it with. It was held on with a hose clamp, so it was a simple matter to loosen it and insert the new tube.

Lo! He can now stand upright again. His head moves great. I hadn’t realized until this point that the damage had also been interfering with left/right movement as well. But his neck movement is so smooth now that there is a noticeable improvement.

Unfortunately, since I fixed him right before the show I didn’t get a chance to really work him before I started performing. I’ve been working so hard to compensate for the damage, that when I had a functioning puppet again, I made all sorts of horrible mistakes. For instance, his head tended to lock in the up position you see to the right.

But I got used to it and it’s sooooo much better.