Friday, October 16, 1998
Day Eleven
Today started at 6:30am. It’s our last day in Seattle so we had to pack our luggage into the van. Fortunately we both pack light. The show itself was in a small town outside of Seattle. We found it with no problems, but it was an old school so Joe had to run an extension cord to the building next door to keep our lights from blowing a fuse. The show went well, the kids were great. But the puppets began to self destruct. There’s a ganged control (ganged control means that several puppets work with one mind, like a gang) of three bees. One of them fell off during the show. The two harder repairs where Weha and Brer Rabbit. Both of them had leg trouble.
We’ll start with Weha. At one point in the show he gets scared and runs off stage with his legs spinning like a cartoon character. The photo to the right is of Weha’s running mechanism. It’s a very simple control. Each leg is attached to a metal axle, and string is wrapped around the axel. When it’s pulled, it causes the legs to spin around. You can see the string wrapped around the axel for his left leg.
The right leg string broke. Fortunately he has a good access hatch.
The problem is that he is a narrow puppet and the hole I was aiming for is tiny. To give you an idea of scale look for the phillips head screw in the middle of the photo. I needed to get the string (braided dacron fishing-line) through the hole in the metal rod on the left. I was not successful. It was dark, I was backstage and the audience was coming in. So, I did a quick fix. There was a hose-clamp around the leg axel to keep the leg from sliding out of the body. So I tied the string to that. It worked fine for two shows, but I’ll need to make a better repair at some point.
Brer’s repairs were a lot easier. He’s got six rods, and the ones at his feet take a lot of stress. One of them came off. Joe reattached it using a ziptie. They are handy for quick repairs and readily available in hardware stores. He actually used two zipties, because of how much stress those rods are under.
When the puppet was built five years ago the rods were sewn to metal rings that were permanently attached to his feet. We wanted to be able to take the rods off in case they got bent. At some point the sewing broke and someone replaced the rod with a ziptie. No one has sewn it since.
It is important to trim the ends afterwards. They look ugly. I highly recommend carrying a swiss army knife on tour with you. We use them constantly.
The second show was at a school that was built in the fifties. We tried to spread our electric load but wound up blowing a fuse anyway. It took out our lights and our sound. Of course we were in a big gynasium with no windows, and it was at a scary part of the show. We had four hundred screaming children on our hands. Some of them were genuinely scared, but most of them liked the chance to scream. Joe went with the Principle to try to get some lights on and power restored. I tried to reclaim the children’s attention. The hardest part was that I didn’t have a microphone, so being heard was a challenge. But there’s a trend at schools these days to use a clapping pattern to focus the children. It’s the same rythm at all the schools. Clap Clap Clapclapclap. They clapped back and I began to talk. First I explained that the lights would be on soon and then I looked for any topic that would distract them, while being vaguely educational. It’s amazing the things you can find to talk about when you need to stall. We discussed the difference between hares and rabbits. (thank you Janet Bradley for that information!) Rabbits are born without fur, hares are born with fur. When they got the gym lights on, we started the show again, by going back a few lines and asking the audience to pretend that the blackout had never happened. We also chose to not use our own lights for the rest of the show. They seemed to still enjoy it.
This last photo is a shot from the parking lot of our last school. That mountain is just one of the reasons to tour. But now we’re going home for the weekend. I’ll continue with our adventures after our shows on Monday. See ya then!
