Monday, October 12, 2009

My Puppet-Pure Heart



This is not me and my sister, but it could be. This is from the late 40s, and I just realized we looked very much like this as kids in the 60s!

When we were about this age, we took a puppetry class at the park. We made papier mache puppets, acted out skits to rehearse the puppet show and then got pulled away before the big event when we would show the world what grand puppeteers we were on the road to becoming. The world's great loss, I assure you, especially considering out wonderously alive my own puppet was turning out to be. At least I earned my puppetry badge in Girl Scouts. (My sisters won't let me tell the story of our skits, though. They say we still have to live and face people in this town.)

OK--it happened like this:
Last Saturday, I taught an art class at the Pioneer Craft House, which is a tucked-away wooded retreat-like campus in Salt Lake City.





I taught this rice-paper-marbling class,





and then wandered into a weaving room.
I'll save this very interesting story about how I spent double what I made teaching the class on Karen Women's Community hand-woven items for another time.




Still wandering, suddenly in a mind-numbing whirl, I was rocketed into my puppet-past. I stepped through the doors of the cottage and actually gasped...even more than I did when I saw my new friend Mark Eaton for the first time. Walls and shelves and benches filled, I tell you, with antique puppets and marionettes. To know me is to know a woman who can be transported to some lost horizon at the mere sight of puppets and dolls.


































And then... oh-my-goodness-gracious-sakes-alive---KOREAN PUPPETS





The woman who showed me into this room told me that they are having a photographer come in to take pictures for some story someone is writing about them, and she was disappointed that I lived clear up here in Ogden because she wanted me to be one of the people to help hold and arrange the puppets for the pictures. She didn't want just anybody to manhandle the dolls and she could tell, just by my reaction to them, that I have a pure heart.