Pulling Strings (February/March 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 1)

Pulling Strings

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February/March 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 1

I no longer remember the exact date; I can only recall the stark terror of the event. Sometime during the fall of 1979, my employer summoned me to the studio for an emergency rehearsal. I was working as a puppeteer for a little, old-fashioned Manhattan-based marionette theater that performed sweet, beautiful, but somewhat shabby Victorian versions of popular fairy tales in grade schools around the country. My original intention on graduating from college was to move to New York and support myself as an actor at any cost, but this had been the closest I could get. The director was a charming yet hot-tempered Italian with a taste for opera. Long years in the business had left him with no patience with young aspiring actors who didn’t know a shoulder string from a leg bar and whose dreams of starring on Broadway made them reluctant to get up at six o’clock every morning to drive to Long Island for the upteenth performance of Puss ’n Boots . Periodically, when another title from the repertory was called for, we would haul out decades-old puppets, sets, and sound equipment to be subjected to two or three days of manic rehearsal before being dumped into a beat-up old van to start what would inevitably turn out to be a disaster-prone school tour. The vans broke down. The sound systems short-circuited. Prince Charming’s head always fell off as he bent over to kiss the Princess. One day, a puppet moose burst into flames during a performance when he was backed into a hot lighting fixture. We rushed offstage, dunked him in a nearby toilet (the only water available), and went on with the show. That charred old moose continued to reappear in puppet plays for years. For all I know, he’s still working.

So it was with this background that my boss wanted me to help him prepare a little show for a birthday party to be held at Tavern on the Green in two days’ time. We both hated working parties, and neither one of us wanted to go to any special trouble, so we grabbed whatever familiar puppets we saw on the shelf, spliced together a tape of some musical numbers we knew, and created a very ad hoc marionette revue. After all, it was only a birthday party. We could wing it, just like we always did.

On the appointed day, I drove our old Dodge up to the doors of the famed eatery and we started to unload into a large and sunny private dining room. There were a number of other high-class party entertainers present, as well as a sumptuous buffet that bespoke a very fancy do. My boss was in an especially irritable mood and we had a lot of equipment to set up, so I didn’t pay too much attention to our booking agent as she schmoozed with the roomful of performers and staff.

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