Crawdaddy and change

So, Paris is receding in memory and a new year has begun.

I spent the first two weeks of the year working on puppets, costumes, sets and props for Crawdaddy's Astounding Odditorium, a new show that debuted this past weekend and is now moving to Calgary, Alberta, for the International Festival of Animated Objects. Last spring I built a fat suit for a workshop production of the show, which then parlayed into a paying gig this month; Xstine Cook, the production designer, had to go back to Calgary to head up the festival, and left me in charge of her puppets (and everything else that had yet to be built/made for the show.) It was a great experience, working with a really talented team of painters, puppeteers and actors, many of whom are good friends from Blue Lake.

Above is a photo of me doing open-head surgery of the show's main puppet. The show as a whole both enacts and portrays an old freak show, and this puppet is one of the featured "freaks." This is actually only one of six versions of this character that appears in the show; this one is wearing a straight-jacket for a send-up of Houdini. In other parts of the show, he's fried in an electric chair, strapped to a dartboard, ripped limb from limb... he's the indestructible man! The character was designed by Xstine (pronounced "Christine") and worked onstage by David Ferney. The original production featured him only as a hand puppet, with David's arm inside his neck, but the straight-jacket, electric chair and dartboard prohibited having a hand inside. The head is made from molded latex and is both very strong and very flexible; it also didn't talk very well with just a string pulling from behind. The jaw never closed without the pressure of a hand inside, so he couldn't talk properly—he just sort of flapped his lip. So my first and biggest job was to recreate the effect of a human hand! I thought it would take a day, but it took me a week.

Latex essentially has no structure, but it has a shape. I first tried stringing elastic through the roof of his mouth, but that only pulled part of the mouth shut. I'll spare you the whole process, but tell you that the solution called for steel to overcome the latex. Ultimately, I carved a lower jaw out of wood, glued it inside the lip, and then attached a system of L-brackets and a spring to the wood. The spring pushed the mouth closed, and a cord run through the middle of the spring both pulled the mouth open and kept the spring from popping out. A steel hinge worked as a trigger on the spring. The biggest problem was that very intense glue is needed to hold all this stuff together, and the best stuff takes 24 hours to dry. So most of the components had to be assembled over the course of days, and it still felt like there was no guarantee that it would work. I'm not sure I found the best possible system, but the one I found works OK.

There were lots of other projects in this show — it may well be the most technically demanding show I've ever worked on — but this was the biggest headache. Sadly, the show no longer needs me, so I don't get to go to Calgary... though I had four months out of the country in 2008, so I'm not really complaining.


So, what's next? There may or may not be a school tour of the shadow-puppetry project Ferney and I were working on last fall, and in March, he and I will head back into writing/rehearsing his one-man show The Misunderstood Badger which I'll be directing. In May, Jerry Lee Wallace (another Dell'Arte grad) will open a self-produced clown show at the Arcata Playhouse. This show will feature the big debut of my solo clown piece, for my clown Ferdinand the Magnificent, which I then hope to tour on the streets of major west-coast cities next summer. It may also go to a festival or two back east... I'm also digging back into music, working on expanding my ragtime and bluegrass chops, and ....

I'm starting a band!

Right now it's just me and percussionist Erin Crites; our current repertoire
is pretty much just me ragging on the guitar and her on washboard. But we are also working on some New Orleans Second Line rhythms, and talking to other prospective members. The full product will involve a lot of junk percussion, and if I had to tell you what to expect, I would have to say "some kind of cross between the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Einsturzende Neubauten."

And I wouldn't be kidding...

The project for now is called "Helicopter." I'll keep you posted about new developments.