First Day at the Puppet Rampage!

First day at the Rampage--the puppet festival in St. Paul, MN. It's the come and go day, so there's mostly performances. It's usually the type that you see at fairs too...out doors, slap stick, no sound system...my type. There was even a Polichinelle--the French version of Punch. No swazzle but I did like this bit of business:
P: [hits Judy with the slapstick]
J: Oh you wicked evil man! I can't believe you hit me with a stick! [two beat pause] Do it again.
P: [much thwacking]

Some things went pretty spiffy today. I was surprised at the number of people who recognized me. My roommate is even some one I took the Punch and Judy workshop with last time. (You can see her on my flickr, in the Punch set. She's in the front row in a black and white dress and curly short hair) Her name is Diane Kozarski and she works at a library--she reports that she's still in the process of pulling her Punch & Judy show together. She's worried that her show is to vicious! Should I show her mine?

We had free time in the morning so we spent an hour running through the Mall of America. I came to the conclusion that you need more than an hour. I only bought food.

I don't think I will be able to go to a Harry Potter party on Friday night. They've scheduled the potpourri for that night. Dare I miss it?

Tonight the adult show "Tim & Jim's Electric Noodle Show" was out there. It was very funny and only suffered the "what the heck was that?" reaction a couple of times. Most memorial moment was the fake news cast they did. I liked the bit where they announced an Opinion section and the next shot shows Frankenstein rising up slowly. "Fire bad!" he says and that was it. I also like the monkey opinion section too--he chewed us out for evolution and how dare we say monkeys were the less evolved of the two. He sited several reasons for which I would need to change the rating of this blog to share with you. Wes, if you're reading this, you would've liked it.

I could mention the Festival opening...the great speech of Ronnie Burkett and the wonderful performances of master puppeteers Joe Cashore and Phillip Huber...but I won't. Those are moments in my life beyond words.

Steve Abrams gave me a morsel of food for thought. He was contemplating doing the same show for two entirely different audience reactions--one just merely entertained--the other knocked completely off of their socks, riveted and throughly entertained. When he mentioned to a friend that he did nothing different and couldn't figure it out, his friend said "Sometimes you come across an audience that just really needs your performance that day." Nice, huh?