Observations from the preschool puppet show

• Not everyday you see a puppeteer who comes across as Vin Diesel’s skinnier,  hyperactive younger brother.

• I was initially under impression that the low grade buzz I heard throughout the performance was an attempt to sonically approximate rushing water beneath the Three Billy Goats Gruff bridge. My mistake. It was actually just the cheap portable PA system humming from the ambient energy of excited children, or perhaps just poorly insulated electric wires.

• The robot puppet’s chirps and whirrs were not adequate SFX. Nobody who has ever stood on an automotive factory floor or has had a Roomba underfoot could suspend disbelief.

• Results of polling: 67% of 3 to 6 year-olds will respond as to what kind of animal lives in a jungle with “monkey.” (Granted, small sample size.)

• Interesting dramatic choice to represent the hunter in “The Mouse and the Lion” with such a heavy British accent. The implied criticism of colonial noblesse oblige was an appropriate nod to Said’s theories on Orientalism for those who aren’t ready for kindergarten yet.

• A performer’s joy in crafting his own tools must be sorely challenged when his diminutive audience always wants to put those tools in their sticky, nasty little fingers.

• The “bunny” that looked like the Donnie Darko rabbit was unsettling, to say the least.

merlin:

43 Simple Ways To Simplify Your Life

1. Remove your doors
2. Eat half of each pet
3. Sit on a big, thick book
4. Something something keyring holder
5. Paint clocks cheery pink
6. Wear discarded food
7. Makebelieve girlfriend chair
8. Sleep in liquor cabinet
9. Embrace hug love hug meow meow
10. Small room to plan crimes
11. Hack your house key organizer
12. Mail a surprise toaster
13. Just stare more
14. Fourteen
15. Poke holes in paper things
16. Macrame shoelace tree
17. Scrapbook poop and pee
18. Euthanize even faster
19. Amputate favorite limb
20. Pencil shaving gallery
21. Immigrant coat rack
22. Shoebox of dangerous porn
23. Zen unicorn rainbow zen journal
24. Icepick to one good eye
25. Simplify fourteen harder
26. Aluminum foil swan cozy dryer
27. Smell your finger. All of it.
28. Resimplify your simplicity
29. Habitualize your zen
30. Remind your drapes, “I love you, Mrs. Textile”
31. Freeze your clutter
32. Couch fort dinner party
33. Nicene creed robot
34. Only sodomize things that forgive
35. Coaxial sweater vest
36. Transitive verb predicate clause
37. More crying but quieter
38. Inhaler nativity
39. Contact paper taxonomy binder
40. America’s Roast Beef: Yes, Sir
41. Breathe like no one’s dancing
42. Unbridled solo diaper play
43. Illuminated panty shrine

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