Chaos in the Streets of CardBurg!
Dozens of buildings destroyed during sudden riot!
By Tipsy Russell
CardBurg Daily Bugle Special Correspondent
photo for the Bugle by Joe BoxCutter
Citizens who have been evacuated from the destroyed port city remained in a daze after usually somber DuckSquatch Day celebrations turned unusually rowdy on Friday. For the first time ever, DuckSquatch demanded that the Mayor and Pastor give him a virgin to take back to his lair in Mount Kilimancardboard. The Mayor and the city complied, having a grand Beauty Contest to find the winner who would get to make their fate in the neighboring mountains.
But the citizens of CardBurg didn’t necessarily comply with the planned post-Beauty Contest festivities by the ruling administration. People seemed to become tense when the Mayor’s office refused to give a definitive time for when the “End of Ages” actually began. “Later-thirty,” the out-of-town help was instructed to say. “Something-ish o’clock,” they also stated.
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Me thinks the Puppet Supper meme has set loose!
From Tanya Padilla,
I hope that you can join us this Saturday March 8th 7-10pm at the Puppet Circus Dinner Cabaret event at Million Fishes Arts Collective. This is the sneak preview of “Carlitos and the Magic Garden”, the puppet show that I have been cooking up these past many moons. The food is going to be amazing and accompanied by the rambling entertainment of dancing cows, accordions, a samba doctor and a charming grandma. This event is a benefit for the future projects of Youth Food Works, a branch of the non-profit arts organization ArtsChange I work with. We will be traveling through the East Bay performing puppet shows for preschools, elementary schools, and health centers as well as collaborating with local artists to host puppetry, performance, and music workshops themed around healthy food and community building.
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When late turns later, and the sun is a mere two hours away, Cookie Monster hits the spot. I guess it was Frank Oz, one of the greats, that allowed Cookie Monster to get interviewed by NPR’s Elizabeth Blair. And it was Cookie Monster that didn’t disappoint. Always good for a laugh, and stuck in a one-joke bit that always gets pulled off, Cookie Monster’s comedic timing ranks among the greats. Watching him improv, whether he knew the questions beforehand or not, is a special highlight. Like those moments on Sesame Sreet where the Muppets improv interviews with kids, you can’t miss the sharp skills of Oz, or David Rudman, behind all that blue fur. And, in good timing, the cookie eating bit was a “throwaway,” done in the first third of the interview and not the main focus of the bit. I could go on about Cookie, and write just as much for Oz’s other character Grover, but I’ll just let the monster speak for itself. And eat its way out of every tough question.
Over new years, I caught a great feed with a link to the new Sesame Street Video site. So I have spent the last week randomly searching for all things Sesame St. Quite a treat to type in “Grover” and get a list of his skits to watch. Then search for “cookie” so I can watch back-to-back videos of Cookie Monster losing it over cookies. Tried to throw a curve ball when I searched for “Pinball” and got the Pointer Sister’s classic song twice! The beta version seemed to get hung up when I searched for “numbers” but when I put “paint numbers” in, the Mad Painter was listed. Haven’t seen those clips in a long time. Classics. They do not allow embedded videos, nor do any of the videos have their own links. So you’ll have to go to the site to catch the madness.
experimental, political & emerging puppetry
October 5 & 6, 2007 ~ 8pm
CounterPULSE Performance Space
1310 Mission Street at 9th, San Francisco
Reservations: (415)905-5958 or wisefool@lmi.net
It is a small space and we expecrt to fill the house both nights, so make your courtesy reservation early to be sure you get in.
Please reserve by 4pm on the day of the show you would like to see. No one will be checking messages after 4pm on those days.
Same program both nights.
Work is geared for adults, but children are welcome.
Participating Artists
- Janaki Ranpura - J-J Trinket’s Operations Theatre Series (web site)
- Seth Eisen (web site)
- Jerome Waag
- Toben & Marty Windahl
- Army of None Project (web site)
- Emily Butterfly
- Wise Fool Puppet Intervention (web site)
For my articles about last year’s Bread & Puppet Vermont experience, go here and here and here.
August 5, 2007
Spectacle for the Heart and Soul
By HOLLAND COTTER
GLOVER, Vt.
FOR the first time in many summers the Bread and Puppet Theater will travel nine hours from northern Vermont for a New York City gig, at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening. Then the troupe will turn around and ride back to its farm just below the Canadian border, where it will put on the same show. You can easily spot the group en route: 1963 school bus, painted sky blue, with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun on the side.
People who know of the troupe without really knowing its work tend to link it to political street theater of the 1960s, an accurate but incomplete association. Recently I’ve been thinking of the theater in a contemporary context. At a time when the art industry is awash in cash and privilege, and theater tickets routinely go for $100 or more, Bread and Puppet continues, more than 40 years on, to live an ideal of art as collective enterprise, a free or low-cost alternative voice outside the profit system.
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