My Life in Puppetry (So Far)

When I rediscovered the Muppets series Fraggle Rock in 1993 during a Disney Channel free preview, I soon decided that I wanted my own fraggle. After a few failed attempts to make one, I gave up until we moved to Northern Virginia, where I joined the National Capital Puppetry Guild.

In early 1997, Terry Snyder - a master puppeteer who lives in Richmond, Virginia - offered to spend a few hours with me a few Saturdays in a row after his last show.  He taught me how to build a foam hand-and-rod puppet (what you could call a "Muppet style" puppet).  Under his direction, I made a green, vaguely frog-like creature from a pattern that Terry supplied and which I named Fred.

After I finished Fred, I was itching to make another puppet.  I also couldn't wait to share what I'd learned with my friends, especially those who were really into Muppet fandom like I was.  I knew they'd love to have puppets of their own, so I invited them over for several puppet-building workshops.  We had a lot of fun and there are now at least half a dozen Fred clones out there (which one of my friends nicknamed "Vaughn Spawn", which was really cute and flattering but since it wasn't my design I don't like to use that term).

While I was holding these workshops, I was starting to work on my next puppet.  Now, as I said, one of the biggest reasons that I had wanted to make a puppet was so I could have my very own fraggle.  As you know if you've looked at my old web site, I was (and still am, of course) a huge Fraggle Rock fan, so the choice for my next puppet was obvious.  I worked on figuring out patterns and materials for the next few months and I learned about Antron fleece (aka Muppet Fleece) and how to dye it.  I figured out how to sculpt foam and learned how to sew.  In July, in the car on the way from DC to Toledo, Ohio for the '97 National Puppetry Festival, I finished my fraggle.  He didn't have a name yet, but one day at the festival my then-wife Marianne (who speaks French), called him Rouge a L'orange.  Well, it stuck and Rouge was born.

Chris and Rouge at the Day of Puppetry in Glen Echo Park, Maryland, April 1999

After that we become very involved in our local puppetry guild and went to national Puppeteers of America festivals (in the odd years) and our regional festivals (in the even years).  Photos from some of them are featured in my photo gallery. I've had the opportunity to do a lot of cool things in puppetry for other people.  I was the left hand of a guitar-playing dog in the opening for a TV pilot.  I got to wear a dinosaur suit (i.e. a full-body puppet) for a music video.  

In the few years after I made Rouge though, I didn't make another puppet.  It didn't help that I started traveling full-time for my "day job" as a computer consultant shortly after the Toledo festival.  Things continued like this until the next national festival in Seattle in '99.  As happened at Toledo, we traveled hundreds of miles only to become very good friends with people attending the festival who were in our own local guild!  In Seattle, it was Laura, Aimee, Mickey and Laura's mom Gloria.  Laura had an idea for a television series that she was working on putting together for the public access cable station she worked for.  It was a puppet show called Ten Acre Park and she still needed some more people to get involved.  That's how I came to build my third puppet, a Canada Goose named Quark. I started with Laura's design and combined it with photos I took of Canada geese at a nearby office park. I really like how it turned out. I llearned how to use an air brush to do his wings and I figured out how to make more advanced 3-D shapes from sheets of foam.

I ended up deciding to leave Ten Acre Park before we went into production but I'm glad I was involved.

It's been several years since I made my last puppet. As often happens, my attention wandered to other interests. I've remained interested in puppetry, though, and I've been looking for an excuse to get back into it.

to be continued...