I like this recipe for cookies. What I don’t like is that my oven is running 200 degrees hotter than it should.

See those cookies that look like they are completely burned? That’s how much was left on the pan after I chiseled the rest away. I don’t use the word chisel, hyperbolically.

Nice, huh?

Rolande Duprey documents the process of repairing an historic marionette. It’s fascinating and with beautiful photos.

Paul McPharlin, sometimes called “the Father of American Puppetry” built a marionette covered wagon with a team of two horses and a driver for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair “A Century of Progress”.

Many years later, the horses and driver were discovered at an elementary school in Michigan by Fern Zwicky, who recognized them as having been at the “transport” exhibit at the fair. She gave them to John Miller, who kept them in his collection as she had found them. In the 1970’s, one of the horses, that was in fairly good shape, was photographed by Time/Life for a book on puppetry.

The other horse was missing a foreleg and hoof. In the spring of 2008, John’s widow, Marilyn O’Connor Miller asked me to repair the horse’s leg. I brought it to the O’Neil Puppetry Conference, where Phillip Huber and Jim Rose could help give advice on how to go about the repair.

We did the benefit performance of Peter and the Wolf yesterday. I’d spent the week in rehearsals and intended to blog about them, but I kept dropping into bed instead. I know, I know. Picking sleep instead of you guys. Clearly, my priorities need work.

So, we’ll catch up today.

The puppeteer who played the narrator/Grandfather role could not be with us this time, so we substituted Jodi Eichelberger instead. Jodi and I have worked together for years, but haven’t performed opposite each other in ages. While I was looking forward to that, the thing that I loved was that we took the time to really work the scenes between Peter and the Grandfather, something that we’d not had time to do with the other puppeteer.

As a result, those scenes were clearly tied to the music and had a specificity that was lacking before. Funny what a little rehearsal will do, eh? It also helped that Jodi and I have performed so much together (years touring) that we can anticipate the other one.

I also got to see the video of the show for the first time. In the last performance, we had no mirror in the rehearsal room and so I had to rely on other people and what little I could see of the puppet myself. I mean, I could only really see the top of Peter’s head. Parts of the video made me happy, but great swathes of it made me go, “Gah! People were letting me get away with that?”

I think the first rehearsal that Jodi and I did largely focused on getting the puppets to walk without looking like they were being prodded with sharp sticks in the rear at every step.

The stage we were on was significantly smaller this time. So there were places where I simply didn’t have enough action and no amount of scenery chewing was going to fill it out. So I asked if they could speed that passage up. Lo! I still had to chew the scenery, but not as much.

Other than that, it was easy to pick the show back up again. I wish we did more than one performance though. As frustrating as the puppet is, I like the show a lot. Or maybe it’s just that I like the music and the live musicians. What a joy!

Jayme Lynn Blaschke has tagged me with the page 123 meme.

To participate, you grab the closest book, go to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and blog it. Then tag five people.

So, the closest book is Clockwork Heart by Dru Pagliassotti, from Juno Books.

“The rest of the evening’s guests were trickling into the room, their faces flushed from the chill night air.”

I picked this up at WisCon because a steampunk romance sounded great, but I haven’t started it yet.

I’m tagging Jeff Richards, Elizabeth Barrette, Joe Sherry, Beth Wodzinksi, and Alethea Kontis