I have come to the conclusion that I will never, ever finish putting all the hair on this dog. It’s 2:30 a.m. I have to go back tomorrow to put more on. I’ll show you photos later, if I don’t go insane first.

Getting a long-arms permit in NYC feels a bit like time-travel. You walk into this building built in 1948, which is in beautiful condition. A guard directs you down the stairs to a sub-lobby, which is all gleaming granite and with lightwells letting in the sun. Then you go down another set of stairs and suddenly you are in a 1940s horror film basement. Everything is institutional brown. The corridor twists suddenly and randomly, so that if someone is following you, it would be easy for them to hide. Exposed pipes snake across the ceiling.

Eventually, you find your way back to a wood door with “Rifle/Shotguns Permit Division.” Inside, are shiny new computers sitting on desks unchanged since 1950. There’s also a ledger book, which the clerk swears is new. I just wonder which year it belongs to.

You get finger-printed, have your picture made — despite having brought four passport photos as requested — and eventually get a shiny new permit.

Now to get the guns.

Weapons Specialists is a fantastic organization. The folks who run it are incredibly knowledgeable and willing to spend time with you to make certain that you are comfortable with the weapon. I loaded and test-fired three shotguns today with 1/4 charge ammunition.

I have learned some things that might be helpful in fiction.

• When putting down an animal, don’t put the muzzle directly on it or you risk creating a closed system which could blow the shell back up at you. That would be bad.
• Deer can’t see orange but they can see blue. Blue jeans stand out like neon.
• Birds can see orange.

Plus just the nuances of loading, dealing with the safety, and such. I got the guns safely dropped at the theater, introduced the cast to them and then ran away.

For those of you wanting to follow along at home, I’m off to get the theatrical long-arm permit today. Check out the fourteen page application.

First of all, you should know that I did not pick up the shotguns today. There’s some additional paperwork that I needed, so hopefully that will be taken care of tomorrow. Meanwhile, here’s some of the dog activity. I’m actually farther along than this but I forgot to take pictures.

What you are looking at here is the bottom of the dog’s skull, minus the lower jaw. I’ve run a steel cable in through the hole where the spinal cord goes. Convienently, there are holes from the brain case down into the upper palette which I threaded the cable through and the looped it back to attach it to itself. This will hold the whole thing securely together but also allow flexible movement.

Since this really just has to flop in the way a real dog would, I don’t have to worry too much about getting the balance right for manipulation. I’m doing ultra simple construction for the legs. These are just flat pieces of airplane ply held together by cotter pins. I’ll put stops on them to keep them from hyper-extending and also use the foam itself as a sort of muscle to control their direction of movement.

At the hip, I have a rudimentary pelvis and have attached the legs to the hips with tieline.  They hang nicely but I totally forgot to take a photo.

Part of why I’m being bad with photos is because I’ve already built one wounded dog, so I’m figuring this isn’t covering any new ground for you.  On the other hand, I am building the legs differently this time.  PLUS the covering of this dog will be such a pain that I will document it in full.

Well this should be fun. The show that I’m working on now needs two rifles. So, I contacted the company that I’ve used before, because they are helpful and smart. I like that when dealing with firearms, even blank-firing ones.

I haven’t had to acquire “long-arms” before and have discovered that they are completely different than dealing with handguns. For one thing, it’s not possible to convert them to fire only blanks, So tomorrow, I’m going to troop down to the courthouse to apply for a long-arms permit and then, I’m going to pick up two rifles. In NYC.

I’ll report in full. Presuming I don’t wind up in jail.

The show that used the moose head ended today and Rob handled the process of picking the props up from the theater for me. He just sent me this email about moving the moose.

It’s in our hall now but we had to walk it up the stairs. Comically, we managed to coax it into the elevator but the slight difference in door geometry on our floor sent us cursing back down to the lobby.

Even on the 50 foot walk from the curb to our building, two people (New Yorkers no less) stopped to gawk, chat, and one took a photo.

I thought you might like the attached images for your blog.

Elizabeth Barrette asked, “How did you get into your cool practice of acquiring bizarre props and building puppets?”

This is one that comes up a lot and, strangely, I don’t think I’ve posted on it, so I’ll give the long answer.

I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything. My parents indulged me and so I took violin, art, theater classes, writing workshops and then, in high school, discovered puppetry. A friend of mine went to a church that had a puppet ministry program, which was the coolest thing ever. I started going to the church so I could be involved — maybe not the best reason to join a church. Anyway, I got very lucky because the leaders of the puppetry program worked very hard on teaching us good skills. A lot of puppet ministry programs have truly dreadful puppetry. I loved the puppetry. When our high school did Little Shop of Horrors, I was the plant.

Anyway, I did puppetry until I went to college. I majored in art education with a minor in theater, which was the closest I could come to combining everything that I loved to do.¹ My sophomore year, the college did Little Shop and I was the plant again.

Then a professional puppeteer came to see the show. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that someone would actually get paid to do puppetry. I mean, sure, I’d seen Sesame Street, but that was on PBS and everyone knew that PBS was run by volunteers, right? Yeah… But this puppeteer, Dee Braxton, owned a house, only worked a couple of days a week and most importantly, was willing to train me. By the end of the first summer, she was handing me the gigs she couldn’t take. People were giving me money. To do puppets. I was making more money doing that than my part-time job.

Later, I realized that we lived in an area of the country with a very low cost of living and that we were the only puppeteers in a three county radius. It helps.

From there I went to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA for an internship. This shaped me as a puppeteer more than anything else. George Latshaw (like unto a god, in puppetry) was directing, and the cast was a dream team of puppeteers, Jon Ludwig, Jane Catherine Shaw, Bobby Box, and Peter Hart. Pete was in charge of the internship program and my mentor. If I tried to say enough good things about that program, I would bore you, so suffice to say that I can trace everything back to there.

After the internship, I just kept working. I’ve been at it for nineteen years now and, with the exception of a two-year break due to a wrist injury, have made my living as a puppeteer.

Until I came to NYC.

Now the irony here is that, before Iceland, I’d had several years where I worked three to five months out of the year here, as a puppeteer. I always felt as if I would work constantly if I lived here. And behold, that’s true. The odd thing is that almost all the work has been in the props department.

That’s something I stumbled into and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I enjoy it and it’s honest work. On the other hand, it’s not why we came to NYC and is taking up so much time that I haven’t had a chance to really pursue puppetry and it’s cutting into my writing time.

Rob and I are talking about how to balance that, going forward. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

1. Later I learned about colleges, like the University of Connecticut, that had puppetry programs. [↩]

Dear actors,

When you demand a prop, a strange and difficult to acquire prop, which requires some hours of time to get for you, please think carefully when presented with the object before you announce that you prefer what you’ve been using in rehearsal.

Many thanks for your time and attention.

A prop master who is checking on the return policy.

One of the joys, when I’m doing props, comes from creating paper goods. Letters, diaries and in this case, a 40-page poetry manuscript…. I took the text of the scene, fed it into the Bonsai Story Generator and got titles from the Book Title Generator. That gave me about ten pages, which I fed back into the story generator. The thing I love about it is that it makes things that flirt with sense without actually making sense.

Consider this gem.

Thoughts of a Sliver

The Vine Yearns for a tea table.
I take it.
Were done properly on a rule.
Oh.
What was your name when he was your letters from there?
Why him?
Forgotten Person, I said you ask
The last two there.
And that, yes.
My Pilot in the Light
Perhaps just a great deal.
The last two there.
You are a tea table.

Go on. Read it aloud in a “meaningful” voice and tell me that it wouldn’t fit in at a poetry slam.

So… let’s recap today. Pilot overslept. Then thunderstorms. Still no pilot. Plane delayed by two hours. Miss D.C. connection. Rebooked on a flight for 6:15 am the next day. Sad. Get standby flight. Happy! Flight is delayed. Why? LaGuardia wasn’t letting flights in. Sad. Finally arrive in NYC. All buses are running! Happy! All buses Except mine. Sad.

I think, if I’m doing accounting for the timezone right, it took me thirteen hours to get home today.

And then! I made props and went to the theater to watch the dress rehearsal. Happy? Bed now. Happy!!!

We thought we had the the system solved to deliver the donut “magically” to the middle of the stage. Alas, using a foam bunny as our test subject¹ we discovered that the foam caught on even the tiniest bit of friction. When the friction released, the bunny shot into the air like a, well, rabbit.

After fiddling with it, we got rid of all the complicated bits and switched to the bluefoam donut I made last night and this morning. The new system works like a champ. Whew. No more fail! I tried taking photos, but the line is too thin to show up on my camera.

Basically, we run a piece of 15 lb braided dacron² offstage, using screw eyes and tubing to control where it runs. The donut sits on a short ramp on the upstage side of the tv, out of the line of sight of the audience. While they are looking at other business onstage, a stagehand pulls the string and the donut slides up the ramp and into place.

The string on its bottom is held in place by a piece of clear tape. When the actor picks up the donut, the tape, caught by a screw eye, releases. Voila. Magic donut.

Now that you know how we do that, I’ll have to kill you.

1. before carving it into a donut [↩]
2. black fishing line that I use for marionettes [↩]

For Steve and Idi I need a fake jelly donut.

My shopping list this week included: Taxidermy moose head, KY Jelly, 2 lbs feathers, balloons, fishing line
Glock or revolver, and a mousetrap.

I actually said the sentence, “As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.”

What’s the strangest combination of things you’ve ever bought?