The Edmonton Public Library produced this delightful puppet show as a public service announcement. It is very effective and funny.
Little Blue Riding Hood
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Author Archives: Frank Moraes
Puppet Shows and the Evil Dr. No No
I have been doing puppet shows for as long as I can remember, but the first puppet show I do remember doing was for my second grade class.[1] I did it with my best friend of the time George Herring. We performed Yogi Bear and the Three Stooges Meet the Mad, Mad, Mad Dr. No-No. This must have been my idea, because this was my favorite record album when I was that age. (I also really liked David Frye’s Richard Nixon Superstar too. Go figure—not because it wasn’t good, but rather: the same kid who liked Dr. No No liked such hip comedy as Frye? Like I said: go figure.) Despite having probably listened to the album hundreds of times, I have no memory of it. Here is the synopsis according to Wikipedia:
Yogi Bear and the Three Stooges Meet the Mad, Mad, Mad Dr. No-No is a 1966 comedy album produced and released by Hanna-Barbera Records. The album presents the Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly-Joe DeRita) as inept park rangers who are called upon to rescue Yogi Bear (played by Daws Butler) after he is kidnapped by Dr. No-No, a nefarious scientist who invented a machine that turns people into animals.
I do, however, remember that I was twenty years old before I found out who Dr. (single) No was, and fully understood the joke that Dr. No No was.
Knowing my personality (then and now), I doubt that our performance was much abridged. My only reason for believing that our performance was less than a half hour is the probability that Mrs. Johnston would not have allowed our silliness to go on that long. Or maybe she would have. Of all my grammar school teachers, Mrs. Johnston was by far the most likely to indulge my innate silliness.
I found this nice little video about how to put on a puppet show. It shows just how little is required.
The main thing I would add is that found material often works very well as a script: comedy records, short stories, whatever delights you. Also: an audience is not strictly necessary. Most of the enjoyment is the process itself. And if that doesn’t work for you, you can always film your puppet show and put it on YouTube. As it is, the, the most viewed video I’ve ever seen is a puppet show, Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise.
Update
At some twenty million views, this puppet show is not even near the top of the most watched videos. But then, neither are many of the videos people think of as very popular. Dramatic Chipmunk, for example, has only 32 million views. Keyboard Cat has on 19 million views. What are the most popular? You don’t want to know, but I will tell you: music videos mostly. Justin Bieber has the top 1, 8, and 9 positions. How many views? Baby ft. Ludacris has over 650 million views. I guess Mencken was right, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
Update II
Just a month after posting this article, carlosvonchang uploaded Yogi Bear & The 3 Stooges Meet The Mad, Mad, Mad Dr. No-No on YouTube. It is presented in two parts—side A (16:01) and Side B (17:00). I’ve put these two videos into a single playlist so it automatically loads Side B after Side A has finished.
[1] My first two years in college, I carried around a puppet mounted on the end of a bamboo stick. The idea was a human skull on the end of a pike. I thought it was incredibly clever.
There, There, There
I have always been a poor speller, although I’ve improved greatly over the last decade. However, because I am a careful writer, I am less likely than most to write an incorrect homonym like “beat red.” This must be a point of pride to many intelligent bad spellers. In general, spelling is arbitrary. As Geoffrey Numberg says in the way we talk now:
Nothing is fairer than a spelling test, after all. The rules are the same for everyone: there is no cultural bias, no subjectivity about right and wrong answers. And unlike other subjects, spelling gives no special advantage to those children who happen to be brighter or more creative than their classmates. The wonderful thing about English spelling—at the fourth-grade level, anyway—is that it makes no sense at all.
Thus we bad spellers can brush off good spellers as freaks like professional basketball players and American Idol contestants. But knowing the difference between there, their, and they’re: that takes intelligence.
Bearing this in mind, I had a very uncomfortable experience a couple of days ago when I was writing Reduced Shakespeare. Reading through my first draft, I noticed that I spelled “their” as “there”—three times! This was very embarrassing, even if I was the only one around to notice it.
Having thought about it a few days, I now wonder what the big deal is. In truth, the following sentence is completely clear, “There horses were not their.” It makes me wonder if my concern is not just a reflex to please grammar pedants who I despise anyway. These people are, after all, the greatest impediments to the reform and simplification of the language that I greatly desire.
On the other hand, no one wishes to look stupid. Such grammatical niceties are the best way that we have to prove we are educated. That is something, sadly, that matters to me. Except, of course, when writing about grammar.
Acclimation
I am working on a short article about Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape and so this reminded me of a short play I had written about a year ago that I called Acclimation. This is because my friend Kristen McHenry had mentioned that it reminded her of this play. I disagree completely, but she must have been perceptive or I clear, because I did write it after having discovered Beckett’s Act Without Words both I and II, but especially I. In this play, a man is playfully tortured by the universe. He is hot, so a carafe of water is hung down, just out of reach. But the universe provides! A box is lowered. He climbs upon the box, but the carafe is only raised farther up. The play ends with the man giving up, regardless of the hope that the universe tempts him with.
When I discovered the play, I read it again and again. To me, it is as truthful of the human condition as Waiting for Godot. But frankly, far harder to shake. As I thought more and more about it, I got the idea for a similar play that deals with my own very personal battle with the universe: acclimation. It seems I am forever putting on and taking off clothes in order to attain the right temperature. In my case, this is likely due to my misspent youth and its negative effects on my Hypothalamus. But I’m sure at least that there are many menopausal women who relate. The play, of course, is deeper than this. Or not. In some ways it is just a romp: a silly theater piece for a comedic actor. I hope someone enjoys it.
How to Read a Play
I have found that most people have difficulty reading a play, and this one is more difficult than most. A play cannot be read the way a novel is. You must convert every stage direction into an image. So when I write that the man removes his cap with his right hand, you must imagine the man in your head removing the cap with his right hand (which would be on his left as you see him in the theater). Otherwise, you won’t experience the play.
Acclimation
by Frank Moraes © 2010
by Frank Moraes © 2010
Dimly lit stage, stronger light focus in the center. A man walks on from stage right and stops just right of the light focus. He is dressed as if he is in the arctic: he wears a parka with a hood and heavy boots. He faces the audience and when he speaks, he addresses the audience directly.
Man: Good evening!
He pulls the hood down to reveal that he is wearing a ski mask.
With his left hand, he pulls the ski mask off his head and drops it on the ground in the light center, while he pulls the parka hood back on. He unzips the parka three-quarters the way down, and then thinks better of it; he zips it back up to half-way up. He reaches inside the parka with his right hand and produces a ski cap at the same time as he pulls the parka hood back with his left. With both hands he puts the cap on and puts the parka hood back up.
He shivers exaggeratedly. He smiles. He thinks for a moment, and then quite suddenly unzips the parka all the way, removes it and throws it on top of the ski mask.
He thinks. He feels his body, and looks concerned. He looks down at the parka and picks it up. He studies it. No. That’s not it. He sees the ski mask. He drops the parka and grabs the ski mask, putting it on his head. He sighs. And then stops.
He pulls the ski mask off with his right hand and then the ski cap with his left hand. He throws the ski cap down on top of the parka angrily and put the ski mask back on. He pets his ski mask from his forehead to the back of his neck, as if brushing his hair back. He is comfortable.
He sits down on the floor and looks at his heavy boots. He looks at the left boot, then the right, then the left again. He pulls the boot off and throws it on to the cloths pile. He smiles and then suddenly becomes concerned. He pulls the ski mask off of his head with his right hand and puts it on his left foot. He thinks about it for a moment, then looks disgusted. He pulls the ski mask off with his left hand and throws it on the pile.
He reaches for the boot he just removed and stops. Then he grabs it and places it next to his left foot. Quickly, he pulls off his left sock and puts the boot back on. He then removes his right boot, removes his right sock, and replaces his right boot.
He jumps to his feet triumphantly, but is quickly concerned. He reaches down into the pile and grabs the ski cap. He places it on his head. Then, without thinking, he begins unbuttoning his shirt. We see a thermal undershirt beneath it. He finishes. He unbuttons his shirt cuffs and starts to take the shirt off before abruptly stopping and sitting again.
He grabs his socks from the pile. He removes his right boot, puts the sock back on, and throws the boot onto the pile. He repeats the process with his left foot.
Again, he jumps to his feet triumphantly, but is again quickly concerned. He reaches down into the pile and grabs the ski mask. He removes the ski cap, throws it on the pile and puts the ski mask back on. He sighs—scratches his right cheek with his right hand through the ski mask.
Impulsively, he rips the shirt off and throws it on the pile. Then he unbuttons his pants and removes them—also throwing them on the pile. Standing in thermal underwear and socks, he hugs himself and dances lightly from one foot to the other. He looks down at the pile of cloths.
He grabs the parka and puts it on, again hugging himself for warmth. Slowly, he releases his grip on himself, as he warms up. Finally, his hands hang down to his sides and the parka is open in the front. He pulls the parka back so it is still on, but no longer covers his shoulders.
Slowly, he pulls the ski mask off his head with his right hand and looks at it. Then he looks down at the ski cap, but gives up the thought. He takes the mask with his left hand and throws it on the pile.
He pulls his right arm out of the parka and then his left arm out. Holding it with his left hand he drops it onto the pile. Standing next to the pile of close with his arms outstretched, he sighs heavily and then smiles broadly.
Man: Good night!
The man grabs all of his cloths and exits stage right.
Interpreting the News
I was listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning. It was the first time I had heard it in some time. It was interesting to compare it to another form of mainstream news: Fox. Although NPR is hardly perfect, I noticed that the stories were presented in as non-judgmental a manner as possible. Interpretation was left to the listener. On Fox News, in contrast, everything is judgement. Regardless of the ideological content of their programming, the point of any program is not the communication of ideas but rather of feelings—particularly outrage.
Rather than the pernicious ideas that underlie all Fox News content, what really matters is this emotional approach to information. Since NPR presents ideas, one can agree or disagree with it. The Fox News viewer is given no such option. Instead, he is caught in a stimulus-response loop that gratifies his basest feelings of in-group superiority and out-group degeneracy. “Look at that person who is so vile as to not live up to my moral standards!” Given that this is the end result of any Fox News story, there can be no broadening of minds—no increased understanding.
Such an approach to news could conceivably be used by the left as well as the right. In fact, it would seem easier for the left. The atrocities of an increasingly unequal society seem ripe for the kind of emotional appeals as we saw during the robber baron days in newspapers and books. And yet, we don’t. The emotional appeal comes almost exclusively from the right.
I think this is due to the fact that the political center of gravity in this country has moved so far to the right. As a result, there are only two kinds of people who can continue to consider themselves conservative. First, there are the super rich for whom conservatism justifies their unjustifiable standards of living.[1] Second, there are those for whom facts and argument mean nothing. These are people who have only their anger and the belief that they belong to an in-group[2] to find any purpose in life. This leaves just about any person who is open to fact and argument on the left in the American political spectrum. However, I think the day is coming when the have-nots will begin to see their situation in less intellectual terms. I can’t see this as an entirely bad thing, even though I do not relish the idea. I am tired of all the modern-day Howard Beales mad as hell that the rich are taxed too much.
In the end, I will always side with ideas and thus NPR. I need no help in determining what to believe. And I think this is true of most people. Left to themselves, they will reach reasonable conclusions—even the Fox News viewers. Unfortunately, the Fox News viewers are not left to themselves. As a group, they are the least able to protect themselves from demagoguery, and yet most attracted to it.
[1] I cannot get my head around the idea that one person is a thousand times more valuable than another. Even Jonas Salk depended upon millions of people in order to do his most honorific work. So it really fries my brain to believe that some hedge fund manager is a hundred million times more valuable than a subsistence farmer.
[2] Whether they really are part of that in-group is highly questionable. For example, many such people believe themselves to be entrepreneurs or the “potentially rich” when they are, in fact, just working stiffs who, if luck turns sour, will be rolled over like Sherman tank tracks by the very group they consider themselves to be “in.” I see this from time to time, like the ENRON engineer who lost his retirement after the top executives—the real in-group members—had sold off theirs early (and illegally) for hundreds of millions in profits.
What is a Truel Heart?
Earlier today, I was listening to Elvis Presley’s The Top Ten Hits. This collection included his number one hit, “Don’t Be Cruel,” of course. I have never been able to sing the refrain of this song anyway but, “Don’t be cruel to a heart that truel.” This is not just a matter of my usual silliness. The fact is that true doesn’t really rhyme with cruel. They are assonantal, but in an extremely awkward way that sends shivers down my spine. So my choices are to pronounce “cruel” as “crew,” which makes the whole line dull, or to create a new word: truel. So it will always be: don’t be cruel to a heart that’s truel.
Reducing Shakespeare
A few years ago, I discovered the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). It is a sketch comedy play which supposedly performs all of Shakespeare’s (36, 38, 39?) plays in just one and a half hours. In fact, they only mention many of the plays. For example, they combine all of the comedies into a single play entitled The Comedy of Two Well-Measured Gentlemen Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummer’s Twelfth Night in Winter. And they do all of the histories in a mock football game. The only plays they actually do are Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus (brilliantly as a cooking show), Othello, Macbeth, Julius Caeser (barely), Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida (with Godzilla), and finally, Hamlet, which takes up half of the entire play. Here is their version of Othello:
As I think can be seen, The Reduced Shakespeare Company does not over-revere Shakespeare. Thus, when I saw that two of the actors—Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor—had written a book called Reduced Shakespeare, I was excited. Unfortunately, the book is a major disappointment. On the plus side, it is a fun enough read. The comedy is often forced, but humor in book form is always a mixed bag. What’s more, for those who know little of Shakespeare, there is much to be learned from the book.
Where the book falls down is in the worship it shows to Shakespeare. Throughout the book, Shakespeare is not just a great writer, or even the greatest English playwright, or even the greatest English writer. No: he is the greatest writer ever. They say, for example, “Ultimately you will understand that Shakespeare is revered above all other writers not because of the kind of man he was but because of his works.” Later, they say that Hamlet is, “In all likelihood … the greatest play ever written.” Really? Hamlet?
I’m not going to go into a discussion of just why such statements are ridiculous. For those interested, I highly recommend Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare. But the book missed out on the funniest thing about Shakespeare: the idolatry surrounding him. No one who has read contemporaries of Shakespeare can come away with any thought more than that Shakespeare was slightly better than his peers (and I would not go nearly that far). So how is it that Shakespeare towers over all of the playwrights who came before and after him? Certainly, when it comes to comedy, Aristophanes is far better than Shakespeare.
To be fair, Martin and Tichenor do lampoon Shakespeare idolatry. Unfortunately, they suffer from it greatly without any apparent recognition of the condition. And that is deadly. Thankfully, that is not the case with the play, which I still recommend highly.
Postscript
The boys have a whole chapter in which they review Shakespeare on film. Unfortunately, in many cases, they admit to having never seen the movie. That’s part of the joke. Get it? Anyway, they review perhaps Orson Welles’ greatest film, Chimes at Midnight (this is not my opinion—I have not seen it—but rather that of Welles himself and Peter Bogdanovich). They start the review thusly:
This is Orson Welles’s[1] crowning Shakespearean achievement, in which he brings a robust magnificence to Falstaff, Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation and a part Welles was born to play. He had a brilliant idea: Create a story that focused on Falstaff by taking the relevant scenes from all the plays in which Falstaff appears (Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor). He even used Holinshed’s Chronicles (Shakespeare’s own original source) for the narration. Welles’s performance is outstanding, and the battle scenes are impressively intense.
Wow. Sounds pretty good, right? But they give it one (out of five) “bards.” Their complaint seems to be that the film has too many technical “glitches” to be enjoyable. They have much the same to say about Welles’ Othello, which they also gave one “bard” to. By their discussion of the film, it is unclear whether they had seen the restored Othello, which is by far the easiest to get today. One would think they would take a little more care with the winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prize. And one would think some mention would be made of the fact this is one of a very few film performances of the great Irish stage actor Micheál MacLiammóir, who is great as Iago.
It is also worth noting that the the plays these boys claim to be of five “bard” quality are: Hamlet (interesting, but really not that good), Henry IV, Part 1 (Falstaff is fun, but one wonders just how much Shakespeare is responsible for the character), King Lear (about as good as Shakespeare gets), Macbeth (ditto), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (tedious when Bottom isn’t on stage), Richard III (good Shakespeare, but I hate the whole “I’m a villain” setup; see also Don John in Much Ado About Nothing), and Romeo and Juliet (as good as that bard gets). I think they have picked about the best of what Shakespeare has to offer, but if it were up to me, I wouldn’t give any play more than four bards.
And Martin and Tichenor never address the most pressing question: why is Shakespeare always better in Japanese?
[1] I hate this construction. Is there any reason at all to add this extra “s”? No. There isn’t.
Rush Limbaugh: Defender of Oppressed Rich
My father just related something he had heard on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. There was an interview with a fourth grader who stated that he wanted to be President of the United States when he grew up. When asked, the boy said that if he were President, he would take money away from the rich people because they are greedy. This struck me as fairly typical, simplistic moral thinking for a young child. Thus, it just isn’t very interesting. But why did Limbaugh put it on his show? Clearly, it was to show how oppressed the rich are.
Everyone has his cross to bear, and I understand that the rich have their problems and deserve their fair share of our sympathy. However, of all of the people on earth who need sympathy, the rich are hardly at the top of the list. Conservative estimates indicate that five million people starve to death every year. Almost one billion are malnourished. By and large, the only things these people have ever done wrong is to be born in the wrong place.
I have little doubt that some of the rich feel bad that fourth graders over-generalize in stating that all of the rich are greedy when it is merely most. But I’ll save my greatest concern for starving masses. Anyway, with Limbaugh out there publicizing the plight of oppressed rich, my sympathy is hardly necessary.
Netflix is Just Not That Into Movies
My biggest problem with Netflix is that the company just isn’t that into movies. I first noticed this when watching Continental Divide via Instant Watch. I liked this film a lot when I was younger, so I know it well. As I watched it, I was shocked to see that it had been cut—with lots of dialog replacement. But there was no disclaimer at the beginning of it. They just grabbed some TV station’s copy and streamed it. I complained to Netflix’s (and I mean this sincerely) fantastic telephone support people. But of course, nothing changed.
I had another experience like this recently. I watched Amadeus on Netflix Instant Watch. Without stating so, the movie that was streamed was not the original but rather the longer director’s cut. I don’t have a problem with this. I quite like the director’s cut; I think it is better than the original release. But there is no doubt that that the original release is a different film than the director’s cut. To see just how far this went, I ordered the DVD and sure enough, it was the original release. If Netflix really cared about movies—the way a real fan does—they would offer both the director’s cut and the original release. Instead, it is just catch as catch can, as though there were no difference between these films.
What all this means is that to Netflix movies are just commodities. Things that film lovers care greatly about do not even register in the Netflix universe. This goes along with the fact that Netflix often offers inferior versions of films. Until recently, they only offered the worst version of Mr. Arkadin, although I see now that they are offering all three, but the description of each is the same, so there is no way for the interested viewer to determine which version to get based upon Netflix’s information. (But I have you covered: get The Comprehensive Version.) They don’t even offer Chimes at Midnight or other great, but rare films.
At the top of my queue right now is the first disc of The Muppet Show. For stuff like this, Netflix is great. But for anything else, it is wanting.
Michael Moore on Democracy Now!
Amy Goodman has an excellent hour-long interview with Michael Moore. It is well worth watching.
Why No One Knows Medgar Evers
I am doing all kinds of research for a book I am writing. It is just a collection of biographies of a certain kind of person. I won’t tell you what it’s about, but I’ll give you a list of five of the people who will definitely be in it. Perhaps you will be able to figure out what connects them.
Milton Hershey
Albert Schweitzer
Walter Johnson
Jonas Salk
Paul Newman
Albert Schweitzer
Walter Johnson
Jonas Salk
Paul Newman
One thing that links all these people is that they are all white and male. So I’m working on that. As part of that, I’m researching Medgar Evers. If you’re like me, about all you know about Evers is that he was the guy who was killed at the beginning of the film Ghosts of Mississippi. As I recall the film, he doesn’t even have a word of dialog. So the film, despite its honorable intent, really comes down to: important black man is killed, let’s get on to the story that involves white folk. So other than the fact that he lived in Mississippi, I started the week knowing nothing about him.
I’ve managed to order a couple of books about Evers, but the only one I’ve gotten my hands on is probably the least valuable to me: The Autobiography of Medgar Evers. The problem with the book is that he never wrote an autobiography. The book is just a compilation of “memoranda, telegram messages, personal notes, transcribed public speeches, [and] fragments of written tests.” Fortunately, it has brief introductory articles by Myrlie Evers-Williams (Medgar’s wife) and Manning Marable (who sadly died earlier this year).
The article by Marable is particularly interesting because he discusses a big reason why people like Evers do not receive their due credit.
Their undeserved obscurity and marginalization is partly derived from the politics of gender. As anyone who has seriously participated in grassroots, neighborhood organizing can attest, women are far more likely than males to emerge as the critical leaders in most working-class and poor neighborhoods. Women activists are far more prevalent than males in the building of civic capacity—whether within faith-based institutions or in groups engaged in educational reform, community safety, and/or public health. Day-to-day political-organizing work is rarely glamorous or exciting. Much of it is mundane, boring, and quite difficult: typing and processing letters; making numerous telephone calls; meeting frequently with small numbers of people at their homes; preparing and serving food; fundraising; finding places for people to sleep or to live; organizing childcare; driving people to and from meetings; negotiating with local ministers, businesses, and schools to obtain space for activities; sustaining communication between group members; and representing the interests and objectives of one’s group to other constituencies and organizations. Added to all of this is the profoundly human dimension: the loss of time and intimacy with one’s partner or spouse, children, family, and friends; the financial costs; the physical and emotional pressures; the burden of ostracism and harassment for advocating unpopular views. To be a “leader” in this context is to assume the burden of these necessary responsibilities and tasks. Within a society structured hierarchically by gender, women disproportionately assume these responsibilities. This was certainly the case within the Black Freedom Movement, especially in the patriarchal culture of the U.S. South in the mid-twentieth century.
The general “story” of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 usually mentions the courageous individual action of Rosa Parks, a respected, middle-aged seamstress whose arrest for refusing to surrender her seat to a white man on a segregated public bus was the spark that started the public protest. Yet the focus then concentrates on the public leadership of local black ministers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, ignoring other individuals who actually did as much—or more—to make that boycott successful. A key figure in this regard was college professor Jo Ann Robinson. The Women’s Political Council, an African American women’s group chaired by Robinson, was instrumental in the planning and building of the boycott. After Parks’s initial arrest, for example, Robinson mimeographed 35,000 handbills calling for a mass boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses overnight. Members of the Women’s Political Council made enormous personal and financial sacrifices for nearly one year to win their victory over racism.
Marable provides me with two other names, in addition to Robinson, of unsung heroes of the modern civil rights movement that will help on the other aspect of my diversity problem: Septima Clark and Ella Baker. Time will tell.
New Robber Barons
I have been reading Hershey by Michael D’Antonio, a biography of the remarkable Milton S. Hershey, who is known as much for his humane treatment of his workers as he is for the candy company he created. To put Hershey’s life into perspective, D’Antonio provides a good picture of life at that time. Hershey came to power during the period of the robber barons and continued in business up through the end of World War II. I knew that the period around the turn of the 20th century was a bad one with high levels of income inequality. What surprised me was the fact that this period wasn’t really any different than it is today. At the peak of the robber barons, the top 1% of Americans controlled half of all the nation’s assets. In 2007, the top 1% of Americans own roughly 35% of all the nation’s assets. If you don’t include primary residences, this number jumps to 43%.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be in the wrong direction. A hundred years ago, many businessmen thought it was important to make workers as happy as possible in order to keep the society stable. They understood that high levels of income inequality might lead to revolution. Today, the dominant philosophy is a Calvinist belief that the rich are morally superior. I dislike both inequality and social disorder. So I am none too happy to be living in this second period of robber barons. We could really use some more people like Milton S. Hershey.