In Dallas, Texas there is a large community of puppeteers. Don't ask me why but they love the area. Maybe there's something in the water. I donno! The types and styles of puppeteering are as diverse as the population. Well, I love puppets and toyed with them a bit learning what I could on my own from books and I'd always wanted to dive in feet first into the art form. In 1995, I got my chance.
After we left the Ringling Brothers Circus ,Pammy,( She always has great ideas!) suggested we settle down in Dallas because there were a lot of job opportunities for actors, clowns, puppeteers, etc. It wasn't too long after we moved there that we crossed paths with some puppeteers, who were members of the Dallas Puppet Guild and we soon became members too. Through them we were introduced to the fun loving puppeteer community of the Big D. They were friendly folks with a great deal of talent and love for their art and were very generous sharing their knowledge and experience with us new-comers. Learning how to be a puppeteer, a really good one, takes dedication, so suffice to say I didn't immediately go out and do puppet shows for the general public.
We had bills and rent to tend to so we started looking for acting jobs and lining up clown work in the birthday party market. I didn't really get to do too much art work in Dallas because there was so much work in theater and clowning but I digress. As I was saying we did acting and clowning to pay the bills and were enjoying the work too. We were doing a play at Theater Three, in the Quadrangle,( which is not too far from downtown) and the play was June Moon, a musical comedy. That's how we met an actor who was a regular there named Thurman Moss.
Thurman had been around a while and seemed to know a lot of people. Don't get me wrong because he wasn't a name dropper. We just asked him a lot of questions he was willing to answer, which was nice of him to do and as we got to know him we started talking about mutual interests and that brought up the subject of ... you guessed it- puppets. Thurman told us about a puppet theater in the North Park Mall of all places...in a mall! Crazy. He said the man who ran it was named John Hardman and suggested we introduce ourselves to him because he trained puppeteers for his marionette shows.
We went out there but he wasn't hiring at that time but said if we really wanted to learn we could come by as often as we wanted to practice with his marionettes. The next few weeks were spent learning the basics of making a puppet walk. You're not worth your weight in puppet strings if you can't make them walk. I did not know that. It's much harder than it sounds because you are standing on a platform( called a bridge) six feet off the ground and it's hard to tell if the marionette feet are touching the floor. There's nothing worse than having a levitating puppet except dropping the controllers that operate the puppet to the floor and untangling the strings for the next half hour.
Once we mastered the basics of walking Mr. Hardman hired us about a month later. At first he gave us the roles that only required simple movement and for the next two years we worked the shows, gradually developing our puppeteering abilities. We spent a good deal of our time working there which was fine by us.
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