"Let's make puppets!"

Ok. New plan. Maybe I should make puppets.

There are a lot of amazing, different configurations for puppets and the way to use them, including hand puppets, finger puppets, stick puppets, marionettes, and shadow puppets (which I forgot existed). Also, there are black-light puppets:

Black light puppet - A form of puppetry where the puppets are operated on a stage lit only with ultraviolet lighting, which both hides the puppeteer and accentuates the colours of the puppet. The puppeteers perform dressed in black against a black background, with the background and costume normally made of black velvet. The puppeteers manipulate the puppets into the light, while they position themselves unseen against the black unlit background. Controlling what the audience sees is a major responsibility of any puppeteer, and blacklight lighting provides a new way of accomplishing this. Puppets of all sizes and types are able to be used, and glow in a powerful and magical way. The original concept of this form of puppetry can be traced to Bunraku puppetry.

(From Wikipedia article on Puppet)

I found some examples of puppet versions of the "smartest animals" that I might want to consider either buying, or making myself.

Here is a random quote relating puppets and animals:

Aristotle discusses puppets in On the Motion of Animals.
"The movements of animals may be compared with those of automatic puppets, which are set going on the occasion of a tiny movement; the levers are released, and strike the twisted strings against one another ...."[1]

(From Wikipedia article on Puppet)

A related word, Poppet, had this definition in Wikipedia:

Poppet, a word that sounds similar, is sometimes a term of endearment, similar to "love", "pet", "doll" or "dear". It alludes to folk-magic and witchcraft, where a poppet is a special doll created to represent a person for the purpose of casting healing, fertility, or binding spells.

Of course, there is the question of what it means to make animals puppets, when puppets are thing that are controlled by humans (or really, even a human can be a "puppet" of sorts if they are being controlled by an unseen operator). Maybe there is something about unseen operator? The magic of making something alive? The ability of kids to interact with a puppet even if its clear that the voice it makes is coming from a grown up and not the puppet hand . . . How do animals react to that? I mean, if you show a chimp a puppet and talk through the puppet, like people do with kids, do they look at you or the puppet? Hmmm.

For some reason, this video is going around the internet right now because several people told me about it, most notably my friend Jonathan, who, out of the blue, sent it to me unaware that I had just spent the day looking up puppet-making online. I asked him if he was google.

Anyway, this is pretty delightful and reminds me of all kinds of good feelings I used to have towards making things. :)

Puppet links

Here are some puppet-related links that I should come back to:

Puppet.org

Puppet Buzz

Puppets Inc

Scottish mask and puppet center

Project Puppet

Shadow Puppets

Also, I love the word puppet. the more i read about this, the more i envision a sesame-street like home for everyone - a long street where all the friendly, compassionate researchers live in brownstone houses and where all the talking animal puppets are't puppets at all. You could walk down the street and see pigeons solving puzzles, parrots spelling words with brightly colored refrigrator magnets, a gorilla using sign-language to talk about her favorite pets, dolphins learning how sentences work, and everyone's favorite bonobo driving a golf-cart down the street waving hello. Children could play along with the TV screen to see if they can figre out how to get the bucket out the well before the crows can. The thing is, this pleasant neighbhorhood exisits in our own world as we speak.