She Kills Monsters

Now let's step back even further.  The night of the last big big snowstorm of the season [March 30-31], I dragged my family over to Inver Grove Heights to see She Kills Monsters.  They had no ideas what to expect. I had only told them it was a play with a Dungeons and Dragons theme.

This was an amazing play and the community theater folks at Black Dirt did an amazing job.   The writer for this play went on to write some of the Disney animated fare and you can see why.  In a nutshell, a teenager and her parents die in a car crash.  Her older sister while going through her stuff finds a Dungeons and Dragons homebrew module that she wants to play [as a n00b to the game and role playing] so she gets a student to help her through some sessions.  While playing, she learns more about her sister than she knew while her sister was alive, including who she loved IRL, who loved her, what her sister found as shortcomings in the older sisters boyfriend [which he overcomes by joining in the game], and more.

The staging was great with wonderful fights and puppets and tricks.

This bit in the playbill amused me....I wasn't sure what to expect.

What I didn't expect was a full five-headed dragon "puppet".  That shit was amazing.  Really put the community in community theater.

Something that struck me during my reading this month, was that when I was reading this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56175912-the-cleveland-heights-lgbtq-sci-fi-and-fantasy-role-playing-club I realized that it was trying to be what this play was.  Trying hard and mostly failing at every single point.  If you ever want to read that book, just set it aside and go find a showing of this play instead.

When the play let out, we were in the middle of a HUGE snowstorm.  Took us over thirty minutes to get back from IGH and it was getting dicey toward the end.  Good timing on the play's part.  Another thirty minutes and we might have been in trouble.  But the family agreed it was a good night out despite the end of evening danger.

Manos: Hands of Felt and Other Puppetphenalia

I backed a puppet production of Manos: Hands of Felt, and this weekend they sent me access to a copy.  It's a popular motif.  I backed The Gamers: Hands of Fate as well.  No puppets in that production.

We sat down as a family to watch it.  It was much shorter than the MST3K version and lasted just over an hour.  That's plenty of time for a puppet show in my opinion.  However, it immediately remedies one of the issues with the original which is that it seems to go on forever.

Hands of Felt was very amusing, although my family stated many times during the show, "This is really confusing."  What's confusing about dead puppet brides strapped to stakes and movie directories slowly losing their minds?  I think it was less confusing than the original.  Puppets definitely helped rather than hindered.  It was slow in a few spots.  But invariably that was where Hands of Felt were making a joke that required knowing something about the original, so they worked it for a bit.  Supposedly a bots-type track will be added at some point.  So the MST3K guys will have riffed on the original and Hands of Felt will have riffed on MST3K and then Hands of Felt will riff on their own riff.  Who knew Torgo and The Master would ever get that much play.

While I can't give you a link to Hands of Felt, I will provide you with this video for a Magic the Gathering puppet musical (via io9). I like the first number the best.

Heart of the Beast

Eryn's school - the first graders - had a puppet show at the end of last week after working with the Heart of the Beast puppet folks. There were shadow puppets. Puppets on sticks. And masks. Eryn wore a bear mask. We thought she looked a bit like Scooby Doo.

From some of the dance.

Scary scary scary!

Puppet ladies scare the crap out of me. I hope Eryn appreciates later in life that I went to her school winter carnival and sat in the front row by the puppet lady, because she was freaking me out. When she started singing "I wish I was a bar of soap" with a soapy hand puppet in a Carol Channing voice, I thought my fight or flight might kick in.

Here, you can see her for yourself. I've spoofed her website address just so she doesn't have to feel bad that I said she scares me (if she knows how to use technorati). Her website design implies probably not, but she has her own domain, so who knows. And I don't want kids linking back to me and thinking she's scary, because they all seemed to be enthralled.

MJ(Nospace)Puppet(DOT)com\Pictures.htm

I had to sit through this one (below) for two years as well, at work. Part of my donating time to children to help them read. There was a big party each year and they brought in these puppeteers. They did more than tell puppet stories, they made me come up in front of the audience. Sorry there's no video. Christy seemed to think it was extremely funny.

the(nospace)silly(nospace)sisters(dot)com