Kentucky ventriloquism museum stares down visitors

     FORT MITCHELL, Ky. — What makes something strange? And why does strangeness draw us in and grip us so?

     That is a mystery.

     Something made my wife, a few months ago, standing 300 miles northwest in the gift shop at the Art Institute of Chicago, pick up Matthew Rolston’s Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, a foot-square coffee-table book containing close-up portraits of some of the 800 ventriloquist dummies at this museum.

     The intimate, unsettling photo on the cover grabbed her, enough that she lugged the 5-pound book over to me. I flipped through it and agreed when she later suggested we detour on our road trip through the South to this small town, spend the night, then tour the private museum.

Lisa Sweasy

     Credit Lisa Sweasy, the curator of the Vent Haven Museum. I don’t believe a person walking through the cluttered rooms alone, trying to meet the unblinking gaze of those hundreds of dummies and disembodied heads, glancing at the photos and the brief white placards, would derive a fraction of what she gives visitors for their $10. Which is good, because you can’t see it without her: admission is by appointment only.

     “Welcome to Vent Haven, thanks for coming,” she said to my family and four other guests, part of the thousand or so visitors who tour each summer. “This is the world’s only museum dedicated to ventriloquism.”

     Sweasy did not start out as a ventriloquism expert. She was a junior high school math teacher and one of her students was the daughter of the lawyer for the man behind the museum, William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman who, on his first trip to New York in 1910, bought a dummy as a souvenir, Tommy Baloney.

    Tommy’s on display, among the legions of now-silent totems from a little-honored art form, one whose popularity waxes and wanes — mostly wanes in recent decades, though in 2008, ventriloquist Terry Fator signed a five-year, $100 million contract to perform in Las Vegas.
     Sweasy gave us the history of the place, a hobby that became an obsession, standing outside three small cottages, explaining, "once we go in there, you'll stop listening."
     She got that right. It is breathtaking, almost shocking, to walk in. The cognitive system that humans use to process social cues is jarred: they're not alive, of course, they're dolls, puppets, dummies, whatever, though some seem startlingly close to life.
     Part of what made Sweasy so interesting is that, though she was very well-versed in the lore of ventriloquism, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, she was no shill.
     Most visitors, she said, see the dummies and "personally find them the stuff nightmares are made of—four out of five visitors to the museum have that reaction."
     She thinks what snags you is the stare. "Psychologically so inappropriate to stare at one another," she said. "When humans do it, they're either going to kiss or hit you."
     I ran by Freud's theory of the unheimlich, or "the uncanny," that uncomfortable zone between human beings and inanimate objects. A rag doll is not scary because it doesn't look alive, but a mannequin can be close enough to creep you out.
     Not that the museum itself focuses on the macabre. Rather it is a celebration, not just of the dummies, but of the craftsmen who made them and the performers who worked with them, with a large display for the most famous ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen — who got his start at a Chicago talent show in 1925 — and his Charlie McCarthy, a replica (the original is in the Smithsonian). There is a wall of mementos and photos of revered Chicago carver Frank Marshall who made dummies for Paul Winchell and others.
     The museum goes up to the present day, though I admit that the neon green, furry, muppet-like puppets held little interest for me. I think the highest recommendation I can give it is that my two boys, 17 and 18, spent 90 minutes there without a murmur of complaint.
     Again, credit Sweasy. She was a font of information. She put on white gloves and showed us how the dummies operate, their heads containing a watch's complexity worth of levers and rings that not only make their mouths move but, sometimes, their eyes, their ears twitch. Some could smoke; some had their hair flip up in surprise.
      And for your Bright People Can be Surprisingly Thick file add this: Driving away, I wondered aloud where the "Vent Haven" name came from. It wasn't the town, or the guy who started the museum. What was it?
      "Vent is short for ventriloquist," said my younger son. "A haven for ventriloquists."
      Ah yes. That would make sense.

The museum allows visitors to pose among one section of dummies. Kent and friends.

No photos

     Once I was walking past the elevators at the newspaper and one elevator was being repaired. The door was propped open, and two workmen were standing on top of the car, working on the cable. The only light was from a single bulb worklight. 
     It was a very 1930s tableau: the greasy cables, deep shadows, the two workmen, straining at a bolt or something. I had my phone halfway out. But they were four feet away. They'd see me taking a picture. It would have a certain zoo cage quality, the white collar guy snapping pix of the blue collar guys. I couldn't explain that I had a blog and wanted them to, oh, illustrate the eerie beauty of physical labor, the odd lighting and mechanics of the elevator shaft.
     So I kept going. Or I asked them and they said "no," I honestly can't remember which.
     There is responsibility toward a potential subject, and even though I am not a professional photographer—maybe especially because I am not a professional photographer—I try to be conscious of it.
     Particularly when the parameters are set up ahead of time. When I visited the Vent Haven Museum in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky, the curator said I could take photos, provided that I promised to get her permission before posting any specific shot. There are not only copyright considerations—some dummies are trademarked—but a few of their figurines are extreme racial caricatures: coal black dummies with huge red lips and white, popping eyes. She didn't want those images representing the museum.
      Is that prudence? Cowardice? Would you respect that stipulation? I did.
     Though I took pictures of the racist dolls. But never posted them. Why? Maybe because they were so alarming. Maybe because I thought someday the museum might close, circumstances might change, freeing me of my obligation. 
    They are a temptation though. I worry, when the subject of racism comes up, these dolls might be a perfect illustration. And as the years go by, the sense of obligation around the taking of the pictures slackens, while the photographs remain. How long do I keep my promise? Forever?
    This sort of issue comes up more frequently than you would imagine. There is a bookstore on Milwaukee Avenue called Myopic books, and in the basement is a sign saying "No photographs." Near the sign, a wonderfully warped shelf, bowing under the weight of books. It would make a great photo. But I respected the sign and, besides, figured I could get the owner's permission.
    I couldn't. She had this complicated story involving moviemakers who wanted to use her shop. I asked every time I went in, three or four times in several ways and the answer was no. She didn't want the free publicity.  Eventually I stopped.
     Why not just take the photo? Why give a sign authority over you? A sign isn't the law. It's just a request, a presumptuous demand. If the sign said, "Jump off cliff" would you do it? Why respect a sign at all?
      A person is different. If a person is aware of me, I ask permission to take a picture. Usually they say yes. If they are not aware—say a man sleeping on a train—I might take it without seeking permission, though I'm not sure how the subject being unaware changes anything. I guess because I'm worried more about the social act of taking someone's photo without consulting them, as if they were an inanimate object, than about the result of publishing a photo that they might not have wanted taken in the first place. The expectation of privacy of a person out in public is very slim, or should be.
     It's an interesting dilemma, and judgment is called for. For instance, the sign above is in the Dermestid Beetle Colony room at the Field Museum. ("Dermestid Beetle" is redundant, isn't it? Dermestids are beetles, of a particular flesh-eating variety. You expect more from a museum, though maybe that usage is an intensifier, a nod to the general public who wouldn't scan "dermestid" as meaning beetles or anything else). 
     I don't feel I'm violating the hospitality of the Field by posting the sign, because I'm not showing what they don't want seen—the bloody springbok skulls and desiccated bird bodies, being picked clean by the beetles. That's what the beetles are there for, to skeletonize animal specimens for later display. I feel it's squeamish of the Field to want to keep the process secret, but it's their party, and no doubt don't want the general public to worry there are danse macabre horrors awaiting behind every door. 
     I wonder if our being photographed all the time by anonymous security cameras will make us less reluctant about being photographed. Maybe it'll make us more reluctant, trying to push back in the few areas we can. It's an intriguing subject, and something about a "No photographs" sign raises suspicion—what are you afraid of? There is a pastry shop on Devon Avenue, Tahoora Sweets, that also displays a "No photographs" sign. I want to take the owner aside and say, "The food doesn't really look that good." Though I'm sure he has his reasons. My guess is he's trying to keep competitors from stealing his store design. The competitive world of East Indian bakeries on Devon Avenue—that seems like the subject for a novel. 
      

Puppetry Week #1: "Puppets are fighting for respect"

     

Cynthia VonOrthal displays a shadow puppet at her puppetry studio in Evanston.

     Puppets are the ambassadors of the obscure and the uncanny. The history of the art form is "easier researched in police records than in theater chronicles" according to Peter Schumann, founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater, an entertainment forever mired in "its own secret and demeaning stature."
     Puppets are by definition low-tech: if there isn't a person with his hand up that sock, or manipulating those strings, or running the show somewhere, then it isn't really a puppet, it's a doll or a robot.     

     This odd subcellar of culture, part sculpture, part folk art, part vaudeville, also has personal appeal to me. There is a kinship between journalism and puppetry. Both require dedicated craftsmen, albeit in dwindling numbers, practicing a profession that neither thrives nor vanishes, but somehow remains perpetually defunct. Both are rough simulacra of life; both had some legendary moment in the cultural spotlight in the hazy past—Hayden composed puppet operas for the royal court, a popular puppet dinner theater was steps off Michigan Avenue—but now linger on in the margins, practiced by various oddballs and misfits. I've never told anybody who asks me what I do for a living that I'm a puppeteer, but were I to, I'm certain it would be met with the exact same blank look. mixing pity and indifference, that "newspaper columnist" elicits.

     My take on puppets wasn't always so complicated. When I first joined the paper, puppets were merely the kind of marginality that caught my interest. I would flip through the phone book, looking for strange subjects to write about. A scribe. Chicago's last coal hauler. I was entranced that there was a Chicago Puppetry Guild, and a number of puppet theaters, which led to this article 20 years ago. I didn't even have any kids yet.

     On Wednesday, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival kicks off in Chicago. And while theatrical puppetry has an airiness that I generally shun—I'd rather see a "Punch and Judy" show on a portable stage in a public park than "Oedipus Rex" performed by marionettes at the Goodman—I thought I would dub this week "Puppetry Week" on EGDD and feature a puppetry-related post every day for the next seven days. I will talk to the festival's founder, attend what events I can, publishing new stories and photos and reprinting old articles written over the years about Chicago puppetry.

     I'll also remind you of recent puppet posts, such as my visit to the deeply-strange Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky over the summer.

     And for those who just can't bear the prospect of that much puppetry, I won't neglect the non-puppeting world: Monday's column from the Sun-Times will be posted here at 12 noon, and each afternoon of Puppetry Week, I'll make sure there is an update from elsewhere. But at least give the puppet stuff a nibble. It's a surprisingly compelling realm, or so I've long thought. 

     As always, thanks for bearing with me. 


      You've probably never seen one of Dave Herzog's marionettes take a bow. It does not snap forward at the waist, jerkily, the way the adjective "puppetlike" would suggest. 
    

     Rather, the bow is a graceful sweep downward, head inclined just so, with one hand fluttering modestly in the vicinity of the mouth, the other trailing behind, arched, a bit of suppressed theatricality. 
    

     Many might be surprised to still find puppets at all—bowing, juggling, leaping, dancing - in the small AnimArt Puppet Theater on North Kedzie, one of half a dozen puppet theaters and troupes making a living in Chicago. 
    

     The puppets, today a circus of mice, go through their paces in front of 60 squealing, delighted schoolchildren who, despite the deadening impact of video games and VCRs and cable television, still enjoy this ancient entertainment. 
     
     "Puppetry is probably the oldest theatrical art form in the world," said Herzog, also is president of the 75-member Chicagoland Puppetry Guild. "There is not any culture in the world, any race of people that does not have a form of puppetry." 
     
     The children are first- and second-graders, prime age for most puppet audiences. 
    

     "The performance window is getting much smaller; by the time they are 9, 10 years old, they have been exposed to so much high-tech entertainment that anything requiring the use of imagination has less appeal to them," said Herzog. "Puppets are not high-tech." 
    

     Yet puppetry is not just for children. The first thing a puppeteer will tell you — after explaining that, no, these puppets are not store-bought, they are meticulously handcrafted — is that puppetry is an art that can be enjoyed by adults. 
    

     "Puppets are fighting for respect," said Michael Schwabe, artistic director of Hystopolis Puppet Theatre, 441 W. North. While kiddie shows are the theater's "bread and butter," Hystopolis also performs work for grown-ups: plays such as Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine," or its new production, "King Ubu" by the French surrealist Alfred Jarre. 
    

     Bill Henderson, president of AnimArt, is working on the production of an evening of Becket plays. He admits that the notion of puppetry as kiddie entertainment is difficult to overcome. 
    

     "I once did a production of Ibsen's `Peer Gynt,' and people would call up wanting to bring their children," he said. "I would tell them that the opening scene is a rape, that there is full frontal nudity, and they would say: `It's a puppet show; I'm bringing my kids.' " 
    

     The very adult taste of opera is the sole repertoire of William Fosser's "Opera in Focus," a lush production of fantastically detailed puppets acting out famous operas on a splendid gilded stage. 
    

     Fosser was once artistic director of the Kungsholm Miniature Grande Opera, which Chicagoans of a certain age will remember as having once occupied the space where Lawry's restaurant is today. Kungsholm closed in 1971, and Fosser went on to a career in movie set design, on such films as "The Sting" and "Home Alone." But after retiring from the movie business he revived the puppet opera, which has now found a home, a bit incongruously, in the basement of the Park District building in Rolling Meadows. 
    

     After each performance, Fosser leads the audience backstage, where elaborate Egyptian costumes from "Aida" wait on tiny mannequins, and sets from "La Boheme" are protected by custom-made twill dust covers. 
    

     "I'm interested in their realizing this is an art form, and what goes into it," said Fosser, 65. "Some say the trip backstage is as exciting as the performance." 
    

     A puppet endures a lot of wear and tear—once, during "Lohengrin," the swan's head fell off in mid-performance. Constant maintenance is essential. 
    

      Before an afternoon practice run-through of "Faust," 
Fosser's assistant, Paul Guerra, carefully applies clear nail polish to Cho-Cho-San, the heroine from "Madame Butterfly." 
    

     "That way," he explains, evenly, lest his hand shake, "when the light catches her just right, people swear the lips move." 
    

     As much as Herzog, Henderson, Fosser and Guerra have to scrape by to make a living, they are the puppetry elite in the sense that they have permanent spaces to perform. 
    

      The majority of puppeteers are like Steven Finnegan, traveling to birthday parties, church picnics and senior centers. 
    

     "It's a dying breed. If I had to just make my living as a puppeteer I probably couldn't do it," said Finnegan, 45. "I'm also a clown." 
    

     Finnegan said he wished that parents looking to entertain their children would consider puppets, instead of automatically turning to magicians and clowns. 
    

     "Think about clowns," said Finnegan. "There are a zillion clowns and all of them work. I know a guy who charges $120 to bounce around in a Barney costume. I come in, set up a theater and a sound system and do a full production for 45 minutes — a much better entertainment value — and I can only charge $135 for a birthday party." 
  

      "People don't understand that it's a profession," said Herzog. 
                                                   

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 29, 1994

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