Puppetry Week: #6 Surprise bonus! "Puppetry of the Penis"

     I know I said Puppetry Week ended yesterday. But someone reminded me of this column, which is about a sort of puppetry, and with the Saturday Fun Activity solved, I figured I would toss it up for your entertainment. It's only Saturday, the week isn't technically over. And this is one of my favorite columns—you can feel the shock of what I witnessed in the Georgian Room at the Drake Hotel. 

    Oh, Lenny, Lenny, we're so sorry. Come back. All is forgiven. 

     I keep thinking about Lenny Bruce. Arrested for obscenity at the Gate of Horn in December 1962. He held up a photo of a woman's breast, and the Chicago cops hauled him away.
     I'm thinking about him because of a show--I almost called it "a play" --called "Puppetry of the Penis," that opens next week at the Lakeshore Theater, on Broadway at Belmont. In case you missed the burst of publicity surrounding its sneak preview at the Drake Hotel (the Drake!), "PoP" consists of a pair of Australian gentlemen manipulating their privates into various shapes. They call it "genital origami," though, having witnessed the marvel with my own eyes in the Georgian Room of the Drake (the Drake!), I'd say it's closer to balloon twisting.
     And, as with balloon twisting, the performance is not particularly interesting (voila, a giraffe!) once the initial surprise of penises on parade in public wears off, which took all of three minutes in my case, though, to be charitable, I suppose a bachelorette party or group of Halsted Street boys out on the town might have fun. If they were drunk enough.
     What lingers is not the show, per se, but its reception by the city--a raised eyebrow, a shrug, and it's on to other things. Those with any sense of Chicago history, however, must shake our heads in awe. Look at where we are. Penises happily wangling every night at the Lakeshore.
     Should there not be a ceremony? A moment of silence? Something? Let's bow our heads for "Les Ballets Africain," a troupe of Guinean native dancers whom the Chicago police forced to cover their bare breasts with brassieres when they performed at the Blackstone in 1959. Let's light a candle for the 1948 production of "Mr. Roberts," whose producers had to have a long conversation with police censors over exactly what expression of approval a sailor would yip after spying an attractive woman through his telescope.
     Chicago was the bluenose capital of the nation. Why else do you think Nelson Algren was so bitter? We were censoring silent movies in 1906. "The James Boys" was banned as too violent in 1909. The heart breaks. Fifty years later, we were still at it. Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" was banned here because one member of the police censor board, a Mrs. Honey Fischman, found it obscene.
     Lest we get too self-satisfied, we have to remember that "PoP" is anatomical, but not sexual. If those penises were put to their intended uses, this would be a different story. Nor is it political. If those elastic members were formed into mocking images of the Bush Cabinet, perhaps our dormant civic outrage would have stirred.
     Not like the old days. Besides a fixation on sex, Chicago was not averse to banning anything that simply cast the city in a bad light. In the early 1930s, we banned newsreels that showed labor riots here. We banned the original "Scarface" because it suggested there were gangs and crime in Chicago. (Reminds one of our current mayor, who raised a stink about a film that suggested inner-city youth swear a lot.)
     We extended a similar courtesy to our friends, the Nazis. In 1938, we banned a "March of Time" newsreel because it suggested that Jews were being persecuted in Germany. "It was rejected because this country is friendly with Germany," explained police censor Lt. Joseph Healy.
     What happened? How were we saved from the simple-minded bowdlerization of the censors? Thank the rest of the country, which dumped police boards years before we did. Thank all the pornographers who stood their ground, from Hugh Hefner to the anonymous managers of the old "adult" theaters. Thank the ACLU. Thank the courts. Thank Roger Ebert, who helped lead the chorus of mockery that finally--finally--killed off our police censorship board, around about 1969.
     There is, of course, a price to pay. "Puppetry of the Penis" opens next week, and anyone who wants to part with $38.50 for a ticket can see it. Cable TV is a smutfest, and obscenities are seeping into that second-to-the-last bastion of morality, broadcast TV (the last bastion, sadly, is newspapers).
     I feel true sympathy for those raised wearing white gloves and hiding copies of "Peyton Place." This must be hard to take. Feel comforted by the fact it can sometimes be hard to take if you're younger, too.
     But isn't our current state vastly preferable to the past? To 1949, when Mayor Martin Kennelly banned Jean Paul Sartre's one act play "The Respectful Prostitute" sight unseen. "The title alone would be enough to ban the show," Hizzoner said.
     Remember the coercion that world required. You needed lots of police censorship boards and cowed theater owners and revoked liquor licenses to keep it working. Remember the hypocrisy. When the police were slapping bras on "Les Ballets Africain," the ever-irreverent Sun-Times sent a reporter out to the various clip joints to note the strippers, including Miss Lila Turner and her flaming, tasseled brassiere.
     Remember that Chicago would not allow Disney's "Our Vanishing Prairie" until after the scene of the birth of a baby buffalo was cut.
     Half a lifetime later, we have "Puppetry of the Penis." Mourn or celebrate, as you will. But the irony is almost too delicious for words.
     Lenny Bruce would have loved it, loved where our prudery eventually led us. I'll bet, wherever he is, he's having a good hard laugh at our expense.

    —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 14, 2003

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     There's nothing like a factory. Wander around a little, discover the most amazing devices.
     When I came face-to-face with this dripping ... contraption this week, my first thought was "Yuck," and my second was, "This'll stump 'em!" 
     Which is fanciful, because nothing seems to stump you. But this ... thing ought to give you a run for your money. It's in Chicago, located in a place of manufacture, and there I had better leave it.  You're too good to require tips. 
     The winner will receive one of my brand new 2015 blog posters, made in a limited edition of 100 in Nashville, Tennessee. They're already flying out the door. But you can win one of your very own by identifying the place where this messy apparatus can be found. Remember to post your guesses below. Good luck. 

Win me!

On law, facts and yelling about gay marriage

  

     “When the facts are against you,” the first part of the old legal saying goes, “argue the law.”
     That means, when evidence undercuts your case, the way it does for those who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds, then try to win by finding a loophole in the law, such as the notion that states have the right to control marriage within their own borders. Hang your case on that.
     Which is necessary, because there are no facts to suggest gays shouldn’t get married. They don’t make worse spouses, or worse parents. If society wants people to form families, in order to raise children and create a stable world, then the only reason gays shouldn’t participate in marriage is religious intolerance, or simple fear that causes one to invent reasons against it.
     Not to underestimate bigotry. It was enough, for years and years, to keep gays from marrying. But the truth will out — another old saying — and over the past few years we’ve seen extraordinary progress in the United States, as old biases melt away.
     On Friday the United States Supreme Court agreed to consolidate four gay marriage ban cases from four states — Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee — and then decide once and for all whether gay marriage, already legal in 36 states, should be the law of the land.
     You could argue that this is the Big One, which will resolve the issue definitively, from a legal point of view. Although, for the shrinking minority against it, a legal decision will only cause them to rail about unelected judges, as they do whenever a ruling goes against them.    
     You could also argue that any Supreme Court decision is moot, that the issue is already resolved, since 70 percent of Americans live in a place where gay marriage is legal, and given the practice’s ample benefits, improving the lives of previously marginalized people, and their children, and complete lack of drawbacks, other than ruffling the moral sensibilities of zealots, we’re never going back, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.
     "When the law is against you,” the second part of the saying goes, “argue the facts.”
     Those facts are that 14 states still do not have gay marriage. Most of them in the Bible Belt — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas. The same states that clung to racial segregation until the Supreme Court pried it away from them, to the degree that it has. They won’t give up this fight easily either. Which leads to the third part of the saying:
     “When both the facts and the law are against you, yell like hell.”
     That is a certainty. Oral arguments will begin in April, and a ruling is scheduled for June. Until then, expect a lot of bluster, a lot of false statements loudly made, and empty claims that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage in a way clear to those who want it stopped, but not readily apparent to the increasing number of Americans who see the dignity, certainty and security that legalized gay marriage brings to their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. Justice Antonin Scalia will no doubt issue a blistering dissent — assuming he isn’t in the majority. But either way, the change has been made, and the high court will either seal it, or delay that inevitability for another day. 

Puppetry Week: #5: "A puppet mocks being human"

 Puppetry Week lurches to a conclusion today — there there, take comfort, it'll be back in two years, perhaps, when the festival returns—with this interview with Blair Thomas, who created the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. 

     Were I to live my life again, I'd be a puppeteer.

     My puppet theater would be called Punch & Judy's. It would be semi-legendary in Wicker Park, a modest hall, wide-slat wood floors, elaborate gilded stage with a red velvet curtain. The line would stretch out the door, the long tables, groaning with ale and spiced meat pies. Once an hour, a bell rings, the curtain flies up, and for 10 minutes Mr. Punch, with his pointed chin and jester's hat is once again locked in eternal battle with wife Judy, the shrieks and whistles and rude jokes, the baby ejected from the stage as if shot from a cannon, the crowd, red-faced and roaring while I sit on a stool in my admiral's hat, counting the gate, greedily fingering the thick rolls of wet bills.
     Alas, I'm stuck doing this.
     But I can admire those who do devote their lives to puppetry, that eternally low-rent art form whose rare splashes of success — the Muppets, Avenue Q, "Being John Malkovich" — only mock  the shabby desuetude of of the art form in general.
     Not to be a downer at the advent of the first International Chicago Puppet Theater Festival, which began Wednesday and runs until Jan. 25. If it weren't so obscure, I wouldn't care about it. Video games do far, far better than puppetry, but don't expect a lot of updates on them here.
     The festival is the hard-earned brainchild of Chicago puppeteer Blair Thomas.    
     "It's true, it's been a lot of work, a lot of great things happening," he said. "There is not a major international puppet theater festival."
     Well, there is now, or could be, if this catches on. What does he hope to accomplish with his festival?

Mr. Punch

     "One thing I'm interested in, as a puppeteer, is to advance the form," he said. "One of best way to do that is to get the audiences to see what is going on in the contemporary puppetry movement. Once they see that, they will be astounded."
     I told him that the "Theater" in his festival name struck me as a stab distancing itself from the grim 4th birthday party machinations that come to mind for many at mention of "puppetry," and a grab at Steppenwolf-ish respect.
     "We are in a way attempting to align ourselves with that, rather than a lesser form of puppet theater," he said. "My goal is to redefine what puppet theater is for Chicago audiences."
     For me, puppet theater is the thing I never go to. I admire puppets as lovely, often strange objects, and puppetry as a concept, perhaps because it's the rare profession even more ill-favored than my own. But the last puppet show I attended was while herding a pair of toddlers. What advantages, I asked Thomas, does puppetry bring to a dramatic effort?
     "I think of puppetry as being a form of performance using sculpture and performance together in a unique way," he said. "You're watching material objects. It looks like a human but it's not, and ends up being able to do things a human being can't. A human being can't come apart, but a puppet can literally come apart in front of you. Fantastical things like that. In puppetry, the fantastical is normal."
     I told him there was a bit of synergy, his festival arriving right after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France.
     "[Puppetry is] extremely good at mocking authority, because authority is the humans, in terms of shows in the festival actually doing that...we don't have anyone doing that directly."
     Pity.
     I told Thomas I didn't think that puppetry could ever be popular again, assuming it once was. That puppets are like hats; their renaissance is constantly being announced without ever actually arriving.
     "You can open up a puppetry journal from 1930, and they're like, 'Puppetry is having a renaissance!' " Thomas said. "The reality is puppetry always exists on periphery of dominant culture. It's an amalgam form, not a pure form like poetry or playing the piano. This position on the periphery allows it to comment. That's why puppetry lends it self to satire. It can mock. A puppet itself mocks being human, appears to be alive, but can't be alive. We're the people who're alive. That's really a disturbing thing, when it's really well done, it's shocking, that uncanny thing ... taps into our reptilian brain, and we think this is a real thing. That's actually a thrilling place to be, sweeping us away with its wonder and otherworldliness. This is what I think contemporary puppetry is. Hardly anyone know this."
     The secret's out now. I've got tickets to a production Friday night — you kind of have to. I'm hoping that it's wonderful.
     "'The Table' is a great introduction," he said. "Really funny and good theater too."
     You can learn about the festival at chicagopuppetfest.org.
     By the way, in that alternate world, after the crowd at "Punch & Judy's" drains their beers and staggers out the door, after the lights are turned up, showing horribly the swill and God-knows-what-else soaked sawdust on the floor, I stand, let out a long sigh, set my admiral's hat on the stool, put on my jacket, look at the empty puppet palace and think, "I devoted my life to this? I could have been a newspaper columnist ..."

Puppetry Week: #4 Sometimes it's just a puppet

     You can, of course, think about this stuff too much.
     I was reading Kenneth Gross' artful critique Puppet (University of Chicago Press: 2011) and as much as I admired his turns of phrase, the "fundamental strangeness" of puppets, their air of "something very old and very early," as I neared the end of the book, I felt he had sort of missed the point.  A writer, of course, is entitled to define his subject, and if you want to wax poetic about puppets by giving far more attention to Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov than you do the Muppets, so be it. 
     But just as, at some point in your exegesis on chocolate cake, even the most scrupulous scholar should admit it simply tastes good, so one shouldn't unspool a puppetry week—or a book about puppets—without a nod to their essential goofiness, their inherent sweetness, so that even under glass, with no animating hand, like my pal Kukla above, with his dark tomato nose, cherry cheeks and matching gown, well, he's funny. You shouldn't speak of the "wild, monomaniacal appetite of the Cookie Monster," as Gross does, without at least whispering that he was a riot to watch. Otherwise, it seems a willful obfuscation. No matter how sophisticated your analysis of the social-mechanical dynamics of schoolyard play, it's still hopscotch.
     Puppets are also commercial. As sweet as Kukla and Ollie were (Fran, being human, we'll leave out, for now) as manipulated by Burr Tillstrom, they were also designed to get kids to pester their parents to buy television sets, and they worked very well. 
     While puppetry can be accomplished with enormous skill, as those attending the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival will no doubt discover, puppets can also push product, do the heavy lifting and cover for a lack of talent on the part of the puppeteer. I'm thinking of the Puppet Bike, a crude moveable stage spied around town where basically threadbare hand puppets bop to recorded music. That's it. Their central skill is dancing with each other and encouraging children to get money from their parents and stick it in a slot. My buddy Mark Konkol caught up with the Puppet Bike's inventor a few years back, describing the project as "a way to help an out-of-work friend make a few bucks."
     No shame there. Not everyone can be artists, and more puppets are adjuncts to beggary than cultural touchstones. Somehow, I thought perhaps local puppet acts would be buffing their shoe button eyes, practicing their best stuff and attempting to shine in the festival, looking for their big break, puppetwise.That is the romantic in me. The truth is, it's a hard world out there, and if putting a sock on your hand makes the passerby stop and maybe fish for a stray buck, well, that's what you do.  

     

Defeating ISIS one mom at a time

Zarine Khan/AP photo

     The mother of the accused can be safely ignored.
     Usually.
     All those outraged “Not my baby!” protests.
     The inevitable “I know he’s innocent” oaths, dripping with ginned-up indignation.
     They must seem powerful when the mothers of boys gone wrong are saying them, with tears and nods.
     And the media passes it along as if it means something.
     But there is always an unspoken dismissive “uh-huh,” a tongue click: Maybe mom, we think, if you were paying more attention, then Junior wouldn’t be duck-walked through 26th and California in shackles, and you wouldn’t have to tell the indifferent world what a good kid he is and how he couldn’t have done what all the evidence points toward him doing.
     With most moms of the accused, this is true.
     Now Zarine Khan is a different case.
     Mother of Mohammed Hamzah Khan, the Bolingbrook teen who in the fall managed to retire the 2014 prize for Top Suburban Youthful Screwup, leaping over being caught with a joint or wrecking the car or missing his curfew, and landing straight into the realm of treason as he was arrested at O’Hare on his way to join the Islamic State group.

       If you don't recall, in October, Khan, 19, his 17-year-old sister and 16-year-old brother were blocked from boarding a plane to Vienna, on their way to Istanbul, then to Syria to help with the beheadings and civilian massacres that the Islamic State is committing in the name of Islam.
     "An Islamic State has been established and it is thus obligatory upon every able-bodied male and female to migrate there," Khan wrote in the note he left behind. "Muslims have been crushed under foot for too long. ... This nation is openly against Islam and Muslims. ... I do not want my progeny to be raised in a filthy environment like this."
     He was charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. On Tuesday, Khan pleaded not guilty.
     Expected. But the really interesting statement was made by his mother, in the lobby of the Dirksen Federal Building:
     "As parents we feel compelled to speak out about the recent events in Paris, where we saw unspeakable acts of horror perpetrated by the recruiters for jihadist groups in the name of Islam," she said. "The venom spewed by these groups and the violence committed by them find no support in the Quran and are completely at odds with our Islamic faith.
     "We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms. We condemn the brutal tactics of ISIS and groups like it. And we condemn the brainwashing and the recruiting of children through the use of social media and Internet."
     Normally, I consider demands for Islamic condemnation of terror an insult to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. Chicagoans weren't called upon to denounce John Wayne Gacy, to prove they weren't in sympathy. Yet whenever there's an Islamic radical attack, those who fear Muslims anyway demand some sort of collective denouncement from them, as a body, a situation best summed up by Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Chicago.
     "We are held account for the choices of the worst among us," he said, pointing out that one of the attackers of the kosher market in Paris and a bystander who tried to help were both African Muslims.
     "Should the guy who saved lives have to apologize for the guy shooting?" Rehab asked.
     But the situation with mothers, and fathers, is different.
     It is possible to discount what Zarine Kahn said. She is, after all, the mother of a teen facing years in prison. And I would never suggest she is heroic for saying that.
     But that process - speaking out against this - is important for the parents of other teens, who certainly might harbor feelings such as those that sent Mohammed Khan packing. A million French in the street is one piece of the puzzle getting us toward the world that most of us want to inhabit. And mothers against the romantic lure of jihad, both in public and in private, is another.
     Zarine Kahn is not the only one; her desperate situation made her brazen. But many parents are in a similar desperate situation and might not even know it. They, too, need to speak to their children. As a parent of a 17- and a 19-year-old myself, I know that they don't always seem to be listening. In fact, sometimes it seems they're never listening.
     But some part of them is listening. And the message sinks in.

Puppetry Week #3: The persistence of puppet opera

 

Photos from "Faust," above, and "Lakme," atop blog, courtesy of Opera in Focus.

      Puppetry Week hit a speed bump today. I had a thoughtful conversation with Blair Thomas, founder of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, all set to go, when my boss asked me Tuesday afternoon to weigh in on the latest developments of this Bolingbrook teen who tried to fly to Turkey and join ISIS.
     I considered replying, “But my puppetry opus is ready!” But that didn’t seem the path of the hardened journalist, and since the paper hasn’t run the puppet story yet—I’m shooting for Friday—it wouldn’t be right to post it here first and scoop my own paper.
     So, to keep the week going, I’ve disinterred this 2010 visit to one of the oddest landmarks of Chicago puppetry, Opera in Focus, a rod puppet operation improbably located in Rolling Meadows. No pictures, alas. I’ll post the kid-in-trouble column at 6 a.m. If you want to learn more about Opera in Focus, you can click here. Its season begins Feb. 4 with, fittingly, a program that includes "Aida."
     Whew.

     Opera is a grand art form, and Verdi's "Aida" is the grandest opera 
of all, a tale of forbidden love amongst the pyramids. Its 
Triumphal March is opera's famed flourish, a pageant that sometimes 
includes chariots, horsemen and live elephants.
     So when I heard that not only is opera performed by puppets in 
Rolling Meadows, but in May the show on the 4-foot-wide stage was 
"Aida," I had to be there.
     Chicagoans of a certain age will remember the Kungsholm Miniature 
Grand Opera, performed at a Swedish restaurant at Rush and Ontario. 
That closed in 1971, but puppeteer Bill Fosser, who began working 
at Kungsholm at 14 in 1943, continued the tradition. He kept his 
Opera in Focus going at various storefronts, and even in a Magic 
Pan restaurant, until his puppets found a permanent home in the 
basement of the Rolling Meadows Park District headquarters in 1993.
     This "Aida" was abbreviated, but still over two hours long, with 
four intermissions, plenty of time to wonder: a) exactly how did 
Rolling Meadows become the permanent host to puppet opera? And b) 
how did this blending of puppetry and song -- unique in the world, 
apparently -- find new enthusiasts after Fosser's death in 2006?
     In the early 1990s, Rolling Meadows was looking for ways to spur 
cultural interest -- courting a children's museum, a youth theater, 
waging a "battle" with Park Ridge over the puppet opera.
     "I had just been assigned by city of Rolling Meadows to work on 
economic development, and we had nothing in the form of 
entertainment," said Linda Liles Ballantine, executive director of 
the chamber of commerce, who had read about the puppets. "I 
happened to say to the city manager, 'Oh shoot, this would be 
something unique.' "
     Unique it is. As tempted as I am to assume a straight face, hold up 
the puppet "Aida" to the Lyric's and find it wanting ("The artistic 
decision to present a recorded 'Aida' using only four puppets 
underscores the Lyric's wisdom in using a full orchestra and 100 
live singers . . ."), the truth is, it is beyond critique, a visual 
and musical gem in a separate realm of sweetness that you either 
appreciate or you don't.
     My wife loved it. "This is such a little treasure," she said. I'm a 
harder case, so did recall Samuel Johnson's line about women 
preachers and dancing dogs -- the issue isn't whether it's done 
well, "but you are surprised to find it done at all." That said, I 
was charmed by the effort.
     The puppets are not marionettes, but rod puppets, operated from 
below, 16 inches tall and finely crafted, with lush costumes.
     Wisely, every half hour there is an intermission, with a spread of 
food—hors d'oeuvres, cookies, candy and pop—in the small lobby. 
My boys appreciated that.
     Afterward, the puppeteers invite the audience backstage, so you can 
see how they maneuver the puppets, while sitting on low rolling 
chairs, and view their work room, with sets and costumes and 
puppets from other operas at the ready.
     You also meet the puppeteers -- brothers Justin and Shayne Snyder, 
Barry Southerland and Leilani Narcisco. All in their 20s, it is 
remarkable to find a quartet of young people devoting themselves to 
this obscure realm of low-tech entertainment. Why?
     "To keep the tradition alive," said Narcisco.
     "We do what we do because we love it!" said Justin Snyder, who was 
an apprentice under Fosser and got the others involved. "It's a 
labor of love. We're the last remnant of a beautiful art form that 
is unique to Chicago."
     That they are. Unlike the Lyric, which, like an exhausted bear, 
hibernates half the year, Opera in Focus performs year-round, if 
sometimes sporadically and not usually single operas, but 
highlights. Call to make reservations -- (847) 818-3220, ext. 186. 
Adult tickets are $12, a buck less for seniors, children are $7.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 31, 2010