Katherine Strange - I’m Your Puppet

 

When I was nine years old, the thing I wanted most in the world was to join Missoula, Montana's premier Christian puppet team. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]

 

Yeah, the First Presbyterian Puppet Patrol or 1P3, if you're a fan. [audience laughter] All of the coolest kids from church were part of 1P3, Jenna with the bouncy hair, Merlena who smelled like cigarettes and Todd, who was a boy. [audience laughter] But the puppet team director said I wasn't old enough. And there was no fooling her, because she was my mom. [audience laughter] 

 

After church, while I waited for mom to drive me home, I would watch 1P3 rehearse. They would march their puppets through the stage to a cassette tape which said, “I can do all things [claps] through Christ who strengthens me.” [claps] They were so cool. [audience laughter] They would perform original skits about stuff like, how awesome it is to obey your parents [audience laughter] or classic songs like Get hot, stay hot, be on fire for Jesus. [audience laughter] 

 

It was the 1990s. It was the heyday of Christian puppetry. [audience laughter] I begged my mom to let me join 1P3 early. But she said I would not be getting any special treatment. I would have to wait until I turned 10, just like everybody else. But in the meantime, I could work on building up my shoulder muscles by seeing how long I could hold a can of soup above my head. 

 

The night before puppet performances, mom would stay up late to drink wine and make props. And if I helped her, she would tell me stories about when she was a teenager on a Christian puppet team. See, my mom told me that being a Christian puppeteer was cool. And I believed her, [audience laughter] because when she talked about it, she got this look on her face like, “Oh, those were the best days of my life.” [audience laughter] I think this makes sense. 

 

Like, my mom's parents were really strict, fundamentalist. And so, I think for my mom, doing puppets in the church basement was basically her only freedom. She loved it, okay? She got to make friends, she got to show off how funny she was. I just wanted to be a part of that, all right? I wanted to be the one to make my mom laugh or make her feel proud, because sometimes I could feel invisible around my mom. She would get really sad. Her sadness got so big, it just seemed like it pushed everything and everyone else to the edges, including me. 

 

But puppet team made her happy. And so, I just knew that this was going to be my chance to shine and for her to really see me. So, when I turned 10 and I got to join 1P3 as a junior member, I was stoked. Plus, every August, we would drive for two days straight to the International Festival of Christian Puppetry and Ventriloquism, aka iFest in Kankakee, Illinois. [audience laughter] And there, we could take workshops from Christian puppetry celebrities like Todd Liebenow and watch performances from the nation's top Christian puppet teams. 

 

I bought a cute green alien puppet made by David Pannabecker. [audience laughter] David Pannabecker,- [audience cheers and applause] - who studied puppet making under Kermit Love? So, Kermit Love, among many other things, is the creator of big bird, guys. Yes. Okay. Anyway, I named my puppet, Deedle. The finale of every iFest was a performance by the puppetry dream team, okay? These are the top 15 teenage Christian puppeteers of the United States and Canada. You had to audition via videotape. And once you were selected, you had only one week to create an entire 45-minute puppet show from scratch. 

 

I imagined one day, I would be up on that stage as a member of the puppetry dream team. It would be like the end of one of those sports movies from the 1980s where everybody's cheering and my mom stands up and she's like, “That's my girl.” [audience laughter] But for now, I was still just a junior puppet team member. Mom insisted that we master the five basic skills of puppetry before getting promoted. You know, entrances and exits, heightened positioning, eye contact, believable movement and lip synchronization. I just wasn't there yet. I was back to practicing with a can of soup. 

 

1P3 booked a series of shows at local nursing homes. These were really depressing and nobody wanted to do them, but mom would not cancel. So, one day, we have a gig, and zero puppeteers have signed up. And mom looks at me and she's like, “All right, we're going to make this happen, you and me.” I'm terrified, because I'm about to go from can of soup to performing an entire show. But I also thought that just maybe I could pull this off, and then wouldn't my mom and Todd and Jenna be like, super impressed? 

 

The show starts off okay. And then, we get to Abbott and Costello's who's on first. This skit is eight minutes, which is a very long time to hold your arm in the air. I'm using this puppet. It looks like an orange muppet version of Dick Van Dyke. [audience laughter] Really big foam head, big padded chin. This makes him extremely heavy. So, about a minute into the skit, my arm starts to sink. Mom nudges my elbow and she says, “Get up there.” And then, my fingers start to go numb, and I can barely get that puppet mouth to open and close. Mom is glaring at my frozen, sinking puppet through gritted teeth. She says, “Keep going.” I look at her and I say, “I can't” and I start to cry. This just makes her angrier. She starts kicking the bottom of my shoe in time to the lip sync, I am screwing up. 

 

In this moment, it feels like my mom cares more about the performance than she does about me. This is not the first time I've had this feeling. It is the first time puppets have been involved, because our lives often felt like a performance. To our church community, we were this saintly family. But behind closed doors, mom was trying to outrun her depression with puppets and white wine while I looked on helplessly. We were both struggling and we could never talk about it. 

 

In the stage that day, all I could do was keep going. So, I blinked back my tears, I finished the skit, I finished the show. On the drive home, mom won't even look at me. But the next day, she promoted me to senior puppeteer member. I didn't know if that was her way of trying to apologize or if I was being rewarded for pushing through the pain. All that I knew was that I could not bear to fail her again. So, I decided I was going to stop complaining and I was going to work harder. 

 

In seventh grade, I figured out that being a Christian puppeteer is not cool. [audience laughs] But I couldn't quit. I couldn't let down my mom or my team. So, I just started keeping that part of my life a secret from my school friends. I worked very hard, and I got very good at two things, puppetry and lying. And by the time I was a senior in high school, I was the star of 1P3. When mom suggested that I audition for the Puppetry Dream Team at iFest, I knew it was an honor, but one I wasn't sure I wanted. 

 

Still, I sent in my audition tape. When we found out I made the team, mom seem pleased. But when I got to my first day of Puppetry Dream Team rehearsals, I realized I had made a huge mistake. All of the other teenagers are ecstatic to be there. Like, they cannot wait to put on the official Dream Team polo shirt. They never take their puppets off. I figured they were faking it. So, I tried to get them to admit, like, “Come on, Christian puppetry is basically the most embarrassing hobby imaginable.” [audience laughter] They just looked at me like they didn't know what I was talking about. And I thought like, oh, they want to be here. They're not just counting the days until they can leave for college and then never, ever, ever do another puppet show again for the rest of their lives. 

 

Our Puppetry Dream Team performance was about a group of sentient school supplies that talked, and preached the gospel and performed thematically relevant Christian pop songs. [audience laughter] I had a minor role as a pencil. Having alienated the rest of the teens, I did what I always do. I stopped complaining, I worked hard and the show went fine, I guess. And as the final puppet exited the stage and a thousand people, including my mom, rose to give us a standing ovation, I expected to feel proud. And I didn't. Because this person on stage, this wasn't the real me. This was the person I thought my mom wanted me to be. And a standing ovation is nice, but it can't compare to being loved and accepted for who you really are. 

 

A few weeks after iFest, it was time for me to leave for college. As I'm trying to cram everything, I own into a duffel bag, my mom walks into my room carrying Deedle, the alien puppet that I had bought at iFest and performed with hundreds of times, because she thinks I need to pack him, so I can take him to Seattle, where I will continue being a Christian puppeteer and maybe even start my own Christian puppet team. I look at her, and I can see what this means to her and I think, well, I could probably hide him under the bed in my dorm room, and I'll just tell her what she wants to hear, but I don't want to pretend anymore. So, I look at her and I say, “Mom, I'm not taking any puppets to college. I quit 1P3.” And she just says, “You'll change your mind,” and that's it. 

 

The next day, I wake up in my dorm room, and it's like the beginning of my new life. I can go anywhere. I can do anything. And if what I want is to go to a party and drink a Mike's Hard Lemonade and then sleep through church, nobody's going to stop me. [audience laughter] Two months after I arrive, I receive my first and last care package. Inside is a jar of peanut butter, a box of granola bars and Deedle the Puppet. I'm angry, because it feels like my mom is trying to force me to be a person I don't want to be anymore. But I also know that this is her way of connecting with me. It's not what I need, but it's what she can do. 

 

For my mom, the curtains of the puppet stage gave her safety, so she could reveal her true self. But for me, those curtains were like a cage. I knew that I had a choice to make. I could spend the rest of my life chasing my mom's approval, or I could go my own way. And that was really scary. But you know what? I had already done a lot of scary things. I had mastered the five basics of puppetry. [audience laughter] I had performed for thousands of people. I could hold a soup can above my head for-- indefinitely at this point. If I could work that hard for something I didn't even really want, imagine what I could do with a dream. Thank you.