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Bread & Puppets
Apr. 20th, 2022 09:29 am
So. The Bread & Puppets museum.
It was a bit like discovering the first cave that decorated its walls with charcoals of dawn horses.
Or the ruins of Pompei in an earthquake fissure.
Or the Erl King’s treasure at the base of the mountain.
Or Alice and the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter hiding out from the Nazis in a tunnel underground.
I don’t know what it was like.
Except that it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
This old barn in Vermont with thousands upon thousands of the most amazing paper maché creations.
###
Some of the puppets were very large. Others were very small.
Here’s Ichabod, standing next to… is it Thomas Jefferson?—for scale
The puppets are arranged by shows they first appeared in. Some of those shows were performed back to the 1960s.
(The above is a very, very small representation of everything we saw.)
Most of the puppets had been created in the service of political street theater.
“Like the San Francisco Mime Troup!” I remarked to Ichabod.
And he said, “What’s the San Francisco Mime Troup?”
And I was reminded once again how transient and ephemeral are all the little cultural markers the chronosphere uses to define each human moment.
But at least one set of puppets had been created to reenact the biography of the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann—a rather odd topic for a puppet play, no?
Immensely strange.
Immensely beautiful.
And all just there.
In this hippie commune on the outskirts of Nowhereville, Vermont.
Slowly disintegrating.
Because the artist, Peter Schumann (maybe a family connection to the composer?) doesn’t give a shit whether they survive or disintegrate.
No pains are being taken to preserve them.
Outsider art at its purest, I suppose: Defiant. There is nothing you can do to turn me into a commodity.
###
Thing is that no matter how much I may love a museum, I can’t stay inside one for more than an hour and a half at a time. It messes with my head. It’s a little the way I imagine standing inside a nuclear reactor might be.
So we communed with the puppets for an hour and a half.
I had actually been afraid I wasn’t going to see the puppets at all. The Bread & Puppets museum is a modest tourism attraction, open June through November, according to its website. There are tours!
But the rest of the time, it is open by appointment or chance.
We had tried and tried to make an appointment. But the puppeteers don’t like email and seldom pick up their phones.
So, we just showed up.
And hoped for the best.
We lucked out!
If I went up to Vermont for a week—and I am thinking I just might if not this July, then some July—I would visit the puppet museum for an hour and a half every single day.
But I'd never stay longer than an hour and a half.
And there’s much more I could write but I’ve run out of time this morning.
