When I was six years old, I received a marionette for Christmas. I remember playing with the marionette, learning how to make him walk and move. I was immediately hooked!
My Grandmother had not been able to go Christmas shopping that year. My Grandfather had passed away a few months before after a long illness, and Grandmother hadn’t felt like celebrating. She asked my Father if he thought I’d like to receive “Clippo,” a clown puppet that had been his toy when he was six. My Father told Grandmother that he thought I’d enjoy the puppet, but he agreed to warn me about it in advance so I wouldn’t be too disappointed at getting an old toy as a gift.
I had seen marionettes before. My prefered television programming had plenty of puppetry; from “Sesame Street and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” to “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie” and “HMS Puffenstuff.” The marionettes I’d seen, though, were all animals and for some reason my mind went immediately to a small horse or dog. “That wouldn’t be so bad to play with,” I remember telling myself, and I was actually looking forward to receiving the puppet by the time we got to Grandma’s.
Christmas morning came, and I remember walking out into her living room. She had hung Clippo from the fireplace mantel, and I remember seeing him across the room and falling immediately in love! He was beautiful, with his bright red clown suit and his cheerful face. He was by far the most precious toy I had ever received. I remember tentitively trying him out, my tongue sticking out in my customary expression of concentration.
There was a little instruction book, its pages old and yellow, and the instructions were very simple. “Tilt the bar back and forth to make Clippo walk.” I could do that. In a short time, Clippo had walked miles around Grandmother’s house. Down the hallway. Through the kitchen. Back into the living room.
I learned how to move his hands, turn his head, and even how to make him do a handstand of sorts. My Father liked to film our holiday celebrations on his Super 8mm camera, so there was lots of film of me practicing with my new best friend.
I have inherited from some members of my family a dominent “wallflower” gene. I not good at mingling, meeting new people, and parties make me nervous. I hated being called on in school to answer questions, and approaching someone to ask for assistance in a store was not an option. I was, as I’d describe, “terminally shy.” I wanted to take my Christmas present to school for show and tell, though. The teacher asked me to demonstrate my marionette. I quickly discovered that Clippo made me fearless. I could stand up in front of the class, answering their questions and performing the little clown’s signature act “Poor Clippo’s Tumbling Block” (a short skit included in his instruction booklet). Not only didn’t it bother me, I enjoyed it. Clippo soon became an annual visitor to my classes. He went to school once a year throughout my academic career. He even visited at least one High School and College course a year.
It was during one of these classroom visits in Middle School that one of the teachers approached me. She went to the same church my family attended, and she wondered if I’d be willing to do one of the children’s sermons during the Sunday service. I said I would be happy to, and got to work writing out some ideas. As I wrote out my sermon, the teacher began to get nervous. What had she done? She was very proud of how special the church’s children’s sermons were, and she began to worry about having a young child with an antique marionette deliver one. “It’s ok if you want to back out,” she’d tell me everytime she saw me in school. I think she secretly hoped I would.
Before delivering the sermon, my Mother, Brother and I visited my other Grandmother in St. Louis. I rehearsed my sermon, sharing it with my Grandparents. I had a beautiful white dress to wear, and the finishing touches were done on it by my Grandmother and Mother.
We were due to come home the day before my big sermon. We were taking the train, and had a transfer at one point. The train was late, and we were stuck in Chicago. At the last minute, we booked passage on a Greyhound Bus, and made our way back to Michigan and home. It was very late when we got in, and I had to be at church early in the morning.
The next day, I dressed up in my pretty white dress, packed Clippo in his shoebox carefully so his strings wouldn’t tangle, and went to church with my family. The time came to deliver the children’s message and the Pastor introduced me. They had a small microphone for me, and they clipped it to my dress. I introduced Clippo to the children, telling them that he could do many things. I demonstrated how he could walk, and run, and climb, and even stand on his head!
A little boy raised his hand. “Can he brush his teeth?” he asked. I didn’t miss a beat. Of course he could, if he had teeth! I spoke of God, and how Clippo relied on me to make him move. God was like a puppeteer of sorts too, but He wanted us to move on our own, unlike Clippo who had to use strings. God was always there, though, to pull strings for us when we needed Him too.
I finished my sermon, and Clippo dramatically completed his final move – taking a sweet little bow. I dismissed the Children to go to their Sunday School classes. The entire congregation burst into spontaneous applause. In those days, Methodists didn’t applaud anything during church service, but they clapped for the little girl, in the fancy white dress, with the antique marionette.
I went back to the pew, relieved that I’d finished it, but satisfied with the result. The exhaustion of traveling the day before, little sleep, and adreneline running out caused me to fall asleep during the sermon! After church, my teacher friend approached my family and I. She wanted to know when I’d be available to do the Children’s Sermon again!
Clippo hangs on a towel ring on my wall now; retired. He’s gotten older (as has his puppeteer) and more fragile (ditto) and I don’t want him damaged. I’ve since moved on to make my own troupe of marionettes, and even more recently, hand puppets.
After her success with Clippo as a present, Grandmother began sending other puppets whenever she came across them. She, my Grandfather, my Dad, and his sister, my Aunt had actually made marionette kits for a time, and had often performed shows as Scouting activities. I began receiving packages with some of those marionettes, or even pieces. It wasn’t unusual to get a box from Grandmother. “What’s in it?” my Mother would ask.
“An arm, a leg, and two heads,” I’d answer!
I rebuilt a lot of those marionettes, giving them my own character. I performed them in school and church, even teaching a class on marionettes for elementary kids while I was in High School. I moved on to hand puppets in my late High School years, building them out of cloth and later foam. I performed puppet shows at hospitals, schools, and for church. I took a puppetry course in college, learning more techniques for bulding and manipulating puppets, as well as some history. After college, I even worked for a year professionally as a puppeteer, in a black light show in Orlando, Florida.
I never forgot though, that the puppet who started it all was a small, happy clown who tripped over his own feet, liked to climb the furniture, and could even brush his own teeth!
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While attending college at Illinois State University, I was lucky enough to enroll in a Puppetry Arts class. The class was fairly basic, and included some of the rich history of puppetry, some basic performance skills, and some very basic puppet-making. One of the “projects” we did involved very simple “Balloon Marionettes.” We did a group performance using these very simple puppets as part of our assignment.
Diane began performing as a puppeteer when she was only six years old. Her first marionette, Clippo the Clown, a gift from her Grandmother, accompanied Diane to school every year through college. As an adult, Diane began making and performing hand puppets. She writes the shows, fabricates the puppets and props, performs all of the puppetry, and even serves as her own lighting and sound engineer!
