I’m applying a slick of barge cement to foam sheets. The garage floor is protected from the honey-thick gloop by a black contractor bag.
In 20 minutes, my foam surfaces are tacky and I smush them together. Soft face structure, body, tail. Making a fish puppet in my garage might be the most Schwartz thing I’ve ever done.
‘We want you to challenge yourself’ says the call for art. Painted sweatshirts, flying things, pies. Puppets. That’s the one.
Is it a challenge if I’ve never made puppets, but I know how they work?
You can make a soft palate with the lid of a yogurt tub. Dense, springy foam makes for good faces. I glean a few tips from puppetry forums, but when I need real direction, I call Mama.
“I have leftover upholstery foam, which I think is good. Hot glue’s not working.”
“Oh yeah, that foam is great. Barge cement is the best for sticking it together. Can’t wait to see! Send me pictures!”
One August, Dad built a 14-foot Jesus puppet from a crib mattress for our church’s Kernel Days parade float. He worked out a hollow center to allow a puppeteer to sit inside, waving Jesus’s arms. I assume Jesus was in the puppeteer that was inside Jesus the puppet—a real theological riddle.
There were costumes for kids in the parade, too. A crew of us gathered in the brown-paneled church basement, following Mama's schematics for a sheep costume made of recyclables: Milk carton head, strips of plastic bags glued in fluffy loops to the cardboard box base. Braided plastic bag suspenders.
Our Good Shepherd beat the church who plopped their soporific worship team on the float and called it a day. He beat the class of 1960 sweating it out in their folding chairs and Dunnell Lenort, our local country-covers singer. He beat the 11 year old girls pageant-waving from their tiered layer cake frosted in glittery mylar fringe. We handed out freezies and equipped our distributors with scissors. We were swift, opening the cold treats before parents panicked about ripping open plastic tubes with their teeth. “Thank you!” they beamed as we glided to the next sweaty family.
If there’s anything my family loves, it’s winning competitions we invent.
And large-scale last minute projects.
Puppets had nineties and early aughts churches in a stranglehold. Have you ever died inside as an untrained adult whips out a homemade Winnie the World puppet onstage and sings ‘Here we go round this great big world!’ acapella, the puppet’s eyes nodding toward the floor?
“She doesn’t know how to move the mouth!” the Schwartz family performers yammered over lunch afterwards. See, Tim and Rosemary Schwartz know how to keep a puppet upright. They have puppets stored in plastic slipcases, professional puppets and handmade puppets that look just as good. They train their children as convincing supporting characters. We know the bottom half of the mouth is what moves. The voice is in the thumb. Look at any person talking–the top of their head stays level while the jaw hinges.
Dad dreamed of having a family band. We all took music lessons, dutiful pupils of kindly adults. The band never appeared. Maybe if we’d learned music we liked, instead of a mixture of polkas, classical strains, and scales, there’d be a band. I’m pretty sure my piano teacher believed I’d burst into tears if she chastised me for not practicing. “Let’s just play that measure again” she said if I’d been stuck on the same song for weeks. “That’s the one giving you trouble. Get that measure and we can go on to the next song.”
There was no band, but we all gamely participated in skits and floats and other church performances. It wasn’t a thing we took lessons for, but a pool of talent we swam around in all the time. You note what gets the most laughs in a kitchen dance off. And what joke diffuses tension in a packed Suburban.
My family builds puppets. Never mind that I’ve never constructed one. I am my family and we know puppets. Puppet catalogs arrived in our mailbox, revealing blacklight puppets, neon families with a gloved arm for added performance dexterity, multicultural children, bibles with heavy eyelids and megawatt smiles, patterns to sew your own if you were so inclined.
There are puppet tutorials on scrappy websites built in puppetry’s heyday, user interface as grotesque as the puppets.
Monster puppets are popular with hobbyists, following the same logic as my brother’s harmonica teacher: “If you mess up, keep going and people can’t tell.” (To this day, Sam’s not sure he ever actually learned harmonica.)
I work out basic fish shapes with cardboard, my brother Jon curiously side-eyeing. The living room is filling up with homemade templates and foam cutoffs. Now that he’s staying at my house, my need for a separate studio space is clear. It’s not fair to make him dance around a half-built puppet for a week. But then he hops in, troubleshooting. Making is in us, both of us, and we can’t help it.
“Just iron the plastic flat” he advises, watching me fiddle with a flap sliced from a curved yogurt container. It leaches toxins into the kitchen air, but works like a dream.
I figure out each step halfway, assuming I’ll work out the details in time. Sewing the soft cloth exterior is my special expertise. I pick up handwork easily, winning the title of the sewing one out of the seven of us siblings. Well, I was until Sam went to school for pattern drafting and garment construction.
“We all have different levels of the same traits” Jon surmises on a hike. “Your friends know you as the creative one, or funny, but they don’t realize your sibling has the same thing, amplified.”
When it’s the tight circle of family, we’re measuring everything, each person’s showmanship for themself. But in the outside world, one of us wins the contest for all of us. One of ours, good at everything. Olivia won her bodybuilding competition. Sam constructed a killer senior fashion show. Jonathan maneuvered the bulky family food truck his first time driving stick shift. “I just trusted he could do it,” Mama says. “It’s crazy how much I trust you guys.”
My friends know me, the carrier of creative traits. I look self-constructed, but I’ve got a power cord snaking back to the family juice.
I come home from work and find Jon’s created a pile of meticulously cut cardboard slivers, and the next day, there’s an exquisite wing structure. It’s an airplane model. There is no pattern.
He leaves for the gym and I slide his project from the table to the sideboard so I can set up the sewing machine and finish up a quilt. He returns and laughs at our overlapping, ingrained tendencies for project sprawl.
Home’s like this.
Elsewhere
You can see my fish puppet at IPSO Gallery’s White Ribbon Show on Friday, August 9th from 6-8pm.
Finally recorded a version of Wide Skies, Clever Guise, my project on Midwest Visual Language. Hand drawn slides, big thoughts, lotsa goodness. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I talked with Pigeon 605 about sustainability and making my own clothes. They interviewed a couple other folks and put together a really nice piece.
I’m a sucker for quilts on the prairie. Rachel Hayes makes joyful large-scale work that blows my mind.
Thanks for joining me this month. Have you been in a parade? How was it?
All of your posts are my favorite but this one is something special. Such a cool peek into your family and your creativity! Being a Schwartz seems pretty neat <3
So awesome Tenley! This article put the most Schwartz smile in my heart!