Welcome to another week of life on the road. I’m Genie Leslie, a freelance writer working remotely and traveling the country with my husband.
This week, we’ve arrived in Raleigh, enjoying our last city before going back to Atlanta to settle down for the foreseeable future.
After Aaron and I decided that Atlanta was officially our next city, we then...mostly stayed at the house for a week and a half. We were searching for work, the weather was rainy and gray (too similar to Seattle, if only for a week), and I think some part of us also thought “Well we’re gonna live here, no rush to get out and see everything.”
But then suddenly it was our last weekend in the city and I felt stir-crazy, so I announced we had to go out somewhere on Sunday. We felt like a museum could be cool, but we weren’t really feeling an art museum that day, so we searched for other options.
Since we’ve been traveling, we’ve liked seeking out a city’s small, weird, or different museums. It’s a little risky—sometimes they really pay off (The Museum of the Musical Instrument in Phoenix) and sometimes they really do not (The Graveface Museum in Savannah, don’t do it). This time, we chose a puppetry museum.
In Atlanta, the Center for Puppetry Arts has three areas of focus: performance, education, and museum. They put on shows, teach classes and workshops, and house a huge collection of puppets and artifacts in three galleries.
The first gallery is a global puppetry gallery. You see historical puppets from across the globe—different types (marionette, hand puppet, shadow puppets, etc.) with different meanings and uses. There were interactive pieces where you could work a shadow puppet, or stand in the performer’s spot behind marionettes and realize that there are mirrors below the puppets for the puppeteer’s to watch their work. There were specific puppets I recognized— like Punch & Judy, or the Scar and Mufasa head pieces from The Lion King on Broadway—and plenty more that I never would’ve known about.
Another smaller gallery is home to an ever-changing exhibition that features a current puppeteer, an artist who’s working right now. We saw the work of Nehprii Amenii, a theatre artist and puppeteer known for personal narratives and grand-scale spectacles. Her work was beautiful, and this exhibit was quiet and contemplative.
And the third gallery, also the largest, is the Jim Henson gallery. Room after room completely devoted to Jim Henson’s career in puppetry, spanning from early shows like Sam & Friends to The Muppet Show and the Muppet movies all the way to Dark Crystal and The Labyrinth.
Somewhat surprisingly for someone my age, the Muppets were not a huge part of my childhood. I knew they were around, and I certainly watched some movies, but I don’t really remember them that well. These were not the movies I watched over and over. As far as I can remember, I never watched Sesame Street. But I have seen Labyrinth too many times to count. So when we walked into the Jim Henson gallery and I saw that it was laid out in chronological order, I felt a little impatient to just get to the Labyrinth section at the end.
The impatience didn’t last, though, because the first spaces you walk into are recreations of Jim Henson’s desk and a Muppet workshop. Right off the bat, you’re looking at how Henson and his teams worked: sketches of puppet designs, diagrams of hand positions inside a puppet to create different expressions and emotions, early outlines and early script pages for sketches or film ideas.
I may have been aware of the Muppets all of my life, but I’ve never thought much about what it takes to perform them. Now, I was looking at an internal diagram of how it works—Kermit the Frog, with his big personality and range of emotions, is performed by one hand. I mean, yes, there’s a second hand controlling the arms, but his face, his emotions, his expressions, is all just one hand, moving fingers up or down, bending and contorting into odd positions, to create an entire character. It’s really impressive.
I’d also never considered how the puppeteers were concealed. Sometimes, they’re working crammed into tiny spaces and awkward positions. Other times, the sets and cameras are up high so the puppeteers can stand normally—except, you know, for holding their arms all the way above their heads for long stretches of time. Plus, they’re staring at monitors somewhere nearby so they can hit their marks with their characters, using a screen to see the work they’re creating above their heads (or behind their backs, or wherever the puppet may be at any given moment).
These early spaces were my favorite part of the Jim Henson gallery. Sure, seeing all the puppets from over the years concealed behind glass was fascinating; there were simply so many more different characters and shows than I ever knew existed. And I did finally delight in seeing a few of my favorites from Labyrinth, like the guards with the riddle to solve: “One of these doors leads to the castle, and one leads to certain death. And one of us always lies and one of us always tells the truth.” (Did I go home that very night and rewatch the 57-minute behind-the-scenes documentary on Labyrinth from that college DVD, now accessible via YouTube? Yes, I did.)
But the workshop section, that was the world of the artist. A peek at how one individual translates an initial idea into something entertaining and moving. How a team comes together to create a piece of art (or a character, in the case of so many puppets performed by multiple people at once). How the right combination of foam, felt, and performer becomes a living, breathing person, or pig, or frog.
Any time I get the chance to see inside an artist’s process, I’m inspired, and this was no different. Which is why, when Aaron decided to swing through the gift shop (I am usually very anti-gift shop), I not only went with him, but immediately grabbed and purchased Jim Henson: The Biography. I’ve been reading it since our museum visit a week ago and honestly, I love it. It’s very detailed (600+ pages!) but still an easy and compelling read, and I’ve stayed up later than I meant to a handful of nights because I just wanted to keep reading.
If you ever come visit us in Atlanta, I will happily accompany you to the Center for Puppetry Arts and revisit all three galleries. Plus we should probably get tickets for one of their shows; I haven’t seen a show with puppets since Avenue Q in New York almost twenty years ago, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a true, puppets-only puppet show. Please come visit and join me on this adventure!
What else is going on?
We’re back in North Carolina! We haven’t really done anything yet except unpack and grocery shop (the first tasks in every new location).
I went to the theater and saw Poor Things, which was great.
Celine Song—writer and director of the fabulous film Past Lives—was interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts, The Screenwriting Life, and she was an absolute joy and inspiration to listen to.
In between Jim Henson chapters, I read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune and loved it. 10/10, highly recommend.
And the above book was purchased at Charis Books, a fabulous queer, feminist, independent bookstore in Atlanta (technically, Decatur) that will be my favorite bookstore for the next few years.
April 10th- Happy Birthday Aaron 💙🎂🥰
We love you 😘😘
Are you living in Atlanta or North Carolina?
Interesting read this week!!!