Dream Jobs #1: Puppeteer

 When I talk to my college-age students about employment, I caution them against taking the advice to "follow your passion" too literally. Passion is one element, I tell them, but you also have to consider the job market, your specific talents, and what you can learn by building on those talents. It's also important not to "kill" the joy of a hobby, I think, by turning a passion into a job without considering the implications. I've met professional symphonic musicians, for example, who are bored with playing the same "greatest hits" to middle-brow audiences every year. Such is the market for orchestral musicians in cities outside of New York, I suppose. Even though these musicians followed their passion and their talent, they sometimes wish they were doing something else and could still enjoy music the way they used to. It's called a job for a reason, after all. 

Sometimes I wonder if this advice is too cautious, though, and too much of a dream-killer. I tell myself that anyone who is driven enough to follow an "impossible" dream (like acting) will perservere no matter what kind of naysaying advice they get. I think this true for the most part. 

If I had followed one of my early passions, I might have ended up a puppeteer. I think I had a natural talent for making the puppets move as an extension of me and also with doing the funny voices. I have, through the years into my middle-aged existence, picked up puppets (including finger puppets) at various times and managed to entertain people. It seems like a silly thing to be interested in, and it certainly is embarassing to express interest in, for whatever reason, but it's also still a profession for a few select, talented individuals. 

Puppetry for me started, as far as I can remember, when I was 7 or 8 and my brother and I bought our first marionettes in Matamoros, Mexico, during a trip to South Padre. We entertained little kids at the condo complex where we were staying. My first puppet, whom I named Bluto in a bit of uninspired whimsy, had a guitar permanently attached to one hand and a bottle connected to the other. He literally could do nothing besides walk, play the guitar, and drink. He actually couldn't play the guitar because the bottle was in the other hand, come to think of it. It's not surprising that I picked a puppet with a guitar, as I was always drawn to guitars from a very young age, though the fact that he also held a bottle is a little scary. (My brother's puppet had a gun, I think. These tourist toys really were built on stereotypes.) We bought two more puppets the next year, before we lost interest, but in the interim we fantasized about turning our bunk-bed set into a puppet theater, with a backstage area on the bottom bunk. What a strange thing to fantasize about. 

Random photo of some kind of puppet-like statue thing that I took in McKinney, Texas.

Sometime before or after, maybe, I had a Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist doll. These were quite the fashioanble middle-class Christmas item for a time in the 1970s. My mother warned me not to take the doll too seriously, as I think she had seen trailers for the movie Magic or had otherwise read about ventroliquists going off the deep end (this was also a gag in the TV show Soap). I never became disconnected from reality (at least not more than usual, for I was a dreamy kind of kid), though I did oddly spend time sewing new clothes for Charlie. I also somehow ended up with two dolls, after the jaw on the first one got broken. (My brother did an admirable repair job, but Charlie looked like he was talking out of the side of his mouth. I couldn't bring myself to throw away the original doll for some reason, perhaps because of some unaccountable feelings for inanimate objects -- I might write a future blog on this -- that I think infects a lot of writers and is surely an occupational hazard for puppeteers. 

As an adult, I made some funny videos for my literature classes involving famous-writer finger puppets, though I'd cringe if I saw them now. My girlfriend (now wife) and I had some fun making them, and I remember making her laugh in a way I'm not sure sure I've heard before or since. I'm still not sure what the appeal of puppetry is -- to humans or to the puppeteers especially -- though for puppeteers I'd wager they are largely a quiet and unassuming lot, maybe a little shy or tending toward introversion. On the other hand, I think I could have done the more boisterous and adult-like puppet shows like Punch and Judy or that vulgar and offensive buzzard puppet show at Astroworld. This could have been a way to combine a few different talents. Puppets are a strange kind of theater, intrinsically funny, but also, like other forms of theater, spooky and uncanny in other ways. Sometimes they seem like dream-projections, figures acting out our emotions in ways we can't. Maybe it's the access to those emotions that I sometimes miss.

 

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away at the age of 100, was the only president I ever met, and he was the first president I supported. I was only 7 when he ran for office, so my support was nominal and symbolic, but it was still clearly out of sync with my second-grade peers and, as I recall, my parents. (It's difficult to remember, though, and also surprising to some to recall that Carter won the Texas electoral vote in 1976.) 

I can't recall exactly what drew me to Carter. I like to think, as so many have said about Carter during his post-presidency years, that I sensed Carter was a fundamentally decent man. He certainly dressed and acted like a more common man, and I may have been drawn to that agrarian persona. I suppose I was also slightly contrary, even for a 7-year-old, and I liked supporting this underdog who seemed so reviled by my classmates in elementary school. (I can only assume that, living in the Houston suburbs, they were echoing the conservative opinions of their parents. My own parents seemed content enough to let me have my own opinions, even if they made me less popular with my classmates. This was an unfortunate pattern, perhaps, in that I wasn't guided to be more liked by my peers when it mattered the most.)

I think I may have also been keen on Carter's identity as a peanut farmer, which was made larger in a kind of teasing fashion by mass culture at the time, as if there was something funny about being a peanut farmer. That's an odd assessment, since somebody has to grow peanuts, and they are certainly popular (in spite of the growing allergy problem.) I loved peanuts, and I still love them, including all the variations in which peanuts are used (like Nutter Butter cookies). My love for peanuts has grown even as they are increasingly identified as not really nuts and perhaps not as healthy as other, real nuts (though peanut butter is a wonder food that has been used successfully to help address acute starvation). The point is, as much as Carter was referred to as a "peanut farmer," as if it were a reductive insult, to farm peanuts is a noble and worthy pursuit. 

The humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich, shown here served at a fundraiser for Kinky Freedman.

And, as much as we might connect "peanuts" (the word) to little things, including small amounts of money (and it is one of those inherently funny words, like banana), Carter clearly did pretty well for himself. As with most modern presidents who have been framed in this way, Carter's "humble" background was relative. 

Much has been written since Carter's passing about how he was a very complex and even a difficult man, who, again in spite of the humble persona, often knew he was right and was tough-minded in his negotations and persistent in achieving outcomes even when it irked the presidents who came after him. This loner quality makes me feel a certain kinship with Carter, as well, as decision-makers and leaders often must live with this kind of solitude in order to be effective (at least some of the time). 

I met Carter when I was in my 30s, at a book signing in Houston. The line was, predictably, literally around the block outside the independent Brazos Bookstore. He was gracious but, also predictably, quick. I think I had about 5 seconds in his presence. Meeting a president probably feels unreal to most people, since they exist as larger-than-life personas, and that's the way it was for me. I gave the autographed book away (I can't even remember if he made it out me or not) to a friend who I thought would appreciate the religious content of the book, though I did read it and found it compelling enough. He was a prolific writer on top of everything else, which is another reason I continued to admire him into adulthood, as my early admiration become more concrete.  

Though Carter has been most appreciated as an ex-president, I think most of all I connect his memory to his actual presidency and his time in the White House during the 1970s. Though those were difficult times (marred by inflation and the energy crisis), they seemed hopeful to me as a 7-year-old Cub Scout enjoying the optimistic themes of the bicentennial and the blue-and-gold banquet (which celebrated presidents, all of them). Carter gave me an early taste of supporting a candidate and considering the country's direction and our need for compassion and grace. I thank him for awakening in me those early impulses, which seem to have been appreciated across the aisle, in retrospect.