Amy’s Stuff

In just a few days, I’ll be jumping in the family minivan and heading to Kankakee, IL, for the 11th annual International Festival of Christian Puppetry and Ventriloquism. Some of you have been asking about dropping in for my performance on the 12th. Here’s the poop:

Thursday night, July 12th, at 7pm on the campus of Olivet Nazarene University. Map it.

Yes, the public is welcome to the evening shows.

Tickets are $5 each.

The shows will be held in Chalfant Hall. Here’s an easy-to-read campus map–come in the main entrance (at the bottom of the page), follow University Avenue to Nielsen Drive and make your way north to the Chalfant/McHie parking lot. Enter the combined building entrance (it’s the only main entrance on that side of the building) and follow the noise. Either that or look confused… somebody will take pity on you and help you find your way.

BTW–the pic here is a making-of shot. One of my pieces is going to incorporate an interactive video background. Here I am getting ready to record one of the segments that will appear in the background. Kewl, eh? Well, hush about it. It’s a sneak peek. Just for you. Ain’t I swell?

Well, I’m off to the St. Louis festival tomorrow. The last fest of the season. After this, it’s I-Fest, baby. And since my dear in-laws have been watching my kids this week, I’ve been able to actually work on some of my stuff for I-Fest. (Thank you Dean & Doris!) I’ve got a couple of new workshops up my sleeve, and of course there’s my little performance I’m preparing for… And since I’m a glutton for punishment, I’m building all the puppets and props and scenery that I’ll be using. But hey, no problem, the conference is still two months away! :::rolling eyes:::

I’ll be posting some in-progress pix pretty soon, but I’m gonna keep some things under wraps until the conference. You’ll just hafta come see. So, the storyboards are almost finished. The props are mostly designed. And I’ve just sculpted the head and hands for a new bunraku-style puppet. But nothing is built yet. :::deep breath:::

So if I look a little tired and sound a little scattered this weekend, you’ll know why! See ya’ in Saint Louie.

There’s a pretty fun contest going on over at the radio station where my DH works. They’re collecting non-perishables for a local food bank, and they’ve pitted the morning show against the afternoon guys to see who can collect the most food (by weight) in their barrels.

Dan, being the clever marketer that he is, contacted Nathan Carlson over at Fancy Monkey Studios about getting some of the Jungle Jam crew to help their cause. And Nathan, being the compassionate soul that he is, sent back these:

 Sully the Aardvark for COMPA and AM91 [0:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Racquet the Skunk for COMPA and AM91 [0:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Gruffy Bear for COMPA and AM91 [0:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ain’t that a hoot? I can’t decide which is my favorite…

We tried something new this year… tie dyed eggs. Didn’t they turn out great? The kids had a normal egg coloring session at Grandma and Grandpa’s house this week, so we had to try something different. It was way fun… not to mention colorful!

My 6-year-old discovered something quite interesting this afternoon.

After digging up a nice long earthworm (and bringing it inside to show me, thank you very much) she proceeded to pinch it by the tail and twirl it around like a propeller while calmly chatting with the four-year-old next door.

I have to admit, I completely expected to see that worm break in two, sending it on one final flight before smearing the little dirt factory on my nice new windows. But the poor thing remained intact while I stifled my laughter and went outside to inform my darling daughter that the little guy had probably had enough.

What we found when the spinning stopped surprised both of us. I’m certain he was a bit longer, and I quickly noticed that most of his skin (do worms even have skin?) had slid out and bunched up towards his head leaving his tail end quite thin… thus producing a SharPei-like effect with all that extra worm skin around his still-spinning head. It was the grossest, yet coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time!

FYI–No creatures died in the process of this story. One worm lost his lunch and has requested Botox and a chiropractor. In related news, Colorado’s first professionally trained worm astronaut just made it in the NightcrawlerNBA.

If you watched the Big Idea Tour feature on the Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie DVD set, then you probably remember the guy in “Tie-land” with the uke and all the “regrettable edibles“. Pretty funny stuff. (If you haven’t seen all the extras on the Jonah DVD set, it’s worth getting just for those… OK, the bonus features AND the Larry/Lunt commentary, but that’s another story. Back to the guy with the disgusting foods.)

Well, that guy is Bryan Ballinger, an amazing artist and tremendously funny to boot. Phil Vischer calls him “truly one of the most unusually creative folks we ever hired.” And if you take a look at some of his web projects, you’ll see what he means.

First take a stroll to his recipe for Caramel Flassies. Click on the gooey goodness to read the recipe. Yummy.

Then you might want to browse his blog, too, where you’ll find sketches, 3D illustrations, and snippets from his recent projects. My favorites are his DailyBreadwig posts in which he illustrates obscure Bible verses like this one.

Ahh… it gets my creative juices flowing.

If you haven’t taken the time to explore the social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, you’re missing more than just a great organizational tool; simplified sharing, easy researching, relevant search results, and subscription feeds are just some of the benefits I’ve discovered. Let me show you what I mean:

But first, a primer. del.icio.us is a no-cost web site that allows users to create accounts and store bookmarks (favorites) of their favorite sites. The immediate benefit for users is that their bookmarks are now not limited to a particular computer, they can now be accessed from anywhere. (Hmm… you can get your favs from home OR work. Interesting…) These bookmarks can be marked as public, available for anyone to browse, or private, for only specified user(s).

Tags. When a user saves a bookmark, he “tags” it with keywords of his choosing (see folksonomy) for easy retrieval later on. For example, the users that tagged PuppetryLab.com chose one or more of the following keywords: “puppetry” “puppet” “instruction” “read” “blog”, to name a few. Users can then use these tags to organize and search their own bookmarks or they can search the entire site with a given tag. (Just today there are 897 listings tagged “puppetry“, 111 of those have been tagged by me.) Now, the benefit here is that people–not machines/spiders/bots–actually did the tagging. That means that if I search tags on del.icio.us, I’m more likely to find relevant sites than if I used a traditional search engine. Cool… Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend brings me back near my childhood hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago for One Way Street’s Chicago Regional Puppetry Festival. As best I can figure, it was 20 years ago this year that I attended my first Chicago Fest–then held in Wheaton. How time flies!

Back then I was just a kid who finally found a niche where I could use my suppressed creativity and not be thrown in a locker for doing so. Now I go to these festivals and conferences as a puppetry coach and workshop leader, helping a new generation of artsy misfits discover and master this thing we call puppetry.

During my non-conference time in the area I’m looking forward to spending time with friends and family before returning to my own little clan here in Colorado. Hopefully I’ll get some good pix to share. Watch for ‘em…

OK. It’s been years since I’ve been to a Children’s Pastors Conference, and even then I was only there as an exhibitor and assistant workshop leader. So I kinda knew what to expect. But boy, did God surprise me! I am SO encouraged and SO energized… phew. It’s taken me a few days to decompress before I felt like I could make ANY sense with a report. (Although, I’m not exactly sure that I’m gonna be any clearer today. Oh well. Deal with it.)

My plane touched down on time in Orlando. But Florida greeted me not with sunshine and smiles, but with gray gloominess that–while unexpected and a bit depressing–was much warmer than Denver (and had a significant LACK of snow on the ground) so I felt like I couldn’t complain. After finding my way to the shuttle and waiting in a forever-long line of children’s workers from around the country, I finally stepped off the bus at Disney’s beautiful Coronado Springs Resort, home of the 2007 (and 2008) Children’s Pastors Conference. Read the rest of this entry »

The annual International Festival of Christian Puppetry and Ventriloquism was, as always, an unforgettable experience. To describe I-Fest to non-puppet people is nearly impossible, since nobody really understands what it is we do in the first place. To quote a favorite Muppet, “I can sum it up in one word: Indescribable!”

Simply put, I-Fest is a conference designed to encourage, equip, and train Christian puppeteers and ventriloquists to better utilize their arts in ministry. Sound odd? Well, it is. And we love it. For me, I-Fest is a time when I leave reality behind and enjoy a full week of creativity, new ideas, silly people, and short nights. When it’s all over, I am explainably exhausted yet strangely energized and full of ideas. Read the rest of this entry »