Photography by Elizabeth Jochum
Dug Feltch (pictured) and Bob Kramer have created a St. Louis institution at Bob Kramer's Marionnettes in the Central West End.
“Puppets!” shrieks the first boy through the door. He and his classmates tumble into Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes and walk wide-eyed through the gift shop, looking up at unicorns, a pink Chinese crested dog, a bucktoothed rabbit, Jiminy Cricket, and an array of kings and queens. “wow!” says another boy.
“There’s a lot of puppets here! I’m gonna love this thing!” Bob Kramer has vanished backstage. His collaborator, Dug Feltch, shepherds the adults to the back row and warns them not to block the children’s view. Then he turns to the kids. “Where do ideas come from?” he asks. “Don’t say the computer, please. We all have an imagination. We just have to learn how to use it.”
Feltch leads the gaggle of first-graders back to the workshop. “Have you all used Play-Doh?”
“Yeeeeeeeeessssss,” they sing out.
“Thank goodness they haven’t changed that,” he mutters. Feltch shows them an armature for a clown’s head and explains mold-making. “I cut right into the puppet’s head,” he says. “It does not hurt—I asked him, and he said no.”
“That’s not a clown,” kids protest.
“It is. Trust me.” Feltch picks up a giant rubber band. “We have to put something in the puppet mold. And we’re not going to put pudding, because then everybody would eat up the puppet heads. So I take this little rubber band…”
“It’s big!” the kids yell.
“Little!” he calls back and produces, with a flourish, a band three times as big. They giggle. “We cut up inner tubes and make them into rubber bands,” he explains. “Now we let this dry. I told your teachers to bring your sleeping bags.”
“We didn’t bring them,” a little girl says, worried.
“I could sleep on the bus,” a boy offers. Feltch takes pity on them and shows them a finished marionette instead, then leads them back to the theater seats. “You must be very quiet,” he warns. “If you make a lot of noise, you will scare the puppets.” He offers a snippet of history (“Some people think the earliest puppet was made for a witch doctor”), and scary sound effects swirl into the air.
“It’s not real noise,” a boy assures his friend.
“Whaddya mean?” Feltch asks, overhearing. “It’s the most real noise you’re going to hear today!” He shows them a mask from Nepal. “Is this fake? No. It’s a real mask.” As he talks, puppets start appearing behind him. “Turn around!” the kids yell. “Turn around!”
“Nah, there’s nothing there,” he says, refusing to look. “It’s your imagination.”
There’s something kid-show about Feltch already, with his curly brown mop top, gray walrus mustache, and fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows that dance up and down like somebody’s pulling their strings. He chatters like a public-television host filling time during a telethon, tossing in wordplay and witticisms as he streams in references to classical music, fairy tales, and William Shakespeare.
“Birnam Wood’s coming to Dunsinane,” Feltch intones while carrying in tropical plants for the winter. “Oh, you Little Red Riding Hood,” he teases when I can’t get the gate open.
Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes turned 50 last year, and Feltch has been Kramer’s collaborator for 38 of those years. Kramer brings out a fat scrapbook, and Feltch flips through, pointing out faded Kodak Instamatic shots of square-dancing chickens; Santa and the dancing poinsettias; the coconut heads that Kramer made in seventh grade (“They do Spike Jones’ ‘Hawaiian War Chant’”); and Sidney the Snake and Sadie the Redbird, who, Feltch says, are in love. There are photos of Marcel Marceau, Carol Channing, Jane Henson (widow of the Muppets’ creator), and Lucie Arnaz. “She wanted to work with us,” Feltch says, “but we didn’t have a TV show.”
Feltch spills every thought and feeling; Kramer’s the secret-keeper. Slight and wiry, with amber ringlets around a rough-hewn face, Kramer is happiest working alone at midnight. His eyes are the brightest possible blue, his dimples deep crevasses, and he gives off the kind of compressed intensity that would have gotten him cast as Jesus in the ’60s. But Feltch calls him Rumpelstiltskin because “he can do it all: sketch and paint and model and carve and sew and perform.”
Kramer is the quiet genius. Feltch voices him for the audience—and for me, when I ask about Kramer’s early life.
“Well, the way you explain yourself,” Feltch begins, turning from Kramer to me, “is that he loved working with the puppets and he didn’t really care too much what other people thought.” Feltch says Kramer made his first marionette at age 5. He had picnics on the Seine—actually, the open oven door—with his playful neighbor and godmother. He performed for his first-grade class.
I wait, eyes fixed on Kramer, until he speaks.
He picks up with his teenage years, at Mehlville High School. “I had a lot of adults around me,” he says, “and maybe three good teachers, and the rest were…” He tilts his palm back and forth. “For some reason, I don’t experience things when they are happening. Months later, it’s ‘Oh my gosh!’ So I got to school, and that was that. One teacher committed suicide; one went to an insane asylum. I think I might have just viewed it as a comedy.”
Luckily, those three good teachers were as supportive as an Oprah studio audience. And while Bob’s mother waited for him to “outgrow” his passion for puppetry, she got interested. Soon, his father, a mechanic, was troubleshooting glitches in the marionettes, and Bob’s sister was helping him build sets. At age 18, Kramer did his first Christmas show, with eight performances at the brand-new South County Center. The mall didn’t even have the heat on yet, but the wholesome, whimsical shows warmed people’s hearts, and the applause brought blood back to their frozen hands.
Four years later, Kramer mounted a production of Peter and the Wolf at the American Theatre.
“There was no school, no other puppeteer I could ask for advice,” he says. He would later learn of a St. Louis couple, Ellen and Romain Proctor, whose marionette shows had been a Christmas tradition at the Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney department store downtown. But in his boyhood, Bob’s only teacher was Bil Baird, who performed in the Ziegfeld Follies and did “The Lonely Goatherd” for The Sound of Music. Every morning before school, Bob sat about a foot from the TV set, watching in a trance state while Baird conversed with Charlemane the Lion. In third grade, Bob wrote Baird a letter asking for advice.
Baird wrote back.
Feltch shows me a Howdy Doody head that’s just like the one he and Kramer made for Buffalo Bob Smith, host of The Howdy Doody Show, when his original was getting old and frail. “It sold for $20,000 at Sotheby’s,” Feltch says. “He didn’t lie, just told them it was his, but the inference I guess was that it was the original.”
He and Kramer lead me backstage. I confess that I’m still not quite sure just what defines a puppet.
“It’s any inanimate object that appears to come to life,” Kramer explains, “whether it’s worked by hand, rod, shadow, or string.” Fred, a cat with milk-tipped paws, leaps in front of him as if to demonstrate.
“It’s like moving imagination,” Feltch says, while pulling back a velvet curtain with one hand. “The tormentors and teasers are the curtains to the top and the right, and the playboard runs across. That’s where the puppets play.”
Marionettes—strung puppets—can be manipulated from a catwalk, as hand puppets, on a raised stage, out in front of a raised stage, or even down in the audience, breaking that fourth wall. “Puppeteers have come out more recently,” Feltch says. “It’s called cabaret-style. But some of our shows are done entirely from the scaffolding.”
He shows me the high stage that they sometimes use for performances. “The Muppets did it this way, and I think [Sergey] Obraztsov did, too.
We sit on these little stools that roll around. There’s one right there: Isadora Duncan’s resting on it.” (It’s Isadora Duck, actually, wearing a gauzy scarf like those of her namesake.)
“This is Julie Andrews over here, doing ‘Le Jazz Hot,’” he says, and I reluctantly look away from the duck. Andrews’ tiny simulacrum wears fishnet stockings with tiny Swarovski crystals glued on.
“She does this little thing with her leg, bah-dum,” Kramer says, demonstrating a slow, loose-jointed, sexy kick. He’s been practicing with the control panel: “I’m not used to the slow, jazzy movements!”
Why all of the French allusions? St. Louis chanteuse Elsie Parker has invited Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes to share the Sheldon Concert Hall stage with her jazz trio, The Poor People of Paris. “The Poor Puppets of Paris” is set to feature Charles Aznavour (using Fred Astaire’s borrowed body) and Edith Piaf (“We’ve had her in a box for years”).
Josephine Baker will be there, as will, less plausibly, Charlie the Caterpillar and Mort the Orangutan. Marie Antoinette will glide onstage just before intermission.
“People say, ‘How do you get them to speak French?’” Feltch adds. “I say, ‘They study very hard.’”
The Sheldon is packed, and Edith Piaf is singing, in the voice of Elsie Parker, “La Vie en Rose.” One by one, men walk up from the audience and drop a rose at the puppet Piaf’s feet. She’s wearing the trademark scarf that Maurice Chevalier’s wife gave her, because Piaf was so poor, she showed up to sing in a Pigalle nightclub wearing a knitted dress with an unfinished sleeve. As the roses pile up like autumn leaves, Feltch goes onstage to dab at Piaf’s huge eyes with a white linen handkerchief, then offers it to Parker as well.
The crowd—all grown-ups—goes wild. They’ve been charmed ever since Kramer peered around a green curtain and Charlie the Caterpillar bounced out and creepy-crawled across the stage, batting his sleepy eyelids at the audience. You can see Kramer spinning the stained-wood handles, called airplane controls, in a complicated twisting pattern, but it doesn’t break the spell. People lean forward, craning their necks, to watch the little caterpillar proceed across the stage, and when he wiggles down the steps, they laugh aloud.
Mort the Orangutan comes out for “Boum!” Josephine Baker dances, each of her petticoat layers banded in a different bright color. The petticoats ruffle and lift as Kramer tilts the controls up and down, kicking each leg in turn.
Marie Antoinette makes her grand entrance, the pleats of her bustled blue velvet dress seeded with pearls. Kramer sews on each tiny pearl, sequin, or bugle bead by hand. I stare, remembering sophomore-year home-economics class and imagining just how much time this costume took to make.
Kramer swivels back and forth on his workshop stool, his lean body zinging with nervous energy. Feltch stands nearby, looking like Geppetto in his work apron. Brass hoop wire hangs from hooks; they buy it from hatmakers and use it for puppet ballgowns. “You can’t even get buckram anymore,” Feltch says, sighing. They order upholstery trim, ribbon, bits of satin and velvet, and crystals in every size and shade.
Kramer comes up with the concept and refines the sketches. He and Feltch sculpt a clay model, use it to make a plaster mold, then fill it with Form Fast—a cloth permeated with plastic that dissolves when dipped into a chemical solution, so the cloth can fit the mold’s contours. When it hardens, they sand it and cover it with plastic wood, which is as goopy as peanut butter and will take days to dry. They articulate the eyes and mouth, cutting out sockets, then slice off the jaw and hinge it back on with wire. They sand again, paint on five coats of gesso, and sand once more. “We sand and sand and sand for hours and hours and hours,” Feltch says, pointing to a giant unfinished dragon’s head that’s hanging from the ceiling, “and then, after a thousand years of sanding, we have to fit the mouth again.” He sighs. “We play a lot of Madame Butterfly.”
Once a head is ready, it’s time to bring it to life. They add moving eyebrows, inserting a rod into a little hole with a block of wood behind it, along with perhaps a moving mustache, ears, or a nose. They insert lips through the hole they’ve left in the back of the head. They put squares of leather inside the head and screw eye hooks into them to fasten the strings. They coat each wooden eyeball with Vaseline and pop it into its socket, then squeeze plastic wood around it so there aren’t any gaps.
When they paint the puppets’ faces, they always use a matte skin color.
“We hate glossy colors,” Feltch says.
“Glossy shines onstage,” Kramer inserts.
“It doesn’t look natural,” Feltch says, lips pressed tight with disdain. “California puppets are just known for being glossy.”
They don’t even like shiny strings. Albrecht Roser, a master puppeteer from Stuttgart, Germany, used monofilament, “and it always reflected the light,” Feltch says. “When we did a commercial, the puppets were strung with dental floss.”
That’s a whale’s worth of dental floss: A marionette has eight strings on its head alone, plus individual strings on its eyebrows, eyelids, nose, and mouth, plus strings on its shoulders, arms, legs, and feet, plus a “bow string” on its back, pulled to make the puppet take a bow.
Does it matter whether people see the strings? Laypeople seem to think so, especially these days, but Kramer and Feltch know the mind itself can make them vanish. They don’t always add springs and rods to make the eyes move, for example, yet people say, “It’s so cute when those little jack-in-the-boxes open and close their eyes.”
“Their eyes don’t move!” Kramer says.
“But we don’t correct people,” Feltch adds. “We say, ‘Thank you very much.’ It’s the illusion that counts.”
“And when the eyelashes are on, there’s a shadow,” Kramer notes, “and when you tilt the head, it does look like the eyes are moving.”
“But we don’t correct people,” Feltch repeats. “Except when they say puppets are just for children. Then we have to correct them.”
All live theater exaggerates, and marionettes do more than most, from the violence of Punch and Judy to the oversize hands and giant thumbs that have become Kramer’s trademark. Kramer shows me the Carol Channing and Josephine Baker marionettes, remarking, “Those people were caricatures already.” In gessoed wood, their eyes are huge, and their curly eyelashes shadow half their face. Their hands are huge, too, exaggerated because that’s what an audience will watch. And they’re busty, which often prompts a few arch comments.
“Go to the theater sometime,” Feltch retorts.
I wonder, privately, if it’s the exaggeration that makes some people pronounce puppets creepy. The big, bright lipsticky mouths, hard faces, and skinny necks give the women a sort of aging glamour queen, Sunset Boulevard feel. Even young Clarice Cloche looks anorexic, her neck broken, her long, thin fingers angled upward.
“I don’t want to blame—well, I do want to blame the guy who did Chucky,” Feltch says, referring to the doll inhabited by a serial killer in Child’s Play. “We spent a good 45 minutes reassuring a child whose father had taken him to see Chucky thinking it was a children’s film. ’Cause that’s all we need, a society where people don’t like puppets.”
He’s wary of media portrayals, too: “Donn Johnson came and did a [TV] story on us. He did say he wasn’t really comfortable with puppets, and we kind of sensed that. Well, he wanted B-roll film. Then the piece comes on. It was pretty good and nice until the end, when he said in this spooky voice, ‘Late at night, a dead orchestra leader might appear,’” with the Arthur Fiedler puppet rising behind him.
We’re standing in the wings, and it’s pitch black, and only the puppets are spotlighted, and I’m trying hard to forget the Chucky reference. Maybe it’s just seeing them so close, I tell myself. They are caricatures, with all the emphasis falling on what makes us lively: eyes and mouths and hands. And they’re made of hard, uncompromising materials, so unless that’s covered in fur or fuzz, we know in advance they’re neither huggable nor pliable.
After the interview, I meet a friend, a film professor, for a beer. He offers another theory: that the alien feeling is rooted in a marionette’s jerky motion. “We’re highly sensitive to movement,” he points out. “The one thing you can’t get away with in animation is bad movement—torso stiff, legs running. We don’t trust anything that looks like a human but doesn’t move the way humans do.”
For me, it’s simpler: They die or come to life at someone else’s bidding. Hung, they go limp, their oversize heads lolling. The shoulders, which hold the weight of the puppet, sag aslant. Yet in a matter of seconds, they can be alive again, channeling their partner’s humanity.
“I’ll never forget seeing Lincoln at Disneyland,” Feltch says with a shudder; it’s animatronics that creep him out. “It seemed like movement without life, like a zombie.” A puppet, on the other hand, is inhabited by a human spirit. The creature is intimately connected to the human who’s manipulating him, and it dies the second he stops pulling the strings.
As long as the human’s benign, all you have to do is enjoy the show. Focus on the puppets’ lively whimsy.
And don’t ask to go backstage.
Some Kramer marionettes are unabashedly cute, like Charlie the Caterpillar, Marvin the Moose, and Ginger Tummy-Wiggle. But there’s also Arthur Fiedler, who conducts in black tie with his eyes half shut. (“Open your eyes!” the kids yell at him.) And the narratives can have a quirky edge.
Sleeping Beauty Mouse doesn’t prick her finger on a spinning wheel; she’s overcome by a very old Swiss cheese. The Annoying Drummer Boy is too poor to afford drums, so he bangs on pots and pans until Joseph comes out of the crèche and begs him to stop. Feltch has been tempted to have Mary snap, “For Christ’s sake, give me some peace and quiet”—but so far, he’s restrained himself.
“We don’t do ‘tootsie-mootsie-eensie-weensie-spider,’” Feltch says, turning serious. “We have a white swan and a black swan, and we’ll say, ‘It’s the first time they have ever danced together’ and hope people get it.”
Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes have performed in Japan, in Prague, and in Yugoslavia, where they manhandled 50-pound dancing bears. “You’ve heard of the ‘Minute Waltz’—how about the 30-second polka?” Feltch gasped to Kramer as they dragged them onstage.
“We kept looking for shorter bears,” Kramer says. “And we spoke only English, and in Yugoslavia, everybody was speaking Italian to us.”
“They had no money, so people were giving us bread, and flowers from their yards,” Feltch says. “We did one show at a collective farm, one at a naval base, and one at a sanitarium for children with cerebral palsy. They said they hadn’t brought the younger children, because they might have been disruptive, and asked if we’d bring puppets to their rooms.” He smiles tenderly. “The puppets were bigger than the kids. Seeing those faces! They cried because we were leaving.”
The next year, 1991, Kramer and Feltch were invited to Moscow. They wound up arriving three days after the attempted Soviet coup. “There were statues lying face-down on the ground,” Feltch says. “No currency, no transportation. We walked everywhere. They asked us to do shows at schools. At the Obraztsov Puppet Theater, they dumped tea out and gave us the pot” in payment. The Obraztsov later put one of the Kramer marionettes, a little lamb, on display. “Then they wanted us to go to Chernobyl. They said, ‘There is great sadness there.’”
Puppetry is as cathartic as the first Greek dramas. “What is more powerful than creating a character and bringing it to life?” Feltch asks. “Children with ADHD or autism come here and sit quietly for almost two hours. Their teachers say, ‘Thank you! I’ve never seen that happen.’”
Puppetry can also be safe therapy. “The puppets can say almost anything, and it’s not as in-your-face,” Feltch explains. “If a child has speech problems, we can say, ‘The puppet didn’t say that right.’” Puppets are used for sex education—a puppet’s version somehow seems less shocking—and to interview children about possible abuse. “Children will confide in a puppet, and they will also learn more from a puppet than they would from a person.”
So will adults. “You are using a different part of your brain,” says Feltch, “and sometimes that part’s never been plowed.” One company hired Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes to do a communication workshop for a group of engineers, and they went from stilted to engaged in an hour. “We let them pick out their puppet for the exercises,” Feltch remembers, “and afterward, quite a few wanted to buy their puppet!”
The art of puppetry is ancient; the first written records show up in The Histories, written by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE. In places like Indonesia, where shadow puppetry dates back to the year 930, the shows can last all night long.
When Feltch talks about puppetry in Asian culture, his voice is wistful.
Puppets dance in and out of Western pop culture—Team America: World Police grossed more than $50 million with its high-strung Kim Jong Il parody—but their golden age is over. And that means people have to be taught to love them.
Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes thrives whenever it has enough staff to market, publicize, and meet demand. Back in the 1980s, 11 people sanded and painted in the workshop. But now it’s down to Kramer, Feltch, and the occasional eager apprentice. And one of their marionettes can take as long as 1,500 hours to make.
There are fewer puppeteers practicing the craft, and there also seem to be fewer grown-ups willing to hang their disbelief at the door. Fantasy’s digital now, fluid and fast. Even in the deftest hands, wood on strings seems a little clunky—especially if your imagination’s wooden, too.
“Highly educated people sometimes are not the most simpatico,” Feltch observes. “Sometimes they don’t want to let go. They don’t want to be drawn into an imaginative world. Adults with no imagination… They shouldn’t be shot, I suppose, but maybe put in a room where they can talk about stuff that doesn’t make any sense. They just don’t get it.”
Maybe they’ve taken adulthood a little too seriously, and they don’t have children to remind them?
Kramer shrugs. “Not all parents get it, either. Sometimes they overreact for the child’s sake. Or they just sort of sit there.”
“We had a little girl the other day, she just kept insisting the puppets weren’t real,” Feltch says. “She was about 6 going on 40. She wanted to know how we did it.” He answered her through clenched teeth: “They are real puppets.”
Most kids, though, enter into the puppets’ world like they’re banging through a turnstile at an amusement park. And older adults have left weeping. One woman embraced Feltch and told him she hadn’t felt so young in decades. A man told him, “Your hands are so wonderful! I kept wanting to watch them, but I couldn’t.”
Feltch grinned. “Then the puppet was doing its job.”
For years, Kramer and Feltch have talked about doing a TV show. They’d stay up late working out the characters and their back stories, coming up with storylines. They’d watch existing children’s TV and find it “mean-spirited, snide, and phony,” in Feltch’s words.
Now it’s time to cast. They are preparing a pilot, and they hope to sell it at the big syndication show that takes place every year in Las Vegas.
“The new one is Elf No. 1,” says Feltch, holding up a white gessoed head with the happiest face I’ve ever seen. “We kept thinking about giving him a name, but we really like Elf No. 1,” he says. “That’s how Big Bird got his name. He was always just ‘Big Bird’ on the script.”
They’ll use the same head form for several other elves, but the expression will range from delighted to grumpy to (not often) angry.
“And then we have—well, they are elves, but they are actually trolls,” Feltch says.
“They tend not to look the same,” Kramer explains.
“I don’t want to get racist, but they are more troll-like than elf-like,” Feltch says, “and sadly, they are not real bright. But they are well-meaning.”
Their landlady will be Arvilla Droll, and no, she’s not a troll. She’s a human actress, patterned after an eccentric St. Louisan by that name who once taught actors how to fence at The Muny. But at least in this incarnation, Arvilla has no imagination. “She doesn’t know why someone is fooling around with this silly pastime of puppets,” Feltch says. “So whenever she comes into the show, the puppets don’t move. They are just dolls, because she only sees wood and fabric.”
“Dolls,” mind you, is a scathing insult. “The word for puppet in German is puppe, which also means doll, and of course we don’t want to get too testy, but we prefer not to be thought of as playing with dolls,” Feltch says.
In one episode, Elf No. 1’s mouth is quivering, because he has to have a broken string repaired, and he’s afraid it will hurt. “So many children are afraid to do things,” Kramer says. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, I might get wet!’ It’s good to be cautious, but really.”
Another storyline is “inspired by an old Truman Capote story, about the time he threw a tennis ball for a friend’s dog, and it bounced off the high-rise apartment’s balcony and the dog went right after it and plummeted to his death.” Feltch is hoping people will get the reference—even though in their version, Charlie the Caterpillar just leaps into Otis the Owl’s nest and safely retrieves the ball.
I don’t have the heart to admit I wouldn’t have gotten it myself.
These are men who live by acts of the imagination. They’re working in a form that’s thousands of years old. The kids they encounter whenever they step outside their workshop are fixated, glassy-eyed, on the screen of one device or another.
“That,” Feltch wants to snap, “is not real.”
On the show, they’ll have a computer, “but we are not going to give it a personality,” he says. “We are going to talk about bullying, but we are not going to have a bully—we’re not going to give bullies that much power.” They want their show to focus on friendship and beauty and imagination. “Children’s TV doesn’t have a lot of those moments anymore,”
Feltch says. “It’s flash dab.”
“We feel like there’s a great need for this,” Kramer says.
There’s urgency in his voice; this plan’s been in the making for 50 years, really. They dream of a show syndicated all over the world, dubbed in different languages, “because puppets can speak all languages.”
But the logistics aren’t easy, and as Feltch says with a sigh, “We’re not the ones pulling the strings.”
They come back from their summer filming days exuberant. They shot Charlie the Caterpillar out at Faust Park, gazing up at a huge butterfly; they posed Lorelei Lamb in her big, feather-trimmed World’s Fair hat aboard a trolley; they put Marvin the Moose under the Gateway Arch, with Feltch holding a light reflector, doing a Mexican hat dance to avoid the swarming mosquitoes.
“Nobody even stopped at Forest Park,” he exclaims. “People were just in their own little world. They didn’t even care that there was a frog on the edge of the waterfall and a little bluebird flying around!”
Still, they found eager collaborators at the Arch and Cahokia Mounds; in Elsah, Ill.; at the Saint Louis Science Center; among the mounted police. Feltch loves “the idea of all these really wonderful people coming together, ’cause you know, in life, you meet the poopy ones sometimes.”
Behind the exasperation lie four decades of frustration. Neither man can bear to fundraise. Another long-standing dream is to establish a Puppetry Institute, a school where children can write stories and build puppets and learn and perform. Puppets are the best, earliest introduction to live theater, they point out; you don’t start cold years later with Bertolt Brecht. And they’d love to pass on their craft.
“We’re just not pushy,” says Feltch, sighing. He’s thrilled when invitations and donations come unsolicited. “You don’t mind doing the pitch, but it’s so nice when you don’t have to beg, cajole, and roll on the floor.” If only one of them had grown up rich, he regularly moans, they’d have their TV show and their Puppetry Institute by now.
Ever since the Discovery Channel filmed Bob Kramer’s Marionnettes for How It’s Made, Feltch and Kramer have been getting calls from a 12-year-old boy in Canada. Says Feltch, “He wants to make a puppet, and there’s nobody there to show him.”
