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Too Much, Much Too Much!North Miami Beach, FL
North Miami Beach, FL 12-18-2000 Aaron H.
Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on issues, ideas and reflections on the times. Published now and
then. Opinions pro or con are welcome.
TOO MUCH, MUCH TOO MUCH.
You must understand that now I am really retired. It all started when I
undertook to equip my savior, David Degani, with the means to start a puppet
program at or near Temple Bat Yam in East Fort Lauderdale.
David was Principal at my new Temple Sinai in North Dade when I was looking
for a new home for all my puppet paraphernalia in the move from New Jersey
to Florida. He tried to interest the powers at Temple Sinai to match how
"intrigued" he felt with the offer to house my puppets and theater there.
Somehow, I had talked to the wrong people in Sinai and in the JCC
immediately to the rear of my Temple and they were not interested. David
could not interest them and anyway, he planned a move north, closer to where
he lived and found a job at Bat Yam. This is a small Reform Temple with
meager space, but Rabbi Littman is a singer, musician and theater buff with
a daughter deeply involved with the Coconut Grove Playhouse productions.
David put me up in the attic in the rear of the Sanctuary. This was a
space under where the steeple once was because this Temple was a former
church. It was hot and dusty there but it allowed storage of the puppets
and equipment that David had paid to deliver by himself and store in a
warehouse earlier.
What was much too much was the introduction of the last opportunity to show
off my life's work in puppetry on the day of the Chanukah celebration
yesterday. I had worked for several months, two days a week, with students
in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth grades to try to get them to
acclimatize to puppets as actors in a play and not as playthings - an
impossible task.
Yesterday was an all stops pulled out celebration of the notion of
Chanukah as a major life event in the Temple Bat Yam membership. There were
classroom events, a program in the rear portion of the Social Hall for the
infants in a separate nursery school entity. There was a special diorama
program simultaneously with me setting up the theater I had built in the
front of the Social Hall. And then there were the troops of classrooms
moving about to different activities. Chief among these was a dance program
in the middle of the Social Hall now cleared up to my spotlights and tables
full of puppets set up just in front of the curtain which separated my
puppeteers from the audience. The entire school plus visitors were
encouraged to join the dance. It really was impressive and joyous and noisy
and my puppeteers were straining to join in fun rather than being repressed
by me.
Now, you must understand that I had a different take on this day. This was
to be my last performance and showing of all the puppets David had
unselfishly transported by himself in a truck he paid for with his own
money. His vision was a little different than mine. He saw forces of
goodness and creativity arising spontaneously when they saw all the puppets
and programs. These he conceived as reaching out to the community to teach
love and understanding spilling forth making the world brim with love and
brotherhood. I haven't delved too deeply with David about this, but I
suspect I have him pegged correctly.
I sweated a lot in this project. The attic over the back of the Sanctuary
was not refrigerated as the rest of the Temple was. I inspected and
repaired puppets where I could and made compromises with the puppets once
belonging to Norman Wersan to put together a show telling the story of how
Judah and the Maccabee children threw the Syrian invaders out of the Temple
and purified it. This play was a redundancy. The story of Chanukah was
told and retold in the activities held before my troop came on at the end of
a noisy, busy and hectic morning.
Thank God Carol came along. She never shared my love for making puppets
come alive but she never shirked being shoved headlong into supporting
activities when needed. She protected the displays I set up on the other
side of the curtain and took pictures of the whole mess.
Now - I guess I should explain this curtain thing. The Social Hall at
Temple Bat Yam (this means Daughter of the Sea) was divided into thirds by
floor to ceiling accordion curtains disappearing into sockets in the walls.
I took advantage of this to make a stage with a four-foot high lower stage
front (made of the heavy rubberized drapes from the condo we had purchased
and where we now live) with wood from a project stored in the once Christian
attic. A second stage front, longer than the bottom one was suspended at
ceiling height between the two curtains pulled together. This made a
proscenium opening of about four feet high and eight feet wide.
The wood that supported the lower stage front was fragile and I had to keep
reminding the children, many of whom were shorter than the stage opening not
to lean on it. The puppets were heavy and they had a hard job with skimpy
muscles to hold them over their heads so the audience could see the puppets.
The most remarkable thing was the audience of school children sitting on
the floor with adults on chairs in the rear. They all had quieted down as I
was introduced and the big spotlight in the back was shining unexpectedly in
my eyes. I used a chair to rest my foot and my guitar and launched into an
attempt to make sense of what I was doing there. A picture Carol took shows
a fat white-haired man dressed all in black holding a guitar and sweating
profusely.
I sought to point out the hand puppets on one side of the auditorium and
rod puppets and marionettes on the other side, all of which would be
explained after the show was over. Then I sang my song that tells the
audience to "open your eyes and open your ears and learn all you can from
the puppets of Puppetopia and me, the Puppet Man".
I got through the song despite being desperately tired and fearful that the
tumult would cause all my work to be for naught. Unexpectedly, the song was
greeted with applause and the audience was quiet and receptive despite many
mistakes, glitches and one thing or another going wrong at just the right
time to prevent it being undone.
Well, now it is over and I no longer will do puppets anymore. I have a
sense of relief and freedom to do the things I have put on hold until this
project was over. I will try bicycling again and resume sketching and
painting and there is the possibility to join a folk music group I learned
about after hijacking the song teacher, Andy Sussman at Bat Yam, to play,
once again, Chanukah songs at the end of the puppet show.
I got home yesterday at about three p.m. I slept a lot since then and here
I am doing what I like most, writing about my thoughts.
Carol's Evaluation: 10 out of 10. Carol also says: "And good luck to you in
your retirement and all future endeavors!
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