I have been dithering about my head for some time now.  It began when I decided to go about arranging for my second Bar Mitzvah.  My first one was in 1939 and this one will be in 2008 (August 9, to be precise). But, being me, I developed this great idea of folding my 13 year old self into my 83 three old self and thought that if I included one of my special skills during the festivities, it might be interesting, unusual and enlightening.

Well, you see, I still consider myself a puppeteer.  I have given away most of my puppets and wonder where some of my favorite ones have gone although I thought I had brought them with me to Florida.  If I had kept some of the biggest puppets I had constructed, it would have been easy to make a transition of one human sized head to another.  But, they are gone and I have had to start from scratch.

Now, old-timers will remember papier-mache.  I still use it but there are newer materials to construct a 13 year-old size head.  I got started twice and have been stymied because I no longer have a real workshop and worry about filling the apartment with dust and debris from Styrofoam, glues and paints and such.

I have both a bag of paper-mache and pieces of Styrofoam but a first attempt sits unfinished and unsatisfactory and challenges me.  So, I decided to begin again.

There are questions that have to be answered which I cannot.  I have no photos of me when I became thirteen.  The obsession with cameras had not reached the small Orthodox synagogue where my service was held.  My obsession with cameras came in High School and I became one of the photographers whose photos where used in the June 1944 Southside Yearbook.  So, I don’t know exactly what I looked like but rationalized that a large kid’s head would do for all that those in the congregation would notice would be a marionette walking up to the Bimah with me.

It is sort of funny, but I found a pair of papier-mache woman’s shoes in a craft store.  They were high heeled – sort of – and I started with them.  They also had a cuff around the top.  So I cut off the heels and the cuff and then had holes to fill which I did with cardboard glued to become male heels and a top that could be fitted to the bottom of the puppets’ legs.  So, they are finished except for painting and, in effect, I started this project from the bottom up.

The head is the problem but I shall attack it as soon as I get my courage up. After that, or maybe before, I need to think of making a pair of hands.  I would rather carve them from wood, but I’ll get to them one of these days.