Moving between modes – or shuffling them, like a deck of cool, maddening, half-sized oversized playing cards, some of them familiar, others in a language you have to guess to grasp – is the fun and the task of this stage incarnation I’m tugging at, wrestling with, rolling through.  Making one thing not into something else, but refracting the characters and the idea, the feel, of the thing, so it not only appears but is “something else,” a new format, is developing lots of new authorial muscles (not to mention providing exciting new sprains, cramps, and funny walks).   Which I guess is why it’s called “adaptation”, right?

… and feathers and shadows and sex and violence, and all the cool things that make up puppetry: Eileen Blumenthal knows all about them.  I’ve mentioned before how incredibly helpful (and surpassingly fun) her book Puppetry: A World History was to me during the research of Under the Poppy. (And I still read through it for refreshers, and just plain kicks.)

She recently took part in a discussion at UConn with John Bell, where I would dearly have loved to be.  Hey, Detroit Institute of Arts!  We have the Paul McPharlin collection, why can’t we have Eileen Blumenthal here, too?

Dramaturgy was indeed discussed (hi, Wesley!), as was the necessity for production support, and what fun it is to go around with a parallel world percolating in your head.  And we did it all in the shadow of this shadow and several others, up on the walls like a line of all-star patron saints. [Artist: Mme. Anne of Pinwheel Bakery, Ferndale.] More shadows also came my way via Etapes (thanks, Mr. Hat!).

Tonight’s research outing, in the autumn dark, will encompass Django Reinhardt-style jazz and the dark carnival that is Prussia, seasoned, ringed, shot through like colored silk with burlesque.

See you at the Guardian Building, fellow aesthetes.