From Hand, Shadow, Rod:
The Story of Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre

1981:

“We’ve arrived!”

“How so?” asked Teri Jean.

“Just got a call from Carolyn at the Arts Council. They want us on the Touring Arts Team!”

“Cool beans!”

The Touring Arts Team was a group of six or seven artists in different disciplines, assembled by the Iowa Arts Council to do two-day residencies in towns with populations of under 1500. Each leg of the team lasted eleven days and went to five towns, with one paid day off in the middle, between June and August. Being a member of the team was a sought-after privilege. As I recall, there was no application process. The Arts Council staff reviewed their rosters of touring and teaching artists and, knowing their artists well, tried to assemble compatible teams. Teri Jean and I had done many successful school residencies before we were invited to join the team. The pay was relatively good (how often does a freelance artist get a paid day off?), and the collaboration and fellowship with other artists were heavenly. 

Our first town was Klemme, where we met the rest of the team: musicians Shadric Smith and Dartanyan Brown, dancer Valerie Williams, and visual artist Diane Rockey. Klemme was a tidy little town. Rows of wood-frame houses mostly painted white, some with daring red or blue trim, lined the streets. The well-kept Main Street had a restaurant, a bank, a hardware store, a drugstore, and a grocery store, all well-maintained. We artists stayed with host families, each in a different home.

“In this town, everyone mows their lawn on Wednesday, so the grass is the perfect length on Sunday,” my host mother told me.

“It’s a good thing I don’t live here!”

She chuckled. “We expect our artists to be a little different!”

Year after year, from 1981 to 1991, we arrived with each new team in each new town in time to have lunch with the hosts. After lunch, we all got ready for our workshops, setting up supplies in our assigned spaces, elementary school classrooms or church basements, or meeting rooms in the town hall. Teri Jean and I found our room and laid out newspapers, masking tape, plaster bandages, tempera paints, fabric, yarn, fake fur, lace and trims, and the ubiquitous hot glue gun. We’d turned to plaster bandages instead of papier maché mash because it dried quickly. Kids could make the puppet heads and paint them in one 2-hour session.

At 2:00, we team members lined up and faced the assembled residents, children and adults alike, to “sell” our workshops.

“Come on, people!  Shake a leg and come dance with me!” Various dancers in various teams uttered various versions of this line.

“We’ll be playing with paint”—or wool or chalk or markers or ink, depending on the artist.

“Kids, let’s make some puppets and put on a show!”

The locals chose their workshops, rolled up their sleeves, and got creative! Everyone in town, from preschoolers to great-grandparents, got involved. Fiddles and trombones that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades jumped out of their cases, scattering dust, and came to life.  Overweight teenagers shed their inhibitions and danced. Grandmothers switched from paring knives to carving knives and made linoleum block prints.  Poems were written, puppets were made, and wacky collaborations came into being.

At 4:00, it was time to clean up and get ready for dinner, usually a huge potluck.  Tables were laden with potato salad, three-bean salad, jello/kool whip/marshmallow salad, sweet corn, and—always! —ham loaf. Most of us ate light, knowing we still had to perform, but wiry little Valerie had whipped up an appetite dancing and heaped her plate—twice!

After dinner, we set up for the evening show. Each team member had 15 minutes to play music, show slides, demonstrate sculpture, read poetry, dance, or put on a puppet show. For the first few years, our show was Clever Gretel, a Brothers Grimm story about a clever cook whose voracious appetite leads her to eat both chickens that she is preparing for her boss and his guest. She tricks her boss into thinking that his guest has broken into her kitchen, taken both chickens, and run off with them. Mad chases and hilarity ensue!

Schulz here: You should be letting me tell this part! I got to play the part of the boss!  Not that I liked being thought of as—well—a little dim, but I sure loved being part of that team, and sometimes you let me MC, or I got to do the bit where I turned Teri Jean into a puppet, or I got to help out at the workshops! Remember that town where the kids were so addicted to their TVs that we couldn’t get ‘em to focus? Ha! Teri Jean made a puppet stage that looked like a HUGE TV screen, got Shadric and Dart to play some theme music, and the kids did puppet parodies of their favorite programs! It was a hoot! *

The next day, we had two workshops, morning and afternoon. In the evening, after another potluck, the workshop attendees performed and displayed their work. For the first few years, we ended the evening by passing out helium balloons, gathering in a big circle, and releasing the balloons on cue. We carried a helium tank in the state van and team members took turns filling balloons during the performance. This practice ended when someone explained the harm the balloons caused to wild birds and someone else expounded on the danger of traveling with a full tank of helium in an open van. We artists did not miss filling all of those balloons!

In some ways, the Touring Arts Team was like our school residencies. We did the same kinds of projects, making and performing with hand puppets and shadow puppets. There was one big difference: these kids brought their grandmas along.

In one town, we were working in a park shelter when our group arrived, with a dozen kids and almost as many grandmas. I started passing out materials—newspapers, tape, and plaster bandages for the heads.

“Here you go, Mandy! Would you like some, too, Mrs. Nelson?”

“Oh no, I’ll just watch and help.”

A few minutes later, in a whiny voice:

“Grandma, can I try?”

“Better get Mandy some more supplies,” said Teri Jean.

As we team members got to know each other, private jokes made their way into public performances to be shared with our hosts.  One year we were on the team with Carl Bleyle, a musicologist from Ames. He always began his first-night presentation the same way.

“I am a musicologist; no, that is not a disease, although it sometimes makes my students sick!”

He went on with a witty description of his obscure medieval instruments. By the third town, we had a plan. We made a plaster bandage hand puppet in Carl’s likeness along with a set of tiny plaster instruments. On the second night, when everyone in town had heard the real Carl give his spiel, the hand puppet Carl danced around the stage in friendly parody. 

Every town was different. In a tiny town, the tone is often set by a handful of people. If those people are positive, optimistic, can-do folks, that spirit infects the whole town. Of course, most of the towns that went to the trouble of applying for the Touring Arts Team were of that type, but there were notable exceptions.  

In one town, all of the planning and preparation had been done by a single person, a banker’s wife.  We never figured out whether she had failed to spread the news or whether she was just unpopular, but the result was that nobody showed up!  

The next town, Volga, was the polar opposite. The town had a population of 200, and 300 people showed up for the first evening’s performance! It was held in the old opera house, which was in the process of being renovated, but luckily no one had painted over Jenny Lind’s signature, which we found in one of the dressing rooms. Volga had achieved its huge participation by involving as many people as possible in the project.  Each artist stayed with a different family; each artist was assigned an assistant for each workshop, whether or not they wanted one; families not involved in housing were enlisted to bring food to the potlucks. Consequently, everyone in town was involved in one way or another and wouldn’t have dared to stay away!

These were the years of the farm crisis, and, from one year to the next, we watched as local businesses shriveled and big box stores appeared to suck whatever life remained out of the downtowns we passed through.  

One of the women we met told me a story that describes perfectly what we’ve lost.  She was a teacher, and she was reminiscing about the clothing store that had succumbed.  Her husband was a lawyer; he’d called her at school one day and told her that they had to attend a dress-up event that evening.  She had nothing to wear, so she called the local clothing store and asked the owner (who knew her taste and size) to select three outfits and deliver them to her house.  She tried them on after school, picked one out, and returned the other two the following day.  

“Try getting Walmart to do that for you!” she said.  

As the years went by, the shoe and clothing stores were replaced with thrift shops, which we team members eagerly patronized.  One year I found a sock monkey with a black velvet vest and embroidered eyelashes. I named him Terrence Eugene after Teri Jean. He looked just as cheeky as she was! He still hangs out at our puppetry center.

My favorite year was 1986.  Our team that year included Preston Love, a 65-year-old black jazz musician from Omaha who’d toured the Midwest his entire life and knew just how to work an audience. You could tell he’d spent his life performing for white folks: he knew exactly how far he could go in ribbing his audiences without quite insulting them. 

Preston loved fishing.  As soon as we arrived in Oxford Junction, he enlisted some old-timers who took him to the best fishing hole around.  Within the hour, he caught the 40-pound catfish they’d been trying to catch all summer. That, and a giant carp he caught right after, was dinner that evening for a crowd, gathered around a makeshift—plywood on sawhorses—table in the church basement.

“Where’s the cornmeal?” Preston asked the church ladies who graciously allowed him to use the church kitchen and agreed to make the side dishes for the feast he planned.

“Yellow cornmeal? No! I need white!” 

Preston sent the old-timers to the next town for white cornmeal while he gutted and filleted the fish. Cornmeal, Crisco, and cayenne, along with Preston’s cooking skills and the church ladies’ side dishes, made the best dinner we had that summer!  

Preston bonded with the old-timers in more ways than one. It turned out they were all members of a local polka band.  By the second evening, the polka band had become a Dixieland Jazz Band under Preston’s direction!  After the show that night, we all gathered at the mayor’s house for a party.  We heard loud music pulling into the driveway. It was Preston and his band, driving up in a boat of a Cadillac convertible, top-down, old men and instruments spilling out, a recording of their performance in the tape player, the sound turned up as loud as it would go.

Vernon Windsor was the dancer on our team that year. A tall, elegantly built African American, he’d grown up in southern Iowa, close to the Missouri border, and had started adult life as a rodeo bull rider. Growing up in the 1950s, he had a finely tuned sense of what was considered “acceptable” for a man of his complexion. When Teri Jean wanted to cut across a private yard to get to our destination, Vernon declined.

“You won’t catch someone who looks like me cutting across a private yard in this part of Iowa.”

When one of the older women in that little town expressed shock that the Arts Council would allow single and married people of different races to travel in the same vehicles, all of us except Vernon and Preston were horrified. We got an education that summer!

Vernon had a special way of making people feel comfortable. I noticed that he often had overweight, uncoordinated teenagers in his groups and that they always felt secure enough to join in the performance the second evening.  

In Ossian, our last town that year, he even convinced reluctant team members to rehearse and perform a team dance that he had choreographed especially for that town. No one but Vernon could ever have talked klutzy me into dancing in front of an audience!  

J Knight, our other musician, was steadfast and loyal. You knew he’d never desert you onstage, no matter how embarrassing the situation. In Oxford Junction, a town with Czech heritage, he and I got talked into singing a song in Czech, a language neither of us knew. My little Iowa City band—the Honk and Bleat, Non-Marching, Mostly Polka Band—had played this song, so I thought I was prepared. At least I knew the tune. But the words—Za naší vesnicí, na hlavní silnici, bosenský rostou švestky ba-jó—who knew how to pronounce that! Luckily, most of the audience knew the words and how to pronounce them. We were drowned out! 

J carried a suitcase full of harmonicas and organized harmonica ensembles in each town. Along with the instruments, his suitcase contained a large can of Lysol. He sprayed the mouthpieces between users. My nose remembers J in a cloud of Lysol.

Our visual artists that summer were Peter Coyle, a Scottish painter and consummate storyteller, and Dana Schaeffer, a fiber artist who raised sheep and spun her own wool. Peter and Dana were both adept at leading group projects, so the towns were left with sizable pieces to display in their schools or libraries.

Peter’s groups made collages, sometimes faces looking at fish in an aquarium, painted in pastels. Dana’s made large felt hangings depicting rural scenes—usually the landscape surrounding the town we were visiting—felted from raw wool. These works were all created by groups of people who’d never thought of themselves as artists.  Those pieces may still be hanging, reminders of creativity that we shed as we run around the hamster wheel of daily life.

Peter was quite the philosopher. No matter what happened, how embarrassing or grim it might be, he countered by saying, “It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry,” a line I repeat to this day.

Although all of the teams became fairly cohesive units, that 1986 team bonded more quickly and thoroughly than any other we were ever on. Every time we left a town in our State of Iowa van, we felt as if we were on the road to Canterbury.  We echoed Preston as he repeated his standard farewell:

“They love us in Ossian” (or Oxford Junction or Ainsworth or Lisbon)!

We whiled away the hours traveling across the state by telling each other our personal histories and family stories.  Afterwards, I felt as if I’d been on a different planet for eleven days.  

One of the things we all loved about the summer tour was eating foods that we normally didn’t allow ourselves.  J was a notorious health nut, eating sensibly and exercising.  On the third day, I saw him eating a chocolate brownie with ice cream and chocolate syrup. I knew it was all over, and that I might as well give in to the potato chips, mayonnaise, and Kool Whip. The Arts Council had advised the towns that the artists preferred light lunches, perhaps a green salad. One town responded by serving us green Jell-O and brownies for lunch!  Mayonnaise flowed everywhere, so much so that we finally rewrote the words to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O”. 

We amused ourselves in the last town by singing in multiple harmonies:

Mayo, mayo, mayo come and I wanna go home,
Mayo, mayo, mayo come and I wanna go home.
Mayo on potatoes, mayo on the beans,
Mayo on the apples, mayo on the greens.
Mayo on the noodles, mayo on the eggs,
Mayo on everything, running down my legs.

* Schulz was the head puppet. “He called the shots,” said Monica.  (Schulz is featured in a graphic above, holding two hand puppets… named Monica and Teri.) 

Hand, Shadow, Rod: The Story of Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre, by Monica Leo, is published by Ice Cube Press, and was released October 1, 2023. This chapter is printed by permission.
Graphics courtesy of Monica Leo.
Copyright © 2023 by Monica Leo.