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Excerpts from "Planet Puppet: A Weekend at the Ventriloquist Convention," by Mina Tavakoli, n+1, Issue 49: Rerun, Winter 2025:
Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists — where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.
The human delegation was only slightly less mixed. Many attendees were entertainers — clowns, cruise-ship performers, Santa impersonators, balloon artists (known in the trade as “twisters”), theme-park proprietors, theme-park employees, and (hugely overindexed) magicians — clapping one another on the back and nodding like Marines celebrating dockage on home soil. Most of the males were adult men. Most of the females were prepubescent. T-shirts read I ♥ MY WIFE and I ♥ YOUR WIFE and I'M NOT OLD— I’M CLASSIC! but these credos hardly needed spelling out. Neither hate nor time was supposed to have purchase in this Holiday Inn, because this was the ConVENTion’s welcome reception, where the cream of ventdom was swarming the warm and ferny lobby to relive the lives and re-die the deaths of the vaudeville era in the pursuit of snapping consciousness in two.
[...]
All throughout the night, the mood onstage was pugnacious grading into the homicidal. Antagonisms — alarmingly relentless, restless antagonisms — were exchanged with puppets that were cruel, podunk, irascible, wily, horny, whiny, stubborn, dumb, deaf, preadolescent, or old. Maegan, a brunette vent as facially acrobatic as a young Lucille Ball, tangled with her dolly, Jody, in a fascinating argument about whether or not Maegan was “believable as a ventriloquist.” Tony and Jeff were embattled over the phrase “you suck.” Nigel looked helplessly at the audience as Miss Cindy mopped the floor with him.
“You seem distracted,” she says.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” he responds, visibly sweating.
Cindy points at the audience. “This ugly man’s falling asleep.”
“There’s a lot of people here. Please make me look good.”
“That’s impossible,” she says.
Here was the puppet master’s pas de deux: between id and superego, between the ecstatic lunacy in which we spend our childhoods and the self-doubt in which we spend most of the years thereafter. These private flailings were almost movingly psychotherapeutic to witness, as the puppet — which worked like a conduit, or a crowbar — cracked open the shadow districts typically locked up in the unconscious, turning them into patter.
[...]
“We have to make people believe that this is a two-character play,” announced another instructor, sweating charismatically through his Hawaiian shirt. “If we don’t believe that he’s a real person, we have a problem. Remember this phrase — you’re ‘committing to a bit.’ You’re switching their minds into your world. Treat your act and your puppet with great dignity.”
Even more than at the Junior Open Mic, it was glaringly obvious that puppetry, like sports or foreign languages, is a practice best taken up before puberty. Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room. And the children seemed to inherently grasp the complex psychodramatic relationship they shared with their dummies — they were not sidekick, nor instrument, nor prop, but extension of brain and self.
[...]
Puppet comes from the Latin pupa, which is not only the root for the French word for doll, but also the name for the cocooned insect in a post-larval state. Not alive, not dead — not unconscious, not conscious. Kentucky, which has those glossy black roads and Grant Woodian horizons of curly trees, barns, and ponies, was a dignified vantage to reckon with the undeadedness we witnessed. My seatmate, who introduced himself as a vent of forty years, splayed his wallet to show me photos of him shaking hands with Jeff Dunham, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump. “I have a Winchell heart,” he said, proudly. “I flatlined for twelve minutes on an operating table. Winchell saved my life.”
“Those dummies are a communion,” he explained, as the highway swished outside. “My grandmother, a medicine woman, spoke to the dead. What you saw is a little like that. We speak through those figures, but they speak to us.”
The thin daytime moon hovered above us. We whizzed past a Chinese restaurant, a fruit stand, a morgue, acreage of two-star hotels. I asked if he’d heard voices in his head when not with a puppet.
“I am a lifelong resident of that planet,” he said, smiling and squeezing my hand. “I believe I’ve been given many gifts.”
[...]
The gospel of Vent Haven, I considered from the deck chair, was like any faith or art. It shared in the belief that the whole language of the human spirit was huger, vaster, more wild and sprawling than what could be kept in flesh. Its congregation, surrendering to this idea, spoke in tongues. It demanded courage, tested patience, had saints and, like any faith, no need for justification. All it asked was a commitment to its bit.
“Ny nother Nary has nany nonkeys!” shrieked a girl in a pistachio one-piece. Her scuba mask made it hard to tell if I’d seen her in the Junior Vent classroom the day prior. “Nany nonkeys!” she shouted. “Nany nonkeys!”
A very small boy, standing on her left in a pair of swim underwear, mouthed the words privately to himself as he studied her screams.
Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists — where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.
The human delegation was only slightly less mixed. Many attendees were entertainers — clowns, cruise-ship performers, Santa impersonators, balloon artists (known in the trade as “twisters”), theme-park proprietors, theme-park employees, and (hugely overindexed) magicians — clapping one another on the back and nodding like Marines celebrating dockage on home soil. Most of the males were adult men. Most of the females were prepubescent. T-shirts read I ♥ MY WIFE and I ♥ YOUR WIFE and I'M NOT OLD— I’M CLASSIC! but these credos hardly needed spelling out. Neither hate nor time was supposed to have purchase in this Holiday Inn, because this was the ConVENTion’s welcome reception, where the cream of ventdom was swarming the warm and ferny lobby to relive the lives and re-die the deaths of the vaudeville era in the pursuit of snapping consciousness in two.
[...]
All throughout the night, the mood onstage was pugnacious grading into the homicidal. Antagonisms — alarmingly relentless, restless antagonisms — were exchanged with puppets that were cruel, podunk, irascible, wily, horny, whiny, stubborn, dumb, deaf, preadolescent, or old. Maegan, a brunette vent as facially acrobatic as a young Lucille Ball, tangled with her dolly, Jody, in a fascinating argument about whether or not Maegan was “believable as a ventriloquist.” Tony and Jeff were embattled over the phrase “you suck.” Nigel looked helplessly at the audience as Miss Cindy mopped the floor with him.
“You seem distracted,” she says.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” he responds, visibly sweating.
Cindy points at the audience. “This ugly man’s falling asleep.”
“There’s a lot of people here. Please make me look good.”
“That’s impossible,” she says.
Here was the puppet master’s pas de deux: between id and superego, between the ecstatic lunacy in which we spend our childhoods and the self-doubt in which we spend most of the years thereafter. These private flailings were almost movingly psychotherapeutic to witness, as the puppet — which worked like a conduit, or a crowbar — cracked open the shadow districts typically locked up in the unconscious, turning them into patter.
[...]
“We have to make people believe that this is a two-character play,” announced another instructor, sweating charismatically through his Hawaiian shirt. “If we don’t believe that he’s a real person, we have a problem. Remember this phrase — you’re ‘committing to a bit.’ You’re switching their minds into your world. Treat your act and your puppet with great dignity.”
Even more than at the Junior Open Mic, it was glaringly obvious that puppetry, like sports or foreign languages, is a practice best taken up before puberty. Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind — those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt — more swiftly outsmarted, pacified, or outright killed than in that room. And the children seemed to inherently grasp the complex psychodramatic relationship they shared with their dummies — they were not sidekick, nor instrument, nor prop, but extension of brain and self.
[...]
Puppet comes from the Latin pupa, which is not only the root for the French word for doll, but also the name for the cocooned insect in a post-larval state. Not alive, not dead — not unconscious, not conscious. Kentucky, which has those glossy black roads and Grant Woodian horizons of curly trees, barns, and ponies, was a dignified vantage to reckon with the undeadedness we witnessed. My seatmate, who introduced himself as a vent of forty years, splayed his wallet to show me photos of him shaking hands with Jeff Dunham, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump. “I have a Winchell heart,” he said, proudly. “I flatlined for twelve minutes on an operating table. Winchell saved my life.”
“Those dummies are a communion,” he explained, as the highway swished outside. “My grandmother, a medicine woman, spoke to the dead. What you saw is a little like that. We speak through those figures, but they speak to us.”
The thin daytime moon hovered above us. We whizzed past a Chinese restaurant, a fruit stand, a morgue, acreage of two-star hotels. I asked if he’d heard voices in his head when not with a puppet.
“I am a lifelong resident of that planet,” he said, smiling and squeezing my hand. “I believe I’ve been given many gifts.”
[...]
The gospel of Vent Haven, I considered from the deck chair, was like any faith or art. It shared in the belief that the whole language of the human spirit was huger, vaster, more wild and sprawling than what could be kept in flesh. Its congregation, surrendering to this idea, spoke in tongues. It demanded courage, tested patience, had saints and, like any faith, no need for justification. All it asked was a commitment to its bit.
“Ny nother Nary has nany nonkeys!” shrieked a girl in a pistachio one-piece. Her scuba mask made it hard to tell if I’d seen her in the Junior Vent classroom the day prior. “Nany nonkeys!” she shouted. “Nany nonkeys!”
A very small boy, standing on her left in a pair of swim underwear, mouthed the words privately to himself as he studied her screams.