The 19-year-old woman from Nova Scotia had just finished her first year of university. A piano student, she was already sick of sitting in practice rooms for eight hours a day. But after a dishwashing job at a summer camp gave her access to silk screening and photography classes, Lee Armstrong finally had a sense of direction. So she walked into Canada Manpower, a recruiting agency, seeking a job.
It was the early 1970s, when a generation of young women were given options similar to those Armstrong heard that day: waitress, secretary or clerk.
“Oh,” she remembers responding. “Well, no, I’d like a job in the arts.” “Well, we don’t have those,” the recruiting agency clerk said.
“Could you make one?”
With hesitation, the clerk took out a folder and wrote “the arts” on it, and she tucked Armstrong’s resume inside. That small action opened up a future for Armstrong, eventually leading to her career as a prominent puppeteer who paved the way for Northern California’s next generation.
Whether it’s the one-off Muppet Show reboot starring Sabrina Carpenter that aired in February, Baby Yoda showing up at the Oscars or Project Hail Mary’s beloved alien puppet Rocky, “there’s absolutely a kind of explosion in puppetry” right now, according to Hunter College puppetry scholar Claudia Orenstein. Most recently, the Los Angeles-based Bob Baker Marionettes performed at the Coachella music festival in April, and a Minneapolis Mayday parade featured a giant puppet performance in protest of ICE raids.
While puppets seem to be everywhere nowadays, Northern California has long had a vibrant puppetry community. It has been home to Jim Henson collaborators like Armstrong and Frank Oz; the nation’s oldest continually operating puppet theatre, Storybook Theatre at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland; premier puppet manufacturing company Folkmanis Puppets; and the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild, one of the earliest regional puppet guilds founded in 1954.
Though history tends to focus on male artists, women have long shaped the regional puppet scene. (Even the word “puppeteer” was invented by a woman.) Some of the Guild’s founding members included “godmother of puppetry” Lettie Connell Schubert (1929-2006), who mentored Frank Oz, and Oz’s parents, Mike and Frances Oznowicz. Oz’s mother, Frances, would sew costumes for the marionettes her husband carved. And Folkmanis Puppets was founded by Judy Folkmanis in 1976, who got her start selling animal puppets on the streets of Berkeley.
In the arts world, puppetry is often overlooked. Some reduce it to children’s entertainment or wiggling dolls. It’s the “poor stepchild of the arts,” Armstrong said.
But for puppeteers, the art form is transformative. It’s engineering, writing, performing, theatre, teaching, producing, playing and more. It’s versatile, accessible and easily learned — though not so easily mastered. Puppets can do things that people can’t always do, such as break down social barriers, convey comic exaggeration, ease anxious situations and inspire deep, interpersonal empathy.
To bring a puppet to life, a puppet must have breath, movement and a touch of nonhuman magic. After all, if a human can do the same thing, what need is there for a puppet?
Armstrong’s story and those of two women who later joined her in Northern California — educator Marisol “Moddy” Himmel and art director Allison Sieber — reflect the many dimensions of puppetry and reveal the meanings they find in it.
The next day, the Canada Manpower clerk got a call. Mermaid Theatre, a performing arts troupe based in Nova Scotia, was looking for a puppeteer. Armstrong got the job.
More than a half-century later, Armstrong, 73, said she thinks she was the only person who auditioned. She recalled putting a puppet on her hand for the first time and thinking, “This is wonderful.”
Her Sonoma home office doubles as the production studio Images in Motion, which produces puppets, molds and casts and other services for film and television. Bedecked with memorabilia, it looks like a page taken out of a search-and-find book. Enter and you might spot a miniature Kermit the Frog, Anxiety from Inside Out 2 and a small, golden Yoda head hidden within. On one wall, there’s a large movie poster of Being John Malkovich; on another, there’s James and the Giant Peach. One shelf is lined with Barbie-like celebrity dolls, another with trophies from regional Emmys.
“I call myself Lucky Lee,” Armstrong said. She feels she was “meant” to do puppetry. “I’ll try something, and it will happen. And it will work, and it will lead to other things and meeting new people.”
Those “new people” and “other things” encompass a storied puppeteering history: from touring schools and libraries with Canadian troupes, to being credited in the 1999 film Being John Malkovich, to co-founding her own studio with the late puppeteer Kamela Portuges in 1989.
For those not immersed in the world of puppets, her most recognizable feat is perhaps her involvement in the work of Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets and Sesame Street.
In 1982, Armstrong auditioned for Henson’s ‘Fraggle Rock,’ a children’s show about a society of tiny, cave-dwelling, carefree Muppets — the Fraggles — who learn to coexist with other fantasy creatures.
‘Fraggle Rock’ was a co-production with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, which meant job opportunities for Canadian performers like Armstrong. About two hundred people auditioned, Armstrong estimated. When they started to whittle it down, she had something to her advantage.
“[Henson] said, ‘Oh, you look just like my daughter,’” she recalled. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s a good sign.’”
It was. She got hired for background puppeteering.
‘Fraggle Rock’ took over a building in downtown Toronto, Armstrong remembered: complete with a big studio, production offices and workshops. Mondays were for script read-throughs. Tuesdays were for recording songs. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays were for shoots.
As a background puppeteer, Armstrong was only required to come in for the shoots. But she found herself drawn to everything. She always attended the read-throughs and spent her free time in the shop, helping to feather Fraggles and learning patterns for different puppets.
Shops aren’t usually so willing to share their secrets, but here, everybody was open and helpful, Armstrong said — especially Henson.
“You learned so much just watching what Jim did,” she said.
The opening musical sequence was one of the first scenes Armstrong filmed. One hand controlled the mouth of a background Fraggle and another hand controlled both arms, which were connected by a V-shaped rod. Before the camera rolled, she and the other puppeteered would practice lip syncing the puppets to the lyrics.
“Dance your cares away…” Squeezing the bottom of the V rod to bring the arms together, they clapped twice. “Worries for another day! Let the music play…” Clap clap! “Down in Fraggle Rock!”
After each take, Henson, the puppeteers and the tech crew gathered around monitors scattered across the floor to watch a playback.
“Jim would go, ‘Hmm, well, that was good. What did we like about that?’” Armstrong recalled. “And then, ‘What could we do to make it better?’”
His shoots were deeply collaborative, and Armstrong tries to model that same care in her own studio.
“I really admire that Jim cared both so much about the art and the quality,” Armstrong said, sitting in her office. She opened her mouth again, but her voice caught. Deep in memory, her eyes welled. “Oh, I always get this way when we talk about Jim.”
After working on three seasons of ‘Fraggle Rock’ from 1982 to 1984, Armstrong ended up in the Bay Area. She met local Guild co-founder Lettie Schubert, who helped bring her into the local puppet scene. In the time since, Armstrong has taught numerous workshops and served in many roles on the board of the Guild.
“Lettie was a great connector of people,” Armstrong said. “That’s what I try to do, because she did that for me.”
In interviews with Peninsula Press, many local puppeteers called Armstrong a mentor. One of them was Marisol “Moddy” Himmel, an educational puppeteer and ventriloquist based in Sacramento. There, she runs Spark, a homeschool enrichment program featuring puppets.
Himmel, 41, got her start in puppetry over 10 years ago while working as a nanny for a friend’s first-grade daughter. One day, while playing with paper dolls they’d drawn at the kitchen table, the girl said, “I wish she was real.” It took a bit to figure out what she meant, but eventually Himmel landed on it: “Like a puppet?”
The girl lit up. “Yes, a puppet!” And so, the puppet was born: Alexa, a Muppet-style little girl with skin fashioned out of a light pink blanket, blonde yarn pigtails and eyes made of plastic spoons.
Alexa launched the next decade of Himmel’s puppet endeavors, just some of which included learning ventriloquism, co-founding the children’s pen pal project “Club Squatch” and creating its sasquatch puppet character Big Mama.
“I never set out to become a puppeteer. It just kind of happened, and then I fell in love with the art side, the stories of it, then the people,” Himmel said. “Once I joined the Guild, I was done.”
At Spark, Alexa helps students work on social-emotional skills, while other puppets help them learn science and foreign languages.
Spark lives in a garage revamped as a classroom in Himmel’s backyard. On a sunny Wednesday morning, Himmel’s youngest group of students — 14 elementary school-aged kids — played basketball and Red Light, Green Light during recess in her driveway. They laughed, squealed, and — as kids do — squabbled.
That’s where Alexa came in.
After recess, the kids tumbled back into the classroom and onto the mat on the floor. It was time to debrief and talk through issues that came up during play.
Himmel fetched Alexa from under her desk in the back and slid the puppet on her right arm. With the arm slit conveniently hidden under Alexa’s shirt, it looked like Himmel was just holding a child on her hip, rather than operating a puppet.
When the kids spotted Alexa, they erupted in a cacophony of shrills.
As soon as Alexa was on Himmel’s arm, she came to life. She nodded and looked directly at the kids when they spoke. Never stagnant, her head twitched back and forth when listening. When she whispered, her pink hand — attached to a slim rod, discreetly operated by Himmel’s left hand with nonchalant flicks of the wrist — raised to the side of her mouth. When exasperated, her head tilted up and her arm flew into the air.
Her movements already looked natural, but Himmel’s ventriloquism really sold her. The voice was high-pitched and childlike, perfect for a puppet who is perpetually six-and-three-quarters in age. With Himmel talking through a toothy, motionless smile, it was as if Alexa was her own person.
“All right Alexa,” Himmel said. “We brought you here because we have some issues.” “Tissues?!” ‘Alexa’ blurted.
The kids giggled. “Not tissues. Issues!” said one. “Issues means trouble,” said another.
“Ohhh, trouble! Alexa is on the case,” ‘Alexa’ said.
The students explained what happened. One boy accidentally hit a girl while whirling around on a spinning chair. The girl was upset because she got hit; the boy was upset because he didn’t mean to. Alexa listened attentively, then asked Himmel to tell them about “intention.” With the help of Alexa, they discussed the difference between intending to do something and doing something on accident, and how intention doesn’t always minimize impact.
And it’s still important to say sorry, Himmel said.
Puppetry has given Himmel a way to embrace different roles she might be hesitant to step into as herself, whereas puppets are welcome right in.
“Through Alexa, I get to be six-and-a-half forever,” she said.
Himmel, who has an entire shed filled to the brim with puppet projects and improvises her puppets on the fly, feels there’s still so much to learn.
“I feel like I’m a visitor into the world even though I’ve been in it for 10 years,” Himmel said. “The world of puppetry is so vast, and the more I dive into it, the more I find, and it opens up even more.”
Two years ago, that world opened up professionally for Allison Sieber, 43. Though she does not consider herself a puppeteer, Sieber is committed to learning the craft.
As an artist, Sieber always told her friends her ideal job was to “make puppets for drag queens,” and one day she found out about an opportunity.
The puppet designer job in question was not for drag queens but for Folkmanis Puppets, a leading children’s puppet manufacturer in Emeryville, CA. If you walk into a toy store and see a plush, realistic animal puppet, chances are it’s a Folkmanis puppet.
Sieber ultimately became Folkmanis’ art director, not puppet designer. She has led its marketing efforts in photographing the puppets, putting together catalogs and, most recently, curating an exhibit at the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco honoring Folkmanis’ 50th anniversary.
Raised by a single mom and an aunt in rural Ohio, Sieber came from a family of makers, where everyone knew how to sew. For Sieber, that craftiness manifested in a range of hobbies: elaborate Halloween and renaissance faire costumes, taxidermy, mechanics… and puppets. She always liked the Muppets and “fairy tale puppety things” like Henson’s The Storyteller and The Dark Crystal.
There was something about pairing a real person with a puppet that “felt like the most magical type of media to me,” she said.
One of the first puppets she ever made was for a costume party at Ohio University, where she studied business a couple decades ago. Using nothing but dowels, pink and blue fabric, ping pong balls and pipe cleaners, she and a friend built the Martians from Sesame Street: sack-like monsters with eyeballs and antennae at the tops of their heads, and long jaws that uttered limited vocabulary in response to Earth’s strange objects: “yip yip,” “uh huh,” “nope nope nope.” They measured about two feet wide and three feet tall.
Dressed in all black with their Martians in hand, Sieber and her friend headed from the dorms to a neighborhood a few blocks away. Inside a tragically unrepaired Victorian house was the typical college party scene: cute decorations, sticky floors, someone’s cupcakes, a keg. It smelled like beer and a bad attempt at making a casserole.
College parties weren’t always fun, Sieber admitted. But “if you take a puppet to a party full of people you don’t know, you are instantly comfortable.”
“We both get to be these entertainers, who don’t have to have a conversation with people if we don’t want to. We could hide behind our puppets the whole time and just be two yip-yip monsters, interrogating what a red cup is,” Sieber said.
She later moved to the Bay Area, where she worked in the bike industry and, after getting a second bachelor’s degree in art direction from Miami Ad University, in creative marketing. These jobs left her feeling burnt out, and she was already looking to switch industries when the role at Folkmanis fell into her lap.
Taking that job two years ago opened up a whole world of Bay Area puppetry — including within the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild.
“My first Guild meeting was their puppetry festival in Sonoma,” Sieber said. It featured a number of workshops, from how to make mouths to how to make moveable eyes to how to do TV puppetry with Armstrong. “I signed up for all of them because I was just so freaking curious.”
The Guild’s welcoming community and willingness to share their expertise made her want to get even more involved.
“They’re all doing their own things, and I want to help them out in turn,” Sieber said. “The more skills you have, the more helpful you can be to each other as a community.”
And the best part?
Puppetry “is goddamn fun,” she said.
