With broccoli ice cream, Aesop's fables and a suitcase full of puppets, Steve Abrams gave a lesson Saturday afternoon on puppetry, theater and manners.
Abrams was president of the Puppeteers of America organization and is currently an associate editor for Puppetry Journal. He has been puppeteering for 30 years and said he most enjoys working with third or fourth graders.
"Young ones have that pure innocence and laughter. They just believe in the puppets," he said. "It's very rewarding."
As part of Family Day Weekend at the University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, he performed to an audience of about 60 in the Egypt section.
But his show was more than just entertainment. He began with Bandi, a blue hand-puppet who had not cleaned up his room, but wanted broccoli ice cream.
"There's three dirty socks under his bed!" exclaimed Abrams. "Are you going to pick them up?"
Children grinned in sympathy when Bandi yelped, "What about the ice cream?"
"No ice cream before you pick up your socks," Abrams firmly responded.
Abrams proceeded to make a puppet out of a paper bag "so that you guys know how to do this." He asked the children to do a happy face, a sad face and a mad face as potential expressions for the puppet. He said that people often think all puppets have to be happy.
"Some TV shows are like that," Abrams said. "Everything is cute and happy. They drive me crazy! I won't say the name of the worst one."
But then, he muttered quite audibly, "It's got a purple dinosaur in it."
Abrams showed hand puppets, paper bag puppets, Indonesian string puppets and rod puppets, giving a brief but well-informed history lesson on each.
The audience, half of whom were sitting on the floor because there were not enough chairs, was fully engaged throughout. They made faces, moved like a string puppet when asked to and even allowed a bird puppet with an appetite for noses and freckles to nibble their faces.
The final part of the show was three Aesop's fables -- "Hare and the Tortoise," "Lion and the Mouse" and "Fox and the Grapes" -- woven into one. In addition to the morals in the original tales, Abrams added more in tying them together.
After the fox gives up on the "sour" grapes, the turtle passes by and says magic words to make the grapes fall down: "abracadabra" and "hocus pocus." But the word that finally works is, as the turtle says, "the best" one -- please.
Toddlers Johanna Bear and her sister Calla Bush-St.George both said that their favorite part was when "the turtle won the race." Johanna pronounced the whole affair a "tongue-clucking day," and wandered off to look at mummies, happily clucking away.
