Village Squire, 1977-03, Page 8Richard to get into the music scene. The puppets will have to
wait for weekends, likely though, no matter where they live.
Whatever she gets into Cheryl would like to be able to find
the time to get out and see what some of the other puppet
theatres are doing and to learn from them. She's never
studied puppetry except for a few books and never seen other
puppet theatres. Most of her work has been learned through
experimentation, by working with a ball of plasticine to
design faces or sitting down over a box of scraps to make
backdrops. She'd like to learn more about things like lighting.
One might expect a little bitterness on the part of such a
young woman providing a needed service but have to
scrounge for a living but Cheryl seems to be pretty much
philosophical about it. When she graduated from high school
she says she was going to go to university but then saw the
program at Thistletown where she could get involved
immediately in work with children while she took a course.
Soon she was training university graduates who were making
far more than she was. Similarly, when she worked at the
library she sat side by side with university graduates who
earned two or three times her salary even though she got
involved in all kinds of extra duties like the puppetry and
working with children. She realized then, she says with a
laugh, that she was always going to have the kind of job
where you didn't get rich.
The family doesn't have high expectations in the way of a
living style, she says. They never expect, for instance, to own
their own house or anything like that. The L.I.P. grant, for
instance, is a luxury in that it allows them for a change to pay
their rent on time. Usually, she laughs, they're a couple of
months behind to their understanding landlord during the
winter months.
The trouble with grants, the couple found, is that you apply
for them, then don't know until the last minute whether or not
you're going to get one. For this project, for instance, they
were supposed to start in November, but didn't find out they
had the grant until mid-November. The couple had already
been working for some time on the puppets and sets and had
to have some kind of income so started accepting weekend
bookings to entertain at parties and such during the
Christmas season. As it worked out, they got the grant and so
were working all week long at local libraries giving shows and
then working weekends for the shows they'd booked
privately. It was a little too much, Cheryl says.
For many children in the area, it will be a disappointment if
No Strings Attached disappears from the local scene.
Puppetry and other live theatre has just begun to be part of
their lives, awaking their imaginations after years of
mind -numbing television. No doubt a lot of them are hoping
that things work out in such a way that No Strings Attached is
around for a good long time.
KEYBOARD KAPERS
a
Production of Pulsifer Music
Seaforth
Invites young students and players of piano
and organ to audition for KEYBOARD KAPERS
cash prizes
phone HENRYPULSIFER at 527 - 0053
Places and times will be advertised by poster and
paper.
PG. 6. THE VILLAGE SQUIRE/MARCH, 1977.