Kathleen never forgot me in the morning anymore, mostly because by the time she figured out which black jacket she was going to wear, I’d already packed my Choc-o-rama and was waiting to go to the studio and see Nick again. After work, it didn’t matter. I could get home on my own. Mum was always going on about how responsible I was. I guess that’s why Kathleen gave me a key to the condo and a bunch of taxi vouchers and pretty much let me just come and go as I pleased.16
Of course that meant Nick didn’t have to drive me home anymore, but I still got to see him about as much as my heart could stand. He used to come around to Zola’s workstation just to talk to me and see how I was doing. I’d read all the scripts and I’d always figured out at least one good thing to say about them. (That was harder than it sounds.)
Of course that was a lot of thinking for nothing. I never did say much to Nick about the scripts.
Or anything for that matter.
But that was okay too. I talked to him a lot in my head. In real life, he’d say, “How you doin’, Tally?” or “Havin’ fun?” and I’d spend the rest of the day in my own little mental conversation with him. (When I wasn’t working, that is. I couldn’t just zone out the whole day.) I’d tell him jokes, talk to him about ideas I had for the show, sometimes I’d even have arguments with him—which would upset us both of course.
At least in my head.
I didn’t say much to Zola either, but that didn’t make any difference. She was “in touch with other people’s feelings.”17 It was kind of nice being around someone who didn’t need a constant “blah-blah-blah” going just to prove you were friends. And anyway, we were too busy to talk most of the time.
I’m not pretending I was a real puppet wrangler or anything, but I did do a lot of stuff. For starters, Zola and I went to the read-through every morning. That’s when everyone sits around a big table and the puppeteers read the script out loud. It’s kind of like a rehearsal.
Someone sat there with a stopwatch making sure the episode wasn’t a second too long. (Okay, maybe not a second, but if it was a minute too long everyone went hysterical and started throwing out whole pages of the script.) The director listened to it all like he was Steven Spielberg or something.
He was always saying things like “Can you try that with a smile in your voice this time?”
Kathleen’s job seemed to be cutting any lines that actually got a laugh. As I understand it, in little kids’ TV, if a joke is funny, it’s got to come out. Otherwise, someone might get “offended.” I could tell this really made the writer mad. She hardly ever got a laugh, so chopping a good one must have killed her. She tried not to show it, but there wasn’t much she could do about that big vein on the side of her head that would start throbbing like some alien life-form whenever a line got cut.18 I guess she really needed the job.
Zola and I went to the read-through so we’d know which puppets and which costumes had to be ready for which scenes. (It wasn’t like we didn’t know already—but we went just to be on the safe side. You would too. Make one little mistake and Mel would go hairy.)
As soon as the read-through was over, we had to start shooting. We only had a day to do a whole fifteen-minute episode. At first I thought, A day?! To do a fifteen-minute show?! Like, What are you, lazy or something?
But that’s just because I didn’t know.
It takes for-ev-er to get anything done. You see some little goofball puppet pick up a banana on TV and it’s like, big deal. You don’t realize that:
a. It took the puppeteer seven takes just to pick the banana up with those little foam rubber hands and then
b. he kept dropping it so
c. they had to reshoot the first half of the scene (the part before he picked up the banana),
d. stop the camera,
e. get the puppet wrangler to tape the banana onto the puppet’s hand and
f. shoot the rest of the scene as if it all went together, but then
g. someone up in the control room noticed that you could see a teensy bit of tape so
h. the floor director went nuts and
i. the puppet wrangler had to race back up and take off some of the tape—but not too much or the banana would fall off again—and then
j. they had to reshoot the scene, only now
k. someone else noticed a little itty-bitty flick of the puppeteer’s arm coming out the puppet’s behind so
l. they had to shoot the scene again, but this time, by mistake, instead of saying, “This is the best banana,” the puppeteer said, “This is the breast banana”, and
m. everybody started laughing (except the floor director who was screaming, “Cut! Cut! Cut!” and “Can we stop acting like bleeding children?”) so
n. they had to shoot the scene again, except by now the banana had gone all brown and gross so
o. they had to untape it,
p. tape on a new banana (that looked exactly the same as the old one used to look because it had to match the first part of the scene) and then
q. start all over again.
(I’m not making any of this up. I mean, working on a TV show could be really fun, but it could be really boring too. I was just lucky to have Nick in my head, always anxious to steal a few precious moments alone with me. Ha-ha.)
What I’m saying is that after the read-through we had to boot it for the rest of the day. Everyone else got an hour off for lunch, but we usually just had to woof back some muffins (or in Zola’s case this health food “snack” that looked a lot like something I used to feed my guinea pig19) and keep going. We were either trying to prepare for the next scene or get a head start on another episode.
I didn’t mind. I liked it. I did a lot of the running around for Zola—you know, racing over to the organic grocery to buy herbal cigarettes so we could blow smoke out Bytesie’s ears when he got mad. Or tracking down some old Styrofoam packing to stuff inside Ram the day his head kept caving in. (It’s a long story.) Or finding a little sailor hat for Amanda when she got to be captain of the Friend Ship. (Get it?) That kind of thing.
I hardly ever did anything with the real puppets. Which is just as well. Can you imagine me trying to keep a straight face dressing Bitsie up as a stupid little cosmic cowpoke or something?
My job was to look after the puppet doubles. They’re kind of like stuntmen. Nobody wants Brad Pitt to get hurt so they pay somebody nobody cares about to jump off the cliff instead. Same thing with the doubles. They look exactly like the real puppets—they’re made out of the same mold—but they’re cheap. They don’t have any mecs inside so it’s okay to throw them around or roll them up in a ball or drop them over the side of the Friend Ship.
I’d get the doubles in and out of their costumes. I’d take this teeny-weeny paintbrush and fix any little chips or nicks they’d get. Sometimes I’d even do bigger stuff.
Like once, when Rom’s double got its head torn off,20 I had to take it all the way across town to The Puppet Plantation. That’s the company that made the puppets in the first place. It has all the molds and chemicals and tools you need for a big repair job like that. Laird MacAdam, the guy who owns it, looks kind of creepy—like going out in the daylight might make him melt or something—but he was really nice.
He showed me all around the “shop” and let me watch while he put Rom’s double back together. I would have loved to go back there, but every other time Laird insisted on coming to the studio to pick up the puppets himself. It was easy to see why.
He had a crush on Zola. It must have been a huge major throbbing crush because it was the only thing that ever got Laird out of the shop. The guy literally worked all the time.
So going to The Puppet Plantation was a pretty unusual thing for me to do. Mostly I’d just take care of the little stuff.
Then, at the end of the day, I’d dust the puppet doubles with baby powder—that’s so the latex foam didn’t get all sticky—and lock them away in the storage room.
And that was when the really fun part of my day started.
16 That – or she just couldn’t be bothered about me.
17 Like mine about Nick, for instance, but she never even teased me about it once. Who else would pass up a golden opportunity like that?
18 I know this sounds mean, but I actually kind of looked forward to jokes getting killed. Not because the show didn’t need a few laughs. Believe me, it did. But I just wanted to see that vein kick in again. It was amazing. Audrey – that was the writer’s name – would be explaining why she thought the joke should stay and sounding like Miss I. B. Reasonable, but everyone knew she was seriously p-o.ed. I mean, the vein would get throbbing so hard that the big old hippie earring on her left ear would start dingling away like a windchime or a marimba band or something. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, which is really rude I know. I just kept on thinking that if Audrey were my mother I would have encouraged her to wear a hat or a different haircut or even one of those big white bandages that cartoon people wrap around their head when they have a toothache. At least it wouldn’t be as noticeable as that vein. What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t entirely my fault that I accidentally called her Artery instead of Audrey. It was really embarrassing, especially since everybody else started doing that coughing and nose-blowing thing you do when you’retrying to pretend you’re not laughing. I felt so terrible. It’s hard to believe that Bess says that type of thing all the time. On purpose.
19 Wilbur died really young, even for a guinea pig, and I always wondered if I should mention that to Zola. I was worried she might actually be harming herself eating so many of those honey-sesame-nut chews. I figured she must have felt the same way about me and the chocolate chip cookies. She didn’t say anything about it so I decided not to either. But I still worried.
20 Bitsie’s fault, of course.