Puppets Save the Day

Somehow, without knowing quite how, I found myself agreeing to put on a puppet show for a colleague's community day at her Mosque. Of course, this was weeks ago, so I didn't need to worry abut it. Until last Tuesday when she reminded me it was this weekend. Oops, I hadn't done anything.

I knew we had a few puppets lying around, so I pulled them out and dragged Felicity, Suzanne and one of our visitors Tracey to work out a storyline. We had to entertain these children for around 20 minutes and right now we had nothing but a few puppets; a crocodile, a funny looking little man, a monkey and two identical ones in smart looking clothes. We looked at the puppets in despair.

But somehow, over a couple of hours we worked out a story; the identical puppets were (naturally) twin brothers. They lived on opposite sides of the river and met every year in the park beside the river to celebrate their birthday, and invited their friend monkey. On this particular occasion, monkey arrives early and as he's about to cross the river, Mr Crocodile pops up and won't let him cross. Finally, Croc agrees to take monkey across in exchange for some chocolate cake (yes, any rememblance to reality disppeared quickly). So silly monkey hops on Crocs back, and of course Croc then tries toeat him half way across the river. Fortunately and fairly fortuitously for monkey, there's a tree in the middle of the river which he scampers up. Then the two brothers arrive on either side of hte river but they trick croc into thinking there is just one of them who can magically get from one side of the river to another, without getting wet! Finally they scare croc into submission (through the alleged magic), and he promises not to terrorise poor monkey or other animals again. Yes, it even had a moral because as it turned out crocodile wasn't mean and nasty, contrary to first appearances. He was just lonely and scared because his parents had died and his friends abaondoned him as he wasn't scary enough. And now he had learned his lesson, he had found friends and lived happily ever after...

So, between Tuesday and today, Tracey outlined the script, I wrote the dialogue and Suzanne and Rachel painted the backdrop. And today, to around 50 children and even more adults we put on our puppetshow - The Twins Save the Day! It was all quite amateur but it was a lot of fun and it showed that with a proverbial gun to the head, you can do (not quite) amazing things! Tracey deserted us for a safari but we're going to do an encore this week for some of the classes so she can star in the show she helped produce.

It'll be a while before I volunteer to do something like that again though. Far too much hard work : )