We gathered several times at Marbles's place for fine-tuning the script. This was always a lot of fun, and I so looked forward to these meetings. It felt like being home.
Marbles's father was a family physician, and his mother was a midwife who liked to eat. A lot. They both smoked, and this seemed like the strangest thing to me for people who should have known out of mere professional experience that it was a bad thing. You only live once, I guess.
The family doctor always held a cigarillo in a corner of his mouth, and the midwife occasionally joined him, although she also liked a cigarette, placed very fancily in an antique silver cigarette holder which must have been over one hundred years old (so I reckoned). (Marbles just smoked along passively, day after day, month after month, but in those days such things were tolerated.) The good doctor's house was filled with an eternal smog of cigar smoke and cigarette dust. I kind of liked that smell, although afterwards the first thing to do was change clothes and wash up thoroughly in order to get rid of it. Needless to say, the doctor and the midwife both had a nice set of yellow-brownish teeth. But they appeared to be happy.
(Later the good doctor was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, and only six months after the diagnosis — which was a death sentence as he knew only too well — he died a terrible death following an extremely painful battle against the disease, which got him in a wheelchair after several of his vertebrae were eaten up by the big C. He was such a nice man, but still got a place of honor in some dark corner of Dante's inferno. He received quite some news coverage after having become a dying front man fighting in his last months for the social status of family doctors. But we did not know that this was going to happen when we were twelve. And in fact, it wasn't. Things only happen when they happen. Not before.)
(When the good doctor had died, Marbles's parental house which contained his father's practise, was sold soon to a new M.D. in town, who promised to take good care of it, along with the patients that came with the practise. Unfortunately the new family doctor's wife had other plans, as she appeared to take the marital vows on the light side, and had private meetings with a rather large portion of male patients of her loving husband, especially if they swam in money. Probably she liked to swim along. The poor M.D. fathered, raised and loved a boy who wasn't his, and had to buy her out of the practise eventually, after which his financial situation almost froze his will to live. But somehow he survived, and gained much respect through his ever polite and humble way of handling situations, patients, his boy and himself.
Word has it that his (by then) ex-wife ended up on the streets of N.Y. city, where she gave any passer-by the time of his life without any kind of protection, if only he would sponsor the next shot of whatever it was she so desperately needed. She probably built up some kind of drug addiction when she still had access to her husband's medicine cabinet, and the ball really got rolling when eventually the money she received after the divorce settlement started to run out.)
Around about the last time I ever was in Marbles's old home before he left us to take up his biology studies in Canada — we must have been twenty-something — we were sitting at the big oak family dinner table, having finished a nice and rich meal as always, in the fogs of the doctor and midwife's tobacco perfume. Steak and fries, fried onion rings and a green salad on the side topped with ranch, and ice cream for desert.
Marbles told us he wanted to show his admission letter to Vancouver Tech University. He proudly announced the moment.
"Le moment suprême has arrived. Brandy anyone ?"
Nobody declined, and the mood even got better after the second and third round of brandy had been served. Marbles took a fancy envelope out of his pocket. A drunk uncle (there's always one there) started to sing The Star-Spangled Banner in a loud voice.
"Oh say can you-ou see
by the dawn's early light,
What so PROOOOOOUUUUUUDLY we hailed
at the twilight's last gleammmmming ?" (The moment was indeed unforgettable.)
"Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perrrrrrilous fight, O'er the rampaaarts we watched, were so gallantly streammmmming ?"
His mother, who already appeared to be drunk after the first glass of wine during dinner (as she was quite used to drinking, I suspected it really wasn't her first glass of the day), started crying. I guess she didn't want her only son to leave the country for so many years. I guess she didn't want him to leave her.
It seemed like such a defining moment in their lives.
"And the rockets' red glaaare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the nnnight that our flag was still there —“
His father was laughing hard (although his eyes were watery as well), but in the process he swallowed a cigarillo stump by accident. He started suffocating right away.
"Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet waa-aave,
O'er the land of the FREEEEEEE
and the home of the braaaaave ?"
The drunk uncle tried to solve the problem by pouring an entire glass of white California Chardonnay in his brother's mouth, which by now was producing smoke like a volcano that suddenly had woken up and decided to do some damage. Nothing could distort his mood, though. He kept on singing all the same.
"'Tis the star-spangled banner ! Oh long may it waa-aave O'er the land of the FREEEEEE and the home of the braaaaave !"
The family doctor finally came through. He drank another glass of white wine at once, and lit a new cigarillo. His wife was laughing and crying at the same time. She also lit a cigarillo. The mad uncle lit two.
Marbles started opening the envelope —
"And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the FREEEEEEE and the home of the braaaaave !"
Then, right after Marbles had opened the envelope and taken the letter out, Daisy's head rose above the table, and in one fluent movement, she took the letter in her mouth, and swallowed it in a matter of seconds.
When the fine-tuning of the script entered a decisive phase, I started making the puppets by hand, with needle and thread. It was something I wanted to do on my own, and I liked it right from the beginning. It eventually so grew on me that I still get overly excited when I see some British TV program about the wonderful world of cloths and tweeds.
Or when some obscure Scandinavian TV channel broadcasts a 24-hour knitting marathon.
Initially thinking of Kermit the Frog, I took a piece of red carton which I cut in the shape of a stretched ellipse, and right on the short axis of symmetry, I folded the carton in two equal parts. On one of these parts, I glued a pink tongue made of felt. As such, I had created a very simple mouth which was easily operated with one hand, and which resembled the inside of a baby chick's little beak.
Then I stitched a grey cloth which looked like a sock (but tailor-made by yours truly) on the carton mouth, such that I could put my right arm in the cloth — my thumb in the lower part and the other fingers in the upper part. And voilà, we had a head, only without nose, eyes and ears. I filled the entire "head sock" with cotton wool to give it the desired volume.
Next, a minimalistic nose was indicated by a little dot of wool or a horn button. (And wasn't really essential because the shape of the head was suggestive enough.) As I once inherited hundreds of old wooden, horn and plastic buttons of an uncle I never knew, time and again I felt strongly obliged to opt for the second possibility every time a nose job presented itself.
For creating eyes, which were so important because they singlehandedly — so to speak — delivered the spark of life, I often used ping pong balls cut in two halves, a small black dot of felt attached on each one. Eyes got stitched or glued if possible, or whatever, on top of the head — a rather hard task with the few primitive tools I had at my disposal.
On other times I also tried shiny white marbles (small "m"), dotted them with paint, and glued them on the head. But keeping them attached to the head was much harder than in the case of ping pong balls, so that I often ended up with a puppet which was more suited for a role in a Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island variation or Herman Melville's Moby Dick; or, The Whale, than for the feel-good movie that was the eventual goal.
In yet another stage, wool colored in every which way was glued to the head to give the little creature hair. I also used wigs, especially curly ones, because the effect was so comical.
(Ears were a story apart: usually I manufactured them, but most of the time they just fell off while handling the puppets, or simply disappeared.)
For the arms, legs and body, I started with a rectangular cloth, folded it in half, thus obtaining an envelope with three open sides — two short ones of the same length, and one longer one — and I then stitched the two halves of that longer side to each other to obtain a cylinder with a nasty scar crossing the whole of its belly parallel to its back. I then turned the cylinder inside out (so that the stitches became invisible), and stuffed it with cotton wool. The obtained sausage was perfect to serve as an arm or a leg. Hands and feet were done in pretty much the same way, even making them have separate fingers and toes, in which I put short ends of metal wire so as to be able to give them — especially the hands — specific forms.
To operate a puppet, I used my right arm which entered the puppet through an opening just in the middle of the backside, and I placed it in the puppet's head. My left arm moved metal wires which were attached to the wrists of the puppet — an idea which was directly inspired by muppets such as Kermit in the Muppet Show and Sesame Street.
(This is just one of the many types of puppet I made and performed. Others were operated by two people — one person for the head and one of the hands, and the second person for the other hand — the hands of the puppet being gloves in which the hands of the puppeteers were inserted. Think of Sesame Street's Ernie and you'll get the picture. The big advantage of this variation was the fact that the hands of the puppet moved like real human hands, the disadvantage being that the two puppeteers had to understand each other’s movements very well. And observing that Marbles was part of our star cast, one might also understand that this type of puppet wasn't our cup of tea.)
I used real baby shoes for foot wear, but the other clothes I made all by myself, using old sweaters and jeans cloths, and lots lots lots of patience. At first, I could do this for hours while watching TV. In a next stage, I started to do it on trains, outside in the garden, in the bathroom — you name it. I even tried to do it in my parent's car (while it was moving), but as usual I got nauseous right away, and had to stop immediately. However, when the car was parked in the garden and my parents weren't planning to use it, I could sit forever in that car — a 1985 Volvo 740 sedan — while stitching, cutting, gluing, and listening to my little blue transistor radio which entered the world of Jazzzz as soon as the stitching began.
(The car still lives. It became such a big part of family memories that everybody agreed it earned its place in my parents' garden, on one of the driveways. I think it's about eight years ago that it was taken for a spin for the last time, so surely the battery is very dead, and probably other parts have to be replaced as well. But I don't think that will happen. It gets a brush-up every now and then, the tires are handled with good care, and it still is looking great. And when I am over to my parents', and I want to do some reading or reflecting (which means: having a nap), I go and sit in the back of the Volvo, and let me drive away.)
In the summer of that same year, my parents, the twins and I traveled to Canada to visit family, and afterwards we did some driving around in Northern Ontario. At some point, we embarked in the Polar Bear Express, which took us for a 190 miles and six hours ride from Cochrane to Moosonee (which is just 12 miles south to James Bay), "The Gateway to the Arctic." Since Moosonee has no road connection to the South, taking the Polar Bear Express was one of the few ways to get there. But mind you, contrary to what its name seems to suggest, this was not a tourist attraction but a brutal, rough, bumpy ride to reach Moosonee.
I do not remember any of the landscapes or animals my parents and the twins still regularly muse about, because I was fabricating trousers for my puppets at the time. They still claim they saw a polar bear strolling around, which I didn't see because I was trying to attach a button to one of the trousers I had finished. And to this day, I am still not sure if they are making fun of me, because I cannot check the story, and there have been observations of polar bear over the years in that region.
But what I can tell you is that it earned me my family nickname "Button."
Yes, dear reader. Button.