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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Dear _____________, please hire me


Two summers ago, a fresh-faced graduate from Marlboro College, I hastily applied too late in the season to be an apprentice with you.  I had been to the B&P museum and seen a few shows of yours including the “Circus Pageant” and “People’s History of the United States” that summer and the summer before hitching from Quebec back to Brattleboro, and LOVED the variety of puppets, the atmosphere, the land, the folks, the garlic bread, the storytelling and the Carnival I went to in Glover.  At the time I had just completed my “Plan of Concentration” (the Marlboro version of a BA thesis) on the “Urban Shaman in contemporary Mongolia”, “Radical Responses to Sexual Assault within Sub-cultural Communities”, “the Common Ground Relief Collective of New Orleans”, and “Hip hop as a Pedagogical Tool”, and I had just finished my round of tours with a Brattleboro-based circus group.  Several continents and experiences later I am trying for the apprenticeship again, this time early enough that you might consider my request. To date, I am 23 years old, and I am ashamed to say that I do not yet play an instrument, although I can stumble through “Bella Ciao” on the accordion and mumble the words in Italian. I write to you from Munich, Germany, where I have been living on-and-off for the past 8 months: getting to know my family, and where they have historically lived as well as their language and culture, while doing some traveling and studying.

            Last month I had the privilege of studying under Miroslav Trejtnar, a gifted marionette and toy maker in his workshop under the auspices of “Puppets in Prague”, an intensive program aimed at mostly international students* of all ages and walks of life to take 3 weeks out of their routine to learn how to design, build, and manipulate wooden marionettes in the Czech tradition.  Well, lets just say that since returning to Munich I’ve gone wild for puppets again.  I’ve been going to as many performances as I can afford, practicing playing my own marionette, and going to museums of puppets, etc. That experience made me really excited about puppets and performance again. 

            While I’ve been here in Europe I’ve been having a hard time falling into a local activists scene and I miss that! Munich doesn’t have a Food not Bombs, my usual weekly thing that I do where I get to go scavenge, cook, eat and serve and talk with others and share in the bounty of other people’s waste and in a sense of community, no matter what other projects may be important to my life at that time.  As a sociologist, political theorist, and visual artist and now fledgling marionette maker I am thrilled about the prospect of puppet theater but also avant-garde performance in general as an avenue for creative collaboration, expression, and political purpose.  With all of these powers combined with a little hankering for the woods of my beloved Vermont (especially swimming in the pristine rivers in the summer and the early autumn Human Powered Carnival) I of course thought once again of you, B&P.

Please have me.

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