Puppets for Pages | Raising awareness about Pittsburgh's endangered libraries, one puppet show at a time.

Open Letter: Support your library, See a puppet show.

By Flora | Published: December 3, 2009

“Let us read and let us dance, two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” -Voltaire

On Open Letter to Puppet & Library Loving Friends and Supporters,

You are invited to a weekend of pay-what-you-will Puppet events to raise awareness about the importance of every single Pittsburgh library. We will also be actively collecting donations for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh at each venue. There is something for every schedule and every puppet-lover from toddlers to twenty-somethings to centenarians. I sincerely hope to see you at one or all.

I’m especially excited to shake a leg at our Grown-up DANCE PARTY Saturday night, to watch tons of kids create and perform at the FAMILY PUPPET DAY Sunday afternoon and to drink some shiraz while sitting around the fire pit after performing a shadow puppet show at the Schmutz Lodge’s BURNED! party Friday night. See below for details on all.

Please tell your friends! Check back to our website or follow me on twitter for updates.

with love,
Flora

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This Weekend’s Master Schedule

By Flora | Published: December 3, 2009

ALL AGES EVENTS
——-SUNDAY, December 6th: FAMILY PUPPET DAY 12pm-3pm, The Union Project, 801 North Negley Ave.
Puppet Performances
12:15pm Ange Tu’ulaupua Ulu: a traidtional Samoan folktale come to life.
1:00pm Things That Stick Bunny Jump: Giant, jumping bunny puppets.
1:30pm Flora Shepherd Together: join a participatory library puppet pageant
Art-making
- Make your own rod, string, hand and shadow puppet and perform in a real puppet stage.
- Help build giant pageant puppets.
- Write letters to the Library Board of Trustees and your elected officials.

——SATURDAY, December 5th: Knoxville Library
- Final Puppets for Pages small community puppet event at a library scheduled to be closed.

——FRIDAY, December 4th: OPEN PUPPET STUDIO as part of UnBlurred, the Dance Alloy Building: 5530 Penn Ave, #3
-Puppeteer Flora Shepherd invites you into her live/work space to see her current projects. In addition to my own work, I will be exhibiting the work created by children in the Puppets for Pages campaign.

ADULTS-ONLY EVENTS:
——SATURDAY, December 5th: GROWN-UP DANCE PARTY
Saturday, Dec 5th, 9pm- 2am, 21+, The Waffle Shop & Shadow Lounge, 124 S. Highland Ave
Dress as your favorite literary character encouraged! Your guest bartenders will be Max and a Wild Thing.
Featuring
- Dance floor with giant shadow puppet screen.
- Video slideshow of endangered libraries.
- Adult puppet-making table.
- Children’s Art Exhibit.
- Letter-writing station.

——FRIDAY, December 4th: Shadow Puppet Show at the Schmutz Lodge’s Burned Party, 5405 Broad St, 9pm- late, as part of UnBlurred, Puppet Show goes off around 10:30pm
- El Paso: my shadow puppet cowgirl love story set to live music by Missy Raterman
- View art by the Schmutz Company,
- Listen to the music of The 4 Roses
- Poems by poet, writer, vixen, and generally amazing person Sandra Beasley.

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Carrick Kids

By Flora | Published: December 3, 2009

“The world is full of magical places, and the library has always been one of them for me. A library can be that special place for our children.”

-Julie Andrews

The Carrick library was very good to Puppets for Pages. After a slight, unplanned detour, we arrived to find a small conference room all set up for us complete with cookies! This was my first week without Katrina, as she was still celebrating Thanksgiving in Brooklyn. I missed her, but was happy to add two new members to the Puppets for Pages team: Tom and Cindy. Thanks, you two! The three of us immediately got to work directing craft activites for many eager Carrick artists.

I had the most fun performing a puppet show I’ve had in a long time that afternoon. The audience was full of parents and children paying close attention. I love it when adults chime in to help the puppets out, too. After all, learning how to escape from a giant is something everyone has an opinion on.

As usual, after my show, letting everyone loose inside the kid-sized puppet tent with their newly minted puppets was a huge hit. At one point, at least eight kids crammed into the stage to do a show together. At their request, I narrated “Where the Wild Things Are.” The roaring of the several young Wild Things isn’t something you hear everyday in a library.

And speaking of Wild Things, if you grown-ups come to our Dance Party Fundraiser this Saturday night at the Waffle Shop & Shadow Lounge, you just might see a certain library-loving puppeteer bartending the event dressed as her favorite scaly legged and horned literary character.

I had such a great time hanging out with this group of Carrick library patrons. I really hope they get to keep their own branch!

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Link Round-up

By Flora | Published: December 3, 2009

If you aren’t already following the Save the Libraries facebook page and Facebook group, I hugely suggest you do so. They are doing an awesome job of keeping people updated on what’s going on! I recommend checking their links for updates on library news in the past few days. Things have been pretty hectic for me around the studio with preparations for 5 events in 3 days this weekend, so they are a much better source of information than I can be right now. More information about this weekend’s plans coming later today!

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City Paper Short List

By Flora | Published: December 3, 2009

Thank you, Lucy Leitner and Bill Driscoll at City Paper. Read about us and the Typewriter Girls in the Short List here

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Lawrenceville Library Love

By Flora | Published: November 24, 2009

As East End residents, Katrina and I spend a lot of time in Lawrenceville. So, we were especially excited to spend some quality puppet time at a library branch in our own neck of the woods.

This Puppets for Pages visit was met by the youngest group of library patrons yet! Thanks to the help of Maya at the Lawrenceville Corporation and Lawrenceville United, we had a great turn-out of many pre-schoolers and their parents. I was very impressed with all of our young audience members’ patience and enthusiasm for my live show. Afterwards, the opportunity to play in a kid-sized stage with kid-made puppets was a huge hit!

Once again, we a had a blast. Katrina even kept the jokes coming this week with another great pun puppet for me:

We enjoyed meeting more library users, including many people from the wonderful site for affordable events,Living Pittsburgh.
More Lawrenceville photos are available at on our flickr account.

I heard about the extremely exciting City Council and Library Board announcements via text message on Monday. And while Katrina and I are extremely excited about the progress being made, we plan to continue our work to raise awareness about the importance of every neighborhood library. The library system is not out of the woods, yet! Perhaps this chalk grafitti on the Lawrenceville Library Saturday expresses our sentiments best–

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Happy Thanksgiving!

By Flora | Published: November 24, 2009

Katrina and I are all over the place this week. So, Happy Thanksgiving to all from Brooklyn, Virginia, Washington DC, New Orleans and Pittsburgh. Can’t wait for Carrick this weekend!

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City Council approves $600,000 of funding!

By Flora | Published: November 24, 2009

“I don’t want to be like ‘Wow, we won, it’s over,’ because it doesn’t seem like it’s over yet,” said Tess McShane, creator of the “Save the Pittsburgh Libraries” Facebook group. “It doesn’t help anybody if two years from now we need to go back and this whole thing is rehashed again.”

This has been all over the news. Read the Post Gazette coverage.

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More great library coverage from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

By Flora | Published: November 20, 2009

Ravenstahl announces that he might have to cut library funding and will discuss it at City Council meeting today: here
Library board and local officals to meet on Monday and adding public hearing to final meeting on Dec 14th: here.

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