Flashbacks to Babylon

Our third week in the Lion's Den was a bit chaotic... My wife, who seemed to be getting over the flu on Monday had a major relapse on Tuesday, and I had to step up to the plate and handle the homeschooling for the day. Consequently, I didn't get my planned day off to prepare for that night, and around 3:00 decided to go with a "music video" approach to telling the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. I had sort of hoped to do something musically (probably the title song from *Cool in the Furnace*), but what was at hand was a song on a Beginner's Bible CD Pam loaned me. It was fun, involving sound effects of a fire chief and dispatcher's radio communication, had a female vocalist and a bit of a rap. It required purchasing four additional puppets to play those roles (the fireman actually was designed to be a fireman, but the dispatcher was a queen I redressed in a discarded policeman's uniform, the rapper was a knight that I converted to an angel (left the shiny suit on and just replaced the helmet with a starry halo and added wings) and the lead singer was a cowgirl (no reason she should be, but no reason she shouldn't, so I left her as she was, for lack of a better idea). We ad-libbed a short intro with Daniel and the Lions, in which Daniel explained he was away on a diplomatic mission when this happened, and so he had to read the story from official transcripts (he rolled out a scroll which was the cue for the music). Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn't tell us WHERE Daniel was when his three friends were thrown into the furnace, but the rabbis came up with some VERY interesting possibilities in the Talmud (one of my favorites was that he was in the Valley of Dry Bones with Ezekiel, helping to raise the dead).

I of course couldn't see how any of this went down (the fire department and space for the singers were in front of the kitchen window we use for the Den, out of my view), but I'm told the kids were into it, and the puppets danced appropriately. The only major problem was my puppeteer for the angel Azmaveth, Daniel's guardian, went AWOL, and the fearless prophet of God had to run away in order to end the scene.

Also out of my view was the doorway we filled with red, orange and yellow streamers to serve as the fiery furnace. Four child volunteers and one of my adult leaders acted out the story as the puppets narrated in song. This followed a pattern established the week before, involving live actors (including some of the kids) in the flashback scenes. That week we had combined the leftover part of the first script (involving Daniel's refusal to eat the king's food) from chapter 1 with the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in chapter 2 for an extended flashback to his early days at court. Surprisingly I did not do much with the character of Nebuchadnezzar, but the young actress who took the role really played it up, turning him into a childish egocentric (giving me a good idea for how to develop the character for next week!). The standout in that week's script was Ashpenaz (who actually was a composite of the chief eunuch in chapter 1--I didn't bother explaining that--and Arioch the chief guard in chapter 2). I wrote him as annoying and annoyed, fearful and sarcastic, all at once. He couldn't understand why his young charges refused the finest food in the empire for the sake of a God who, if he cared anything for them, would not have allowed them to be conquered in the first place. He tried mocking them, reasoning with them, and eventually begging them, fearful that if they didn't do as they were told HE would lose his head. When they ended up being the most impressive new students, rewarded with high positions in the king's court, he had to admit maybe they knew what they were doing, and there "might be something to this God of yours after all!" As I tried to imagine this character, what came to me was a voice from one of the "Fractured Fairytales" in an old *Rocky and Bullwinkle* episode, the one in which Prince Charming is a crooked schemer who, instead of kissing Sleeping Beauty and waking her up, decides she's more interesting asleep, and turns her into a tourist attraction, building "Sleeping Beauty Land", charging admission, and making a fortune off of merchandise tie-ins. I don't know who the voice talent was, but he was very familiar and I'm sure had a lot of the work back in the day.

The challenge for the coming week is to write the script for King Nebuchadnezzar's "Beastly Time" (when he is humbled and eats grass like an ox), and to get the lions' mouths moving.

Denizens

Well, due to a 4-day mens' retreat (among other things) I was unable to get the puppets really ready for their debut, as I'd hoped; but we had a script, we had actors, and we had SOMETHING to help visualize the characters as we launched ourselves into the Lion's Den at KidzLife last Tuesday night...

Mr. Smith is not pretty. He's actually quite large and scary looking. He started out based on a caricature of Harrison Ford, but as I sewed him he got more and more wrinkled (of course, seeing the fourth installment of Indiana Jones, I'm not TOO far off the mark). He now has something of a Yoda-esque quality to him. But even as I created him (primarily to be "Pennsylvania Smith"), I had thought of letting him play a large archangel Michael in "The Legend of Slappy Hooper." So when I needed an angel to guard Daniel from the lions, it seemed a logical role for this puppet to play. I've given him the name of Azmaveth for this role, and explained his age and look by saying he's a Warrior angel who has been fighting evil for 3,000 years. He's all about action, and not terribly verbal, which fits in with the Indiana Jones/Pennyslvania Smith type of charater.

No one is quite sure who "Darius the Mede" was, but it seems that his reign in Babylon coincided with Cyrus I's reign over the Medo-Persian empire. That puts Daniel's time in the lion's den AFTER 70 years of him being in exile, which means he HAS to be 80 or older at this time. Thinking of likeable elderly people whose voices I could do, I ended up with a personality and style of speaking similar to Jimmy Stewart (dead now and forever young in many films, but I can recall him in several live appearances in the 60s and 70s, mostly on talk shows, at which point he was quite old). Originally I'd hoped to make both an old Daniel and younger Daniel (another reason for picking Stewart, in that I had a good idea of what he looked like at both ages), but I had to settle for buying a puppet, stripping him of his garb (in this case, a fireman's hat and coat), recostuming him in a simple tunic and putting white hair and beard on over his brown hair and moustache he came with. My wife informed me that his hair fell off shortly after the performance began last week, but I've had time this week to sew it in place, so FROM NOW ON, not a hair from his head shall be harmed...

At first, I thought we could get by with one lion, and I naturally pictured something large and ferocious, roaring with a wide-opened mouth (and from several classic cartoons of yesteryear, I pictured the angel slapping him with an "Ahhhhh, SHADDUP!"; at which point the big fierce cat becomes humorously meek). As I thought more about it, I realized that if I wanted a female character anywhere in this piece, it would have to be one of the lions. So I began to imagine a tough lioness named Leonora, as the primary "take charge" character in the den. Of course, the lion is the "king of beasts" and I didn't want to let go of my initial image, so Lexus Rex emerged as the big scary beast, who makes all the others do the work while he sits back and looks regal. I thought he could stand in for all the puffed-up self-important kings Daniel has to deal with in his flashbacks (as the most famous story about Daniel happened near the end of his life, I thought this would be the ideal setting from which to tell all of the earlier stories). Then Lenny appeared in my imagination as a comic foil, inspired partly by one of Scat Cat's band (in *The Aristocats*) and partly be Cheech Marin's voice work for Disney, as a hep cat beatnik/hippy who likes to take life easy and doesn't really go in for all this "king of the beasts" bit. He kind of likes Daniel, and is not so hip on Lex or other authority figures, and he acts in very undignified and unlionlike ways, partly in protest agains the pomposity and pretense of royalty which the other lions expect him to conform to. As Lenny and Leonora started dialoging, I began to see that their bickering, Lenny's attitude towards Lex and the Lion Code, and the fact that gets away with so much could best be explained if Lenny was Leonora's younger brother. This comes out clearest in the fact that, while everyone else refers to her as Leonora or "Nora", Lenny consistently calls here "Lena."

Though the lions' characters were well developed in the script, I didn't have time to do anything with their bodies before last Tuesday. I found a lion-headed rug which was the proper size for Lex, and picked up at a second-hand store a large stuffed Simba (the best I could do for a lioness) and another stuffed lion for Lenny (which I simply added orange sunglasses to, to help convey his character). I need to work in the coming weeks to turn these into actual puppets, hollowing them out, making them more flexible, and giving them movable mouths. It should be an interesting challeng, working from the outside in, rather than the inside out...