From a Puppeteer's Perspective

From a Puppeteer’s Perspective

HOW ZIGGY & THE JUNKYARD BAND FULFILLED A CHILDHOOD DREAM

Story by Kristen Foster • Photos by Kimberly Meadowlark

It is 8 am on a Tuesday, and I am crawling beneath a mound of artistically-arranged junk zip-tied and screwed in to a hollow scaffolding of chicken wire and wood. I scooch across the floor on my side, inch-by-inch, maneuvering around corners and stretching toward a jagged hole cut in the rubble just large enough to thread an arm through. With my body fully eclipsed by trash—a bent bicycle wheel, a burned out toaster—I reach up into a simulated spring afternoon. I witness this surreal effect— my arm blooming through debris— on a small screen carefully balanced between my face and a two-by-four.

“Alright!” a voice at once gruff and impish calls out to me from the surface. “You ready?” it asks, while working the foam and felt over my forearm. I answer, “yes!” with the immediacy born from a subconscious anticipation that has been coiling, spring-like, for years. “Outstanding!” the voice booms, “Puppets up!”

And just like that, my arm becomes the spine, my hand the jaws and eyes, of Pat Riot—a mohawked and safety-pinned punk rock bass player who, along with the rest of the Junkyard Band, has arrived to guide a spaceship-wrecked alien named Ziggy through lessons on arts and empathy in Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s newest original children’s educational program.

Puppets Ziggy, Pat Riot, and River Young from Ziggy’s Arts Adventure.

Kimberly Meadowlark

Growing up, when adults asked me that quintessential question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’d answer, with a youthful lack of hesitation: “A puppeteer.” Said adults rarely knew what to say next. In fact, it would take decades for me to meet another person who shared an appreciation for this particular art form and understood its importance. It was then five years after I first met Clay Achee that he became the puckish director guiding my puppeted arm from the opposite side of a garbage pile.

In truth, it wasn’t until recently that I even bothered to ask Achee what drew him to puppetry in the first place. It was always something that felt inherently obvious to me, an unspoken understanding we’ve shared since the day I first crashed into his inbox upon hearing there was a “puppet guy” in town. While the contents of that initial missive are long since lost in the digital ephemera, it would be fair to imagine an overall tone of fanatic desperation. There was a puppet show in town, and I wanted in. I needed in. To my great fortune, Achee is one of those people who finds room for everyone, a quality that not only makes him an edifying creative collaborator, but a superlative friend.

So, it was no surprise to me that, when I finally did get around to asking, his answer might have been pulled from the pages of my own history: it was The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, Labyrinth, and The Dark Crystal. It was, in short, Jim Henson’s innumerable enchantments orchestrated using only what could be built, then brought to life, by skillful hands.

I remember vividly the first time I got my hands on—or, more accurately, inside of—a puppet. It was a muggy summer in my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and my grandfather and I were visiting the country music-themed amusement park, Opryland. A vendor with an array of brightly-colored shaggy puppets festooning his kiosk beckoned to the crowd with the rodded arm of a fuzzy brown monster who was, in a gruff and wild voice, hawking his wares: “Brother for sale! Sister for sale!” I moved closer, mesmerized by the assemblage of costume fur and wire that seemed to live and breathe before my widening eyes. The monster, whose nametag read “Bofleeceus”—a triple-layered word play of Hank Williams Jr.’s nickname—proved to be a world class salesman. Gesturing toward one side of the kiosk made to look like a jail from the Wild West, Bofleeceus leaned in and asked my grandfather if he’d like to, “spring one of these criminals.” “Well, I don’t know. What do you think?” my grandfather asked me in his playfully rhetorical way. I don’t remember answering, but I do remember BeBop, the taffy pink monster with dark aviator sunglasses and a straw cowboy hat who became my constant companion for the rest of that summer and years thereafter.

The writer, Kristen Foster, pictured with her puppet Pat Riot.

Kimberly Meadowlark

“I’ve always been drawn to practical effects,” Achee explained of his own affinity towards puppetry and performance-based storytelling. “The magic trick of something happening onscreen that I knew wasn’t real, and yet it was actually happening, was just so neat to me as a kid. I remember turning back to my dad and asking, ‘How’d they do that?’” It’s a question that, today, has become an indelible guide to his many creative pursuits.

Achee’s childlike curiosity ultimately resulted in a degree in Film and Television from Savannah College of Art and Design, followed by a decade of work in the Louisiana film industry in various capacities. The connections he acquired on sets over the years were not only instrumental in the eventual production of the Ziggy’s Arts Adventure television program, but also—and quite by accident—in providing the initial spark of inspiration for the project.

“One day, I was helping a friend read through a stack of scripts. She just asked me to help her see if there was anything good,” Achee recalled. “There wasn’t. Not really. But, there was this one sort of not bad biopic of Carl Sagan. It was about the Voyager and The Golden Record.” The Golden Record, appropriately titled The Sounds of Earth and launched into space on The Voyager in 1977, is a painstakingly-crafted LP grooved with examples of music, spoken language, images, and text from our planet. If discovered by life forms beyond our solar system, the record is meant to provide cultural insights into our inhabited world, at least as it appeared through an American lens up to the late 1970s. “It was such a lovely idea,” said Achee. “It was meant to inspire us with awe, and let me tell you, it succeeded on me grandly.”

Of the music on The Sounds of Earth—which included selections by masters Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach—it was the inclusion of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” that most inspired Achee. “I just kept seeing these little green aliens bopping along to Chuck Berry,” he said. “I just loved that idea.” And as fate would have it, one of these imagined aliens would someday travel through space in search of rock ‘n’ roll, crash landing in a Louisiana junkyard.

Kimberly Meadowlark

The journey from Ziggy’s Arts Adventure’s inception to its realization was no straight line. When Achee first decided to transition out of film industry work, he was making puppets purely as a hobby, but soon started selling them with his wife, artist Kirstin Martinez, at local arts markets and festivals. Before long, the couple decided to increase their efforts and focus more creative energy on making the puppets into a revenue stream for their family. One such project evolved into the creation of Achee’s junkyard-dwelling puppet rock band. “Each puppet represents a different genre of music,” he said. “We would ride floats in parades and make appearances at local events.” On weekends, Achee would take two of the puppets to New Orleans to busk on the street for the tourists passing by. “I don’t know when the two ideas came together, but, at some point, I just knew that this band would be who would take in the alien.”

Achee began by making Youtube videos, which were viewed by handfuls of family and friends, but he didn’t see it as the ideal platform for the project. Encouraged by a friend who works at LPB, he submitted a program proposal in July of 2019. With the ensuing chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, he recalled, “I had almost forgotten I had applied when I heard back from them.” When, at their first meeting, LPB told him that they wanted to offer Ziggy and The Junkyard Band a home at their Studio B, Achee joked, “The moment just kind of hung in the air. Eventually, it dawned on me— wait—this is the greatest thing that has ever happened.”

This sentiment was overwhelmingly shared by the cast and crew who, after funding was secured, spent the next six months writing, building, and rehearsing. The cast, comprised of actors from LSU’s theater department, local improv comedians, and musicians, was mostly in place at the time the show was picked up. Auditions were held for a new character, the jazz saxophonist Cynthia, and the glam rock puppet Nic Fit. In addition to the producers and crew provided by LPB, Achee’s film industry contacts filled out the rest of the talented team that brought the dream of Ziggy to vibrant green, bugeyed life.

Humans and Puppets from left to right: Kristen Foster, Pat Riot, Chase Bernard, Ziggy, and Clay Achee.

Kimberly Meadowlark

As he was developing the program, Achee sought out resources to help him integrate educational curriculums into Ziggy’s story. “The characters and main ideas were there, but the show was never overtly educational,” Achee explained. “I always knew I wanted to teach through the puppets, and I was confident in teaching the soft skills—like empathy and character—but to create something that was teaching curriculum-based lessons, I knew I had to get Foos.” Elizabeth Foos’s company Foos for Thought provides creative learning resources and training for educators to implement the arts into their curriculums.

Foos had been working with Achee for years before signing on as his co-creator of Ziggy’s Arts Adventure. “I’ve been playing with Clay since he arrived on the scene,” she said. “So, a decade. I was excited that Baton Rouge had gotten a strong enough and vibrant enough arts community that we could support a puppet guy.” Together, they’ve created educational videos with puppets and brought puppets into classrooms to teach important concepts through creative play. According to Foos, “No matter what you’re teaching, your curriculum is lurking in the arts.” This poetic philosophy shapes each episode of Ziggy’s Arts Adventure and almost subliminally communicates the deeper messages that lie below the surface.

“I was brought on to figure out how to not only bring the show into an educational universe that didn’t lose any of its pure imagination, joy, and story arc— but to make something for an elementary audience that could be genuinely useful as a resource not just for learning about the arts, but for Louisiana,” Foos explained. “I think our first goal is to feature Louisiana. Not just the arts, but everything that’s awesome about it.” In each twelve-minute episode, Ziggy, a nine-year-old alien who leaves his artless home planet in pursuit of the feeling Chuck Berry’s music gave him, learns an important artistic concept with help from a professional Louisiana artist. This season, special guests include—among others—dancers Anna Schwab and LeTiger Walker, visual artist Chris King, violinist Alba Layana; and even the First Lady of Louisiana Donna Edwards, a former music teacher who unyieldingly advocates for arts education in our state.

Foos described the impact of including guest artists as twofold. In addition to experiencing expert demonstrations of various art forms, young audiences are learning that art can be a profession. “We must make new artists,” Foos emphatically explained, citing, among other things, the crucial link between our state’s artistic identity and the revenue it generates. “The only way to make new artists is to show them that this is a valid profession.”

At the August 1 premier, sitting curled behind the junkyard fence that had been temporarily transplanted from Studio B to the library—where the gathering crowd buzzed beyond our barricade—I thought about how this show and the phenomenally gifted people who brought it to life are all the proof anyone should ever need of that validity.

After a live performance by The Junkyard Band, accompanied by trumpet virtuoso John Gray, it was finally time to roll episode one. And, well, to colloquialize: it is everything. It is, at long last, a resounding response of affirmation to the kid who wanted, more than anything, to be an artist, to be a puppeteer.

lpb.org/programs/ziggy