Thursday, September 8, 2011

Furry Puppet Studio

So we missed the Elmo doc but hit the Jim Henson exhibit and both girls really liked it; there were enough puppets and videos for them to look at and enough labels and conceptual art to supplement it for the adults. We had to drag the girls away from a documentary on Henson's life and, later, the Muppet-full gift shop.

After that we survived the hurricane by leaving town for a week to see Niagara Falls, some Mormon Church history sites east of Rochester, and some friends in Vermont, with surprisingly good roads given the flooding. The Hudson and East Rivers are both brown with flooding run off, and I stopped by the Central Park lake this morning (after dropping Loretta off at her first day of second grade!) to see it's risen about a foot (it's been raining this week too), but there's virtually no damage in the city and the kids I've talked to actually found Irene more amusing than anything else, which is a nice contrast to how it could have gone.

So let's get back to puppets. While all of that was going on I got an email from Zack Buchman, the founder of Furry Puppet Studio in Brooklyn. The studio's been around a while but they just got a new website, which looks really cool in both Flash and html versions. One thing I love about New York is the plenitude of puppet-makers here; I'm no expert but I think this may well be the puppet-making capital of the world. And Furry Puppet's work, like this example, looks great--anyone in need of some design or construction would do well to check them out!