October 30, 2008 / News / Parenting / Dooley Noted

Nobody asked me …

By Thurston Dooley III

for The Brooklyn Paper

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It is a time-honored tradition in the puppet and mime world to take stock around Halloween. So without further ado, here is my annual “Nobody asked me, but…” column, a format first invented by my great-grandfather, Thurston Dooley, in his seminal pieces in “Let’s Marionette!” magazine in the 1920s. Those were dark days for puppeteering, so Ol’ Chicory certainly had plenty to write about. So do I;

Nobody asked me, but …

… the people who put together the haunted walk in Prospect Park every year on the weekend before Halloween do a heck of a job. Now, granted, my 80-something-year-old eyes have long been trained to see things only the way a 6-year-old’s would, but this year’s Headless Horseman was the best I’d ever seen. It would’ve made my dad, Thurston Dooley II, so proud. “Duo Dooley,” whose reputation in the puppetry and mime world was destroyed in the 1950s when he was wrongly accused of advocating “strip miming,” was actually an early proponent of reviving the ancient art of mime by getting its practitioners out of their black-and-white-striped prisons and into more fluid, more mobile, more spontaneous situations.

… I’ll be glad when the election is over. Now, I’m as liberal as the next guy (provided the next guy is Leon Trotsky), but I’ve been no fan of how parents in what I call the “Babble Belt” (Park Slope through Boerum Hill to Brooklyn Heights) have been forcing their political beliefs on their kids. Sure, an Obama bake sale is a nice way to get the kids involved, but the other day, a 6-year-old accosted me and accused me of supporting McCain (presumably because I am old, stiff and, yes, given to flashbacks of my forced labor as a puppeteer in a Korean prison camp). There’s nothing wrong with giving kids an overview of the issues, but when a 6-year-old is telling me of McCain’s “secret plan” to bomb Iran, I think we’ve gone a bit far.

… kids these days are little whippersnappers, let me tell you. I received a press release the other day (a press release!) about a record-release party for a band calling itself T-Rox. The album, “Burnt Marshmallow,” is the product of 7-year-olds Ben Everett-Lane and Max Kessler. The duo sent me their CD, which I promptly converted to 8-track so I could listen to it — and I was blown away! The song “TV Rots your Brain” is an instant classic. The record-release party is on Nov. 1 and I was told there would be veggie booty.

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper