A puppet show

As I go through our piles o' stuff, I keep finding treasures. Pictured is a puppet theatre that my paternal grandpa made for his kids, around 1954.

Sadly, one of the curtains, and backdrop cloth, have been grawed by something -- either bug or rodent. Don't know if it happened in Australia, or in my grandpa's attic.

My dad says that "the decorations [gems] atop the proscenium [the top front thing -- he was a Drama major in college] are a section of some suspenders we had had when we were toddlers. Seems like the curtain pulls terminated by using tax tokens as weights."

The drawcords on the curtains were tied in an inefficient manner, such that they kept jamming -- so, I threaded them through a different route.

Also, they originally passed through the same eyehook, which caused a bit of drag and made it a little confusing as to which cord to pull. I added a cuphook (didn't have any small eyehooks handy) for one of the drawstrings.

Has an old-timey power cord running to some small (Christmas?) lights inside, for stage lighting. A little dangerous. Eventually, I'll rig up some colored LEDs and a 9V battery -- maybe some switches for each of the colors.

Finally, here's my daughter trying out the puppet theatre.




She loved it -- she did a zillion ''dress rehersals'' before doing the show for Mommy, and each one was fairly different.


--GG