Muscle Memory with Smuppet, the Diction Puppet

“Could you find time to help the second grade with their poetry assembly?” Mindy e-mails.

“Are you kidding? Of course, I can,” I respond immediately. 

I holler through the open door to my assistant’s office, undignified behavior for a head of school.

“Erin, it’s poetry time!”

“Second grade?” she asks.

“Yes, can you find me some time to be with them?”

It’s not a small ask. The calendar for the head in any independent school during the weeks before spring break is always jammed–I have a theory that the closer we get to vacation, the more unhinged folks become…but that’s another essay.

I know Erin will juggle and move obligations to get me time with the second grade–fifteen minutes here, a half hour there. She knows how much I love being with little people, how much I love coaching their public speaking with Smuppet, my handy diction puppet.  He is an Elmo-red furry hand puppet, with a bobbly orangey nose and a big purple velvet patch around his right eye. I cannot remember when or where I acquired him, but we have been partners for a long, long time. To be honest, I know the girls enjoy their time with me, but Smuppet is the real star. They ask for him by name, scowl if I leave him in my office by accident, grin when he appears from behind my back.  

“P-t-k, p-t-k, p-t-k,” (puh, tuh, kuh), Smuppet and I intone.

“P-t-k, p-t-k, p-t-k, ” the girls repeat.

“Petticoat,” I say.

“Petticoat,” they echo.  

Muscle memory. When I take a break from the work of headship and return to my drama teacher roots, I don’t think. I simply do.  I gently place Smuppet in a mint green basket full of markers. “He’s going to nap while we stretch,” I explain.

I invite the children to warm up–there’s some squabbling about who is standing too close to whom, but eventually, we reach up high to tickle the ceiling, stretch our arms wide to push away the walls, make fans and fishes with our fingers.I no longer plan the warm up or make any notes. I simply trust that, just as I have warmed up casts since 1979, I will know what to do. During the pandemic and its aftermath, we did no plays or assemblies for more than a year, but I never forget what to do with a group of children to get them ready to appear onstage. My process is more or less the same, regardless of the age of the performers, though Smuppet’s appearances are typically reserved for performers under ten.

I remind the girls that our energy must go all the way through our fingers–”No pasta fingers,” I chide, to more giggling. We roll our necks and our shoulders, bend at our waists like rag dolls, roll slowly up through our spines, lift our shoulders to our ears and let them fall, squinch up our faces as angry chipmunks, stretch them wide as happy bears.  By the second or third time, the girls know the drill. I have fussed at them about standing on both their feet, not hyper-extending their knees back, or cocking out one hip.

Smuppet, up from his nap, helps me lead the girls in a series of diction drills and tongue twisters. 

Their favorite goes like this: “What do tigers and armadilloes like most? Tigers and armadilloes like toast most. After that, they prefer roast.”  That one is an AVK original.  

We attack the final sounds–the “d” in “and” and the “st” in “most” and “toast and roast.”  I recently bought an armadillo hand puppet and found a tiger one I had in my collection. I let the girls hold them while we practice, but, while they love them, they are Smuppet loyalists, and I don’t share him; I’m afraid he might lose a body part fighting over who got to hold him.  

“Love your final consonants,” I say. “Who can tell me what a consonant is?”

Lots of hands shoot up.

“B,” says Eleanor, confident.

“D,” adds Elise.

“C?” offers another child, tentative. 

“Yes!  Marvelous,” I enthuse.

When we talk on stage, I explain, we need to speak more slowly than we do in real life. We need to be loud, which is a form of being generous. We use our voices to paint pictures with our words, particularly with poetry, so we have to pronounce all the sounds–on purpose! Performers have to love their words.  If we  talk too fast or in a squeaky, high-pitched baby voice, we sound as if we are little mice who have had too much sugar. The girls giggle. They want to sound grown up.  

They are ready to recite their first poem and take their places in two lines in front of the classroom’s white board. In real life, they will perform in a larger space with enough room for adoring parents and grandparents.  

“Okay,” I tell them, “Here’s the thing: when we speak as a group, we have to work really hard not be be sing-songy, not to sound like martians. Got it?” 

They nod, solemn.

“Is it true, Ms. Klotz,” a younger sister asks, “that as long as you are jumping up and down, we’re not in trouble?”

“It is,” I confirm.

“But my sister says that if you put your glasses down and look over them and get quiet, then we are in trouble.”   

Ahh, my reputation precedes me.

“Well,” I say, “that’s pretty much true. Those of you who don’t know me well might feel a little worried that I get so excited about working with you. It might annoy you that I ask you to do a line over and over again, but that’s because I don’t want you to settle for anything less than your best, and, it’s also true that if I put my glasses down and get very quiet, I might feel a little cross.

“Oooh,” the girls murmur.  After 21 years of leading Laurel, my “tells” are well known by the Laurel students.  

We work on their opening poem. They do a great job, so great that we decide to add gestures, which they perform with gusto. A few of the smaller groups, handling the verses in between the group opening and closing, are a little soft, a little shy–it is hard to speak with a partner.

“Don’t run out of gas at the end of the line,” I coach.

“Keep your vocal energy up. Love the words. Help us see how one word is different from the other. Can you underline that word with your voice, make it more important than all the other words,” I ask, cajole, instruct.

I’ve been a drama teacher since I was 18, working first with children in low-income housing in New Haven. I am mostly self-taught, finding my way depending on what the group of children in my care at a given moment needed. Much of my life was spent making plays with high school students, but I relish my time with the “littles,” as I think of them. 

Each day, I see progress. I am lavish with praise and positive reinforcement. In the lunchroom, the second graders lay claim to me, high-fiving me, inquiring about Smuppet–”Is he napping? Did he eat lunch?  Does he know his nose is funny looking?”

“Funny-looking?”  I glare, indignant. “Don’t we have a rule in second grade that we don’t make comments about anything a person cannot change?” I ask, a little stern.

“But he’s a puppet,” they chorus.

“Still,” Charlotte demurs; “Ms. Klotz is right; it’s not nice to say he’s funny looking—even if he is a puppet. Tell him we love him, Ms. Klotz,” she entreats.

“I will,” I smile,

The performance approaches. The day before, the girls and I discuss the temptation of waving back when parents want to blow “smoochy kisses” from the audience. We agree that it is sometimes hard for parents to know how to behave because they love their daughters so much. The girls decide to ask their parents to refrain from waving ahead of time.

Early on Thursday morning, we gather in one of the homerooms; I have implored the girls to come with their hair out of their faces; though I smooth several wisps and secure a few unruly curls, by and large, they are well-coiffed and proud. We warm up and rehearse the opening poem one more time. Mindy and Claire, their teachers, remind them where they will stand and how they will pass the microphone between one small group and the next. 

I say, “If you are excited, that’s fine; if you are nervous, that’s fine, too. And if you just feel regular, that’s fine. Mrs. Schenk, who taught drama at Laurel a long time ago, used to tell her girls that if you feel nervous, all you have to do is harness your butterflies and let them fly in formation. And I always tell girls before a show to “Light up the sky”!  You’ve worked hard; you’re ready. Let’s go!”

They file out of their classroom, giddy, some practically prancing down the hall. As they take their places, they sneak shy glances at their families, relieved when they spot them. There’s a little snafu about who goes where, but they sort it out. 

They say their poems.Very few rush. Almost all of them remember to breathe at the end of a thought. Each one stands on both her feet, though Yardley is so excited that she shifts from one foot to the other until she catches my eye and immediately stands still. Antoinette remembers to take her hands out of her pockets: ”You are not a kangaroo,” I had reminded her. Most try hard to look up from their scripts on podium–their solo poems–recalling my plea that they share their eyes. Smuppet, on my right hand, at the back of the room, nods his approval to them. I beam at them all , glasses well up on my head, trying to communicate with my eyes how much I love them. I am so proud of them. I imagine the young people they will grow into being.

I think about how automatic it feels for me to “lock in” as a drama teacher, how familiar and how those moments buoy me when other aspects of headship feel hard. To do creative dramatics with children is such a gift–to play make believe with puppets, to impart the basics of diction, to stretch and reach and try and try again. How lucky I am to have had so many experiences like this with children, how glad I am, still,  to be a drama teacher.