Great Adventures for the Faint of Heart by Cary Fagan

Author:Cary Fagan [Fagan, Cary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Isn’t the name a little long?” their father asked. Their mother was worried that no one would come. But the neighbourhood kids were eager to see what the freak twins were up to; twelve showed up to sit on the floor of the finished basement in front of a large cardboard box with part of the front cut out. Herb and Eleanor stood at the back, expecting some variation of their private show. Instead, they witnessed a completely new one about a badly behaved dog, played by a stuffed animal taped to a ruler. The dog howled, tore up newspapers, and almost caused a riot when it peed on the audience (squirt gun). At his wit’s end, the dog’s owner called a witch and the witch conjured up the Stinky Potato Golem, which promptly ate the dog with loud smacking sounds. Then it ate the dog’s owner. Then the witch. The golem made loud burping noises until a human-sized rubber boot came down to squash it. The end.

The children cheered.

That Hazel was the more dominant and peculiar sibling became clear as they grew older, at least to Malcolm. His tentative steps to make a school friend or two were quashed by her withering ridicule. Did he really want to associate with such ordinary people? Yes I do, he thought but couldn’t muster the courage to say. He grew into a burly young adult and managed to separate from his sister (“out of the Soviet sphere of influence” he told his new friends) by choosing Queen’s University for earth sciences. Hazel was now tall and willowy and almost pretty, if too intense-looking. She stayed in Toronto, going to U of T for theatre. Malcolm came home for the summers and it seemed like a good idea to go along with his sister’s idea of making their own summer jobs by starting a puppet theatre for kids. He wanted to stick with their original name, but Hazel insisted they would sell more tickets as the Merryland Puppet Company. They presented adaptations of The Ugly Duckling and Little Red Riding Hood, advancing from hand puppets to the more mysterious realm of marionettes, with their fragile gestures and ethereal walk. Malcolm built the skeletons of wood and wire and carved the heads, hands, and feet from basswood. Each had one particularly expressive feature — a long nose, sailboat ears, a dimpled chin, doe eyes. Hazel designed the costumes, sewing them on a Singer Machine that she recovered from the basement of her parents’ store.

They rented the small theatre in the Palmerston Library and built a plywood stage with a curtain. With so many families living downtown and wanting artistic experiences for their kids, they had no trouble selling enough matinee and early evening tickets to pay themselves more than minimum wage. The following year they added a two-week Christmas season. A story in the local section of the Toronto Star called the Merryland Puppet Company “a holiday institution in the making” and sold out the house for several performances.

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