I was inspired by Truepenny’s post on her teenagedom with Jesus (which is quite good) to write my own similar story down. But, given that I’m still a Christian, it came off as really preachy. Don’t get me wrong—I like the faith, and it’s a huge part of who I am. It’s just that I got in enough preaching when I was a teenage fundamentalist, so I’m a little self-conscious about that now. Anyway, I’ve decided to just write about the puppets, which was the best part anyway.

As a teenager, my family attended a Southern Baptist church. (Yes, the women-can’t-be-ordained, gays-are-attacking-marriage, Postmodernism-is-an-attack-on-truth Baptists.) In the South, that’s the thing to do—lynchings and book burnings are so passé. Around age 14, I joined a “creative arts ministry team.” Now, mind you, we didn’t really have any musicians or fine artists. We were just a bunch of people with our hearts in the right place. (You know the type.)

I should probably explain that I spent most of my adolescent life with acute social anxiety and severe depression. It was a big struggle for me to just make it through a school day mostly unnoticed. So there was no way in hell I was going to get up and act or do hand motions to emotionally moving songs. This left me with limited options:

• Stage tech
• Prayer warrior
• Puppeteer

(I actually wound up doing all three, but the third makes for a better story.)

So I actually devoted some serious time to studying puppetry. I read books. I attended workshops. I held books over my head to develop puppet muscles. I practiced in the car to the radio. (Puppet Linkin Park is about the greatest thing ever.) I don’t mean to brag, but I was a damn good puppeteer. I looked down on Sesame Street (bunch of amateurs). We had freaking pyrotechnics, just like Metallica.

What performances looked like weren’t quite as impressive as my puppet prowess and the bulging deltoid I had on one arm. If you don’t know, there’s actually a surprisingly large collection of Christian puppet material, ranging from bad scripts to bad music. One big phenomenon in the Christian puppeteering world is re-writing pop songs to have Christian lyrics. Mind you, they weren’t parodies, mainly because they weren’t funny. They were just really, really Christian. Here are a few travesties available on cassette:

• “Manger Zone” (“Danger Zone”)
• “Shepherd Boy” (“Sk8er Boi”)
• “Turning Christianese” (“Turning Japanese”)
• “Payin’ Your Tithe” (“Stayin’ Alive”)
• “We’re Gonna Read the Bible” (“We Didn’t Start the Fire”)

Don’t believe me? You can buy CDs and listen to samples here. Here are some to make sure to listen to:

• “Three Wise Men”
• “Hey, Hey, We’re the Christians
• “Hey Job”
• “You Give God a Bad Name”
• “You Must Be Born Again”
• “I Love Jesus Christ”
• “I Wanna Know What God Is”
• “When He Saved the World” (Coldplay!)
• “You Really Saved Me Now”

I have to break composure here, just for a moment, to say, Dear God! These are so bad!

It’s not like the songs were the end of it, though. In one performance, we had choreographed a rather epic puppet number, with seven different puppets and pyrotechnics. I don’t remember the song at this point, but it was probably very much like the songs I posted above. It got to the climax of the song, and we were all naturally feeling like puppeteer badasses, when the pyrotechnics went off and blew a fuse. The performance was outdoors, so all of our power was coming through a single extension cord, including the power to the sound system. The song stopped abruptly and mass panic broke out behind the thick black curtains.

“Act confused!” I yelled out. All of the puppets started looking around, as if the song had run away and could be coaxed back out with some kind words. A few started whispering to each other and pointing at the audience. My puppet buried his head in his hands and shook his head slowly. After about ten minutes, the song started up right where it had left off (we were using a cassette tape) and we jumped right back into our song and dance number.

To the best of my memory, this sort of thing happened once or twice a year.

It was the allure of starting a rock and roll church band that finally drew me out of puppetry. But that’s a story for another time.

Man, reading over this, I can’t help but notice what an abstract thinker I am. Details mean nothing to me. If there’s ever a crime, leave me off of your interrogation list, officer, because I will be no help at all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.