Dear Sara, my sweet dead Sister,
You were two years old in this clip, so Peter was three. I was seven, the age of reason.
I am enchanted by this clip, over and over again, and now again, as the subject of this letter, dear Sara. Its charm has been diminished by reading the news last year around this time of children killed by guns.
On December 18, 2022, Christmas past, the New York Times Magazine published a photo/essay titled “The Lives They Lived.” I still display the magazine on an unused music stand in the studio, changing pages occasionally.
I can’t remember the first time I used this clip, and others of me growing up in the home movies, in my artwork, enchantment is not good with numbers. But I can show you an example of the most recent and significant use in an experimental puppet theater work I called the Soup Talks Trilogy.
“Blake, who became a puppeteer after a career as a scenic designer, says the titles are variations on the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) talks. In reference to those international negotiations, Blake sets up a conference table that seats 12 spectators, while about 40 others watch from more conventional seats. But Blake’s real subject is not global politics. Rather, it’s the creation of the world.”
Alexis Greene, Theater Week October 14, 1996
Yes, in my show, mating turtle puppets give birth to civilization, and I projected clips of my childhood from the home movies — in the live performances, I used the family projector to show the edited clips on the wall at the end of the table! For the video, I superimposed the movies onto a book of Braille that the Blind Storyteller was reading.
Ten thousand years ago --
wooden-reaping knives set with flint blades,
first used in Palestine -- agriculture was established.
A story told of the first murder --
of a man killing his brother, taking his land,
and sleeping with his brother's wife,
who was in fact his own sister --
5000 years ago.A good time was had by all of me putting the first part of the trilogy together for the small screen. Dad outdid himself, capturing my First Communion the following year. I used it in the climax of civilization’s timeline when the mating turtles separate — the puppeteer wearing a black hood raises the Chorus of Civilization, twelve miniature figures holding a lace curtain splattered with blood — and Adam ascends to become the Sun while Eve, the turtle puppet settles in as Mother Earth, and closes her eyes.
Father supported our Mother’s devotion to the Catholic Church; it was her French Candian roots. Dad never attended Mass; instead, he set a stunning breakfast table of sectioned grapefruit with a red cherry set in the center, followed by waffles.
I once read that the “age of reason” is when we become aware of life and death.
I have no idea what this has to do with the home movie clip of us pretending to die in a gunfight, wearing our new cowboy shirts, and under the bright lights.
Your guess is as good as mine, Sis; thinking of you always.
“Voice of the Turtledove” may be viewed on Vimeo.
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The Christmas Day Shootout, 1949