Hearing a Hands-On Calling

By Sarah Kaufman

The Washington Post

June 02, 2009

Listen up, boys and girls. Hare Prof. Bunne is going to clue you in on What Is Really Important.

(By the way, you all look so nice -- is it Picture Day today? No? You look this good every day? Wow!)

The man in the bunny suit holds up his furry gray hands: 'Okay! Everybody say 'con-ser-va-tion.' ' He cocks a long ear, waits for it . . .

'Conservation!' sings out the gym full of pre-K through third-graders.

'It means to save!' the bunny exhorts, punching the air. 'We must work together, boys and girls, and save this world! Everybody repeat after me: Turn it off, turn it out/Don't waste water from the spout . . . '

Soon the rows of kids at Patuxent Elementary School in Upper Marlboro are singing along and clapping, little shoulder blades bouncing under white uniform shirts. Inside the bunny suit, even with sweat streaking down his domed forehead, curling his white hair, the big man is having the most fun of all.

Michael Cotter, founder of Blue Sky Puppet Theatre, is many things -- idea man, carpenter, quasi musician, actor, schlepper, number cruncher -- but at this particular moment, as Prof. Bunne, helming maybe the 4,000th production of 'Lights Out on the Bunny Brothers,' a show about saving the planet, he is what he loves best: the guy who can get hundreds of kids to laugh and take away his message.

He is also maybe the smartest/luckiest/pluckiest guy who ever rumbled into Berkeley by van in the '70s and had an epiphany in a haze of smoke.

Everybody say, 'self-ac-tu-al-iz-a-tion'! It means to be 61 and bouncing around as if you're 6, to have put three kids through college on what started out as a hippie-dreamer's lark and turned into a full-time career. As a puppeteer.

* * *

Who starts a puppet company and makes it work for 35 years?

That's how long Blue Sky has been operating, from the basement of Cotter's home in University Park. It's long enough to make quite the reunion party, held this past Saturday night at a nearby joint in College Park. A bunch of puppeteers, musicians, school principals and others involved with Blue Sky over the years gather to perform excerpts of favorite shows, to sing indelible songs complete with all the hand gestures, to marvel over the rod puppets -- furry bodies on long poles, with movable mouths and arms -- that still look lively after all these years.

And they swap puppeteer war stories -- about kids puking, fire drills mid-show, getting sucker-punched by a homeless guy, and that day they tried out a show with a new ginormous monster puppet that sent the first few rows of children screaming out of the room.

Cotter, born and raised in the District, a graduate of Gonzaga High School, hadn't a clue what to do after college. He joined the Peace Corps, taught at a poor elementary school in Louisiana, did a little carpentry, started looking for something 'unusual.'

Hey, it was the '70s, explains Cotter, a tall, slim man with a mischievously upturned nose set into the round, open face of a country doctor. 'If you didn't do something alternative, there was something wrong with you.'

He piled into a van with a bunch of friends to tour the national parks, and eventually landed at the University of California at Berkeley. There, he came upon a street-theater performance by a San Francisco puppet troupe.

Cotter was 26, and he'd never seen a puppet show before. But somehow, he knew he'd found his calling.

The troupe had adapted Harry Nilsson's 1971 acid-influenced fable-turned-film 'The Point!,' about the only round-headed boy in a land where everyone else is pointy-headed. The puppet show 'was sophisticated and it was perfectly ridiculous -- you know, a bunch of adults watching dolls,' Cotter says. 'And the fact that it was perfectly ridiculous made it wonderful.'

Cotter, an avid jazz fan, returned to D.C. with a vision of Miles Davis playing into a bank of computers and communicating with outer space through jazz. He thought it would work with puppets. 'It was the first original idea I ever had,' he says.

He hadn't studied theater or art; he'd never written a play. 'I just knew I could do it,' he says. He came up with a script, got his composer buddy Jeremy Young to write some songs (as Young still does today), and called on every artist and friend he could find to pitch in. On May 24, 1974, 'The Blue Suede Zoo' premiered in the back room of a Hyattsville bar. Saxophonist Richie Cole performed in it, which gave the enterprise much-needed credibility. It was a big outfit at first -- an eight-piece band, five puppeteers, four backup singers, a modern dancer and someone to work the lights. On a good night, they'd make 20 bucks apiece.

Cotter named his troupe Blue Sky after looking out the window as he was brainstorming and seeing a blue sky. 'It's true!' he says.

'Man, you gotta come up with a better story than that,' snorts Steve

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