Thursday, February 24, 2000
Kids partners in performance
BY MARK SCHMETZER
Enquirer Contributor
MONTGOMERY — Shameka Webber and Astarr Pinkney sat in the front row of the Sycamore Junior High School auditorium Wednesday morning and watched their stories come to life.
The two 8-year-olds, third-graders at Winton Place Academy, and their classmates saw seventh- and eighth-grade Sycamore students performing as vividly colored, outlandishly sized puppets in productions of A Beast Named Ugly and The Sponge Witch.
The performances were the final steps of a cooperative effort between about 100 Sycamore art and language arts students, and pupils at their sister school, Winton Place Academy. The effort got help from Jerry Handorf's Madcap Puppet Theater.
Madcap is this semester's artist-in-residence at the junior high school, art teacher Melissa Speelman said. She and some fellow teachers got the idea for the productions about two years ago after attending a workshop, she said. For original material, they went to Winton Place.
“We wanted to get them involved,” Ms. Speelman said.
“They very generously included us,” Winton Place teacher Dee Anne Helm said.
“The kids enjoyed the whole process,” Winton Place teacher Kelly Eldridge said.
Mr. Handorf spent a day at Winton Place working with students on writing the stories. Shameka's and Astarr's were picked for production and turned over to the seventh-grade language arts classes at Sycamore, taught by Kathy Nagel and Joe Eilerman, for editing. They turned out one story starring Queen Shameka (named in honor of the author), her princess daughter, a court jester, a fairy god mother and a beast named “Ugly” who preferred “Barry.”
The other story featured a witch intent on turning schoolchildren into sponges, along with her assistant, a giant sponge monster and a too-cute-to-be-true schoolgirl named “Cutey Pie” which the monster was unwilling to transform.
“All of the stories were very, very creative,” Ms. Eldridge said.
Pat Mulvaney, 13, a Sycamore seventh-grader who helped in the editing and portrayed “Cutey Pie,” was good-naturedly upset at being reminded that he'd picked up a nickname that might come back to haunt him.
“I wrote the jester's "Oh, drat,' line,” he said. “I also had a line — "Never trust a two-bit sponge monster' — that was cut from the witch story. This was a pretty cool thing to do.”
After the stories were finished, Ms. Speelman's and Carol Ritchie's art students worked with Madcap to design and build the Muppet-like puppet-characters and sets.
“The most difficult was putting them together,” said Zach Newman, 14, who also was the beast. “I worked on the witch, too. We learned a lot about cooperation. ... We had a heck of a time drilling everything in.”
“When Jerry (Handorf) saw them, he said they looked really professional,” Ms. Speelman said.
“It was exciting to see it all go together,” said Madcap's Mimi Richmond, who directed the productions.
Shameka and Astarr were similarly excited about seeing their words turned into shows.
“I learned you can be anything you want to be, and you can do it as long as you have help,” said Shameka, adding that she's now working on a song as well as a story about dancing.
Astarr pronounced herself pleased with the way her story about a witch casting spells became The Sponge Witch. “I learned that any person can write their own stories and do whatever they want in the story,” she said.
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