When Shadow Puppetry ATTACKS!

Usually when you take a family vacation it is so boring you want to see if throwing yourself out the car door would liven things up a bit. Not so with my family, we are the show.

First, the ride, dull and boring until my father finds the only station playing opera and sings a long or better yet, when a certain station that plays different versions of “Louie Louie” all the way up north for hours and hours. It still haunts me to this day, I have a knee jerk reaction to the opening notes, I always kick the back of a seat yelling, “ Stop it! This is child abuse!” Or one trip to Kentucky, my family rented a car to go south in, sounds luxurious, but not so. My gaseous father found that farts are way better if you can lock the windows and force your loved ones to marinate in it. But those antics do not compare to the trip to Niagara Falls. We hit all the tourist traps and had some fun looking at water, but what we always remember is Shadow Puppets.

Yes, Shadow Puppets, you wouldn’t think that making these on your hotel wall at midnight with your feet or hands would almost bring you to tears with side splitting laughter, but it did. My father got the flashlight, propped it up and made with the shadow puppets. My favorite was the guy with a large nose sniffing, made with my father’s huge hand with the thumb forced thru the first two fingers of his fist, an instant classic. It made my sister and I snort with laughter. Then he pulled out all the stops with a toe band called, “the Great Pretenders”, which was his big toe as the lead and the others as back-up singers complete with faces drawn on with a Sharpie. He would sing classics and jingles with “the Great Pretenders”, such as; “weeeeee are the great pppreeetenders”, here’s the back-up part now, “ooooohhhhh oooohhhhh”. We would roar with laughter, while my mother claimed that she “didn’t get it”. Oh we got it all right, our dad was weird and so were we.