About Those Puppets

So, before we continue, a little update that will help put this post in context. 

I got engaged, you guys! It happened on November 25, 2012 in a way that surprised and touched me. It's a great (and absurd) story that I'll share with you in another post. In the meantime, wedding planning has begun.

To my surprise, I've found that part of the wedding planning process is not only about dreaming of what might be but also about unearthing dreams long ago buried. 

In this spirit, I bring you today's post about a dream long-buried that got resurrected again in the last months. And now, about those puppets...

I was in college when I first saw the Ventriloquist Dummy Choir on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

The Ventriloquist Choir is just what it sounds like - ventriloquists and their dummies, dressed in choir gowns, singing. It's bizarre. It's hilarious. It's unspeakably cool. Especially if you love puppets. And I do love puppets.

I joked back then that I would get the Ventriloquist Dummy Choir to perform at my wedding. It garnered a laugh from my friends and some strange looks from acquaintances. The more incredulous gasps of "Oh my god, not at your wedding???" I heard, the more I pushed the envelope. The Dummy choir could sing me down the aisle. They could provide background music to the lighting of the unity candle. Hey, they could even sing our first dance as a newly wed couple.

I kept pushing the idea because it was funny. But also because I was so convinced that I'd never walk down the aisle - and so it was safe plan a ridiculous, absurd and goofy wedding. Complete with puppets. That sang.  Over the years, as I got into serious relationships that could have potentially ended in marriage, I casually tossed out the Dummy Ventriloquist Choir in conversations with my then-boyfriends. By that point a choir of puppets had morphed into a whole puppet wedding - with puppets that looked like me and my husband-to-be.

Shortly after such conversations, the relationships would end. I don't think these relationships ended solely due to my fascination with puppets. But perhaps I was subconsciously throwing out the idea of a puppet wedding as a litmus test of whether those men could share my ridiculous sense of humor and tolerate the absurd. Most of them couldn't. One of them found my love of puppets incredibly creepy and half expected me to have puppets hidden away in a closet somewhere, ready to spring on him at any given moment. (For the record, I do not own any puppets.)

After the Dude and I got engaged, as a joke, I typed in "puppet wedding" into a Google search. Much to my surprise, a blog post popped up on offbeatbride.com, a wedding blog I've come to love. The couple featured did have a puppet wedding - complete with puppet look-alikes of the whole bridal party.

And it turns out, puppets and weddings are more common than you think. There's a whole set of Offbeat Bride posts tagged with "puppets."  One couple got married in the middle of the Million Puppet March, another got married at the Jim Henson Studios in Los Angeles with actual custom bride and groom muppets. 

I guess I wasn't so absurd and ridiculous afterall.

Sadly, there will be no Ventriloquist Dummy Choir at our wedding. Not because the Dude objects, but because I don't think the troupe still performs. Besides, even if they did, I'm pretty sure they are out of our budget range. I'm not, however, ruling out the possibility of puppets at our wedding yet...

Since they won't be singing at our wedding, here's a YouTube clip of the Ventriloquist Dummy Choir for your viewing pleasure.


http://youtu.be/nmpMvEyCNFQ

PS: In case you were wondering if I ever told the Dude I wanted a puppet a wedding while we were dating - I did. As a testament to what kind of a man he is, we made a visit to Puppets on the Pier at Pier 39 in San Francisco on Christmas Eve. We even jokingly picked out potential puppet versions of ourselves. That's how I know I'm loved.