Lessons from a Purple Puppet

I went to see a puppet show with my son this weekend.

My son is 24.

So, it was a puppet comedian. Randy Feltface. A fuzzy, egg-headed purple puppet with a quick wit and a bit of a mouth.

The person who holds Randy’s strings and heart, Heath McIvor, is a bit of a mystery—but we know from his stories and his accent that he is from Australia. He's on a North American tour at the moment, and was in Boston, so after watching him only on YouTube, we had to go.

Randy has already been to all four corners of the country, and said he loves the U.S.A. But he also said, “You’re a bit of a cluster#$*& at the moment, eh?”

The audience laughed hysterically at that one.

We are a bit of a cluster right now.

We’re waiting for the economy to crash, we’re waiting for the healthcare system to crash, we’re waiting for our educational systems to crash, we’re waiting for the climate to crash, we’re waiting for general civil order to crash.

It's crashing already.

We’re living in divisiveness, anxiety, and fear, and after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, for many, a deep sense of betrayal and hopelessness. It’s a lot of weight for any one set of humans to hold.

What do you do when you're in a cluster?

There’s activism.

There’s systemic change.

There’s policy change.

There’s making life better for our neighbors.

And, to the point of going to see a funny purple puppet, there’s humor. There’s finding laughter in day-to-day life to help keep us all going. My son has always been the one to remind me of lightheartedness—hence, he's the one that introduced me to Randy Feltface.

One of the things that made Randy so funny is he breaks the fourth wall, that imaginary wall between the stage and the audience that keeps actors from seeing us as theatergoers. Randy is a puppet, with half-domed eyes, and his puppeteer is underneath a curtained frame. So, he literally can’t see us.

And yet, he did.

He looked into corners of the room as if he could see everyone who was there. He got into conversations with individuals in the audience—in one case, a deep discussion with a guy about his day, which had been spent cleaning his closet of memorabilia from four former relationships. But he was single. So Randy tried to hook him up with a single woman in the front row. And then he had that guy come up and give Randy a hug.

When a few of us laughed really hard about something, Randy said, “There are three or four of you in the front who got that last bit, and you are making my night. The rest of you can leave right now, and I wouldn’t even care. You could walk out, and I wouldn’t know it. I wouldn’t even see you go.”

That made us all laugh harder. Thus, he broke the fourth wall, and was right there by our side.

What fourth wall might you be behind?

Are you living your life on your own stage, as if you aren’t seeing what’s happening out there in the audience?

And yet there is no world outside of us. You know that television show, “This Is Us”?

That sums it up: This. Is. Us.

We are the ones who have made this cluster#$*& world. We are the ones who have to change it.

Sue Monk Kidd wrote in The Book of Longings, “Each of us must find a way to love the world.”

How are you loving your world? How might you break the fourth wall and better love this cluster#$*& of a world right now?