A Brief History of Ash St. Puppetworks

Born of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a tendency to neglect proper newspaper disposal, Ash St. Puppetworks was founded sometime in the fall of 2001, by Ducky Vigneault & Michael Huggins, in the otherwise serene north end of Manchester, New Hampshire.

It began, benignly enough, as a Halloween display; large and garish, full of goblins and witches, reapers and tree trolls... And a talking puppet (dubbed Ralph) who, complete with lights, cameras and voice modulators, managed to either fascinate, amuse, or scare the hell out of an increasingly long line of trick-r-treaters... Creepy enough, they thought, to startle the conservative sensibilities of most of their upper-middle-class neighbors.

The reaction, however, was both unexpected and disconcerting: the neighbors liked it.

They scrambled to regroup.

Several possible scenarios were discussed; a children’s show, perhaps…maybe a reworking of “Where the Wild Things Are”…True to the original, except the little boy is completely grotesque, with fangs and claws, drooling and spitting... and the wild things all look suspiciously like Al Gore...

Or a series of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas… with large, Carnivalesque puppets in lieu of Japanese maidens, all set to a techno sound track, and performed every hour, on the hour, for the amusement of the rec-room crowd down at Dole & Child’s nursing home...

There were other ideas, all just as good, but budget constraints and vague public indecency laws put most of them on the back burner.

Then came Wormtown...

Ducky, it turned out, had been a fan and aficionado of the music festival circuit for years, and suggested that these venues might be just the place to showcase their growing collection of paper-mache monstrosities. Mike was hesitant, being generally averse to any large crowd that didn’t involve some kind of mass exodus... but Ducky persisted; and after a soundly reasoned pitch and a fifth of bourbon, Mike agreed... StrangeCreek was coming up, and finding themselves with no current legal entanglements; they packed up a puppet and headed for Greenfield... It went well enough to get them invited back.

Clearly, this was a sign from God.

Mike immediately retreated to the basement with a bottle of single-malt and began feverishly tearing up sections of the Manchester Union Leader... And believing that everyone has four mortgages, Ducky went out and bought a trailer big enough to transport the whole menagerie cross-country...

Throwing both caution and personal obligation to the wind, they drove from New Hampshire to Arizona and back again, cleverly meshing their recently conceived business and art venture with some long over-due vacation time... The result was both a pair of happy, however frustrated, artists, and nearly a continents-worth of either enthusiastic or horrified witnesses...

The rest is revisionist history...

Ash Street Puppet Works may be reached at: info@ashstreetpuppetworks.com, or call us at: 603-289-7992.