Word: bil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...minds of most people puppets are kid stuff, and few U.S. puppeteers care to argue. Two who do: tousled Bil Baird, a gentle Midwesterner who looks like a shop teacher in a progressive school, and his sloe-eyed actress wife Cora. Early this month, on TV, they clinched the argument with ABC's delightful, top-rated Art Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf (TIME, Dec. 8), which gave millions of adults a chance to watch the Bairds' marionette fish, their nose-wrinkling rabbits, and even a Baird cat climbing a tree-all funny rather than cute. Next Baird...
...With Her Head. For the Bairds and their two children (aged three and six), such surroundings make no difference, for they live in a gay and private world. That world began in the lively imagination of Nebraska-born Bil (so spelled since he formed an art club requiring three-letter first names). Growing up in Detroit, the son of a chemical engineer, Bil built a puppet-populated miniature city for his friends in a vacant lot. He continued puppeteering apace through the State University of Iowa, wound up as assistant to famed Puppeteer Tony Sarg. One of his duties: nursing...
...nowhere with their ancient art. For an act in a Toronto burlesque house in the early days, they designed a hilarious puppet stripper, who took off everything, including her head. The audience merely clucked in sympathy, thinking the doll was broken. "They just didn't dig us," says Bil, "until we hit the Persian Room...
...those who have dug them since, Bil Baird has made some 1,600 creatures (average length: 27 in.). Dozens of retired characters festoon the Baird apartment; hundreds more are packed in catalogued cardboard boxes, along with rows of drawers containing eerie hoards of spare heads, arms, legs, hands. All over the workshop benches lie new creatures in various stages of becoming...
...spoof people, Bil has generally used animals: a gossipy hen (Hedda Louella McBrood), a bulldog TV interviewer (Mike Malice), a cow fan dancer (Dorothy LaMoo). He also has a mournful hound-dog named Edward R. Bow-Wow, who delivers historical newscasts over See It Now-Wow. But if TV is willing, Baird proposes something grander: serious news shows using puppets (Khrushchev, Dulles, et al.), with graphic, moving geopolitical maps. "Nothing to it," says Puppeteer Baird. "In this art, the whole world is at your fingertips...