Word: bil
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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...
...Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf (ABC) proved to be one of the most engaging shows ever to be seen on TV. Actor Carney was fine as a new character in the old fairy tale, but the wonder of the hour-long show was Bil and Cora Baird's 50 animal puppets, who achieved something rare-a fairy tale mixed with true gaiety, a child's world edged by real irony. That was the spirit, too, of Ogden Nash's lyrics, notably in the wolf's lament ("Aesop launched the slander/ I should have eaten Aesop...