Weekend in July Pt. 4: Shadow Puppet Theater

One of the exciting things I did this past weekend was visit Red Hill Books for a shadow puppet show. When I was in middle school, I put on my own shadow puppet show about how Brer Rabbit outsmarted a lion by bringing him to a well so the lion got mad at his own reflection and jumped in thereby stopping any and all terror experienced by the animals.

It is sort of hard to explain how ridiculous the show is, so I'm gonna break the situation down into headings:

Description of Story Teller:



Do you see the focus in this man's eyes? His life is dedicated to shadow puppets. He lives in Humboldt County and every couple of months he comes down to the Bay Area to do a little tour of shows in bookstores in libraries, then he returns home. Whether he has another job is beyond my scope of knowledge, however I would recommend that he keeps it if he has it.

Whether he is the coolest man in the world is debatable; whether he has the coolest name in the world is not: Sean Powers. Sean Powers: Storyteller.

The coolest part about maybe the coolest person in the world is his musical instrument collecting.

His Instruments:

1. His 'Contraption' (A homemade brilliant thing)

Unfortunately, he didn't actually use this during the story. Ridiculous.

2. His Hu-Lu (a Chinese wind instrument)

He told a really convoluted story about how he bought it.

3. His Sanza.

His was made from a fish can and he says that in Africa, they play Sanza's as they walk from village to village

4. I can't remember the 4th, it must not have been that tight.

The Stories:
The first story was short. It featured a bird that hatches an egg. In the egg was a giant mouth with legs that talked about eating candy and how much it hated brushing teeth. Then a flying toothbrush forced itself on the monster and the monster changed his mind.


The second story was about a hungry turtle (the African Lore counterpart to the American Coyote [the trickster]). The turtle heard about the feast in the sky so he tricked the birds to giving him feathers so he could fly. He went up, ate all their food and they got mad so they took their feathers back and he was stuck on the cloud. He asked them if he could tell his wife to put the soft stuff from their house out, but they changed the message so his wife put the hard stuff from their house out and he jumped on it, shattering his shell.


His storytelling was like this:

"and then the birds were like... and then the turtle was like...etc."

All in all, brilliant show, wonderful day. Check his website here.