Puppets & Stories for Lunch

At the Provo City Library, I've been doing a show called Canopy Capers on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12-12:30. Miss Alicen and I perform puppet shows and storytelling for pretty decent sized crowds. It's totally free, so stop by sometime. Here are some highlights from one of my shows:

Miss Alicen is an amazing performer! She graduated from BYU in vocal performance, which is a very hard program to get into to begin with. I have a lot to learn from her.

It's been awesome performing at the library for about 2 years now, but at the end of July I am going to be done. Miss Alicen is going to resign as well, so any of you who would love to perform for toddlers weekday mornings in the fall, there will be 2 positions posted. They aren't posted yet, but I'll let you know as soon as they are up.

Zoo with Gashler clan

We went last Friday with Steve's parents, Deanna, Eric, Desire and her girls Jamie & Talie. We of course forgot our camera, so Desire let us take some pictures with hers until they had to leave. It was a fun experience because we actually got to see a good amount of the animals moving around instead of sleeping. A zoo keeper was feeding this tiger to get it to come close to the fence while a news station (I forget which) was doing a little live blurb about the zoo.

Good old uncle Steve let Jamie ride on his back. You can't see it, but Steve is wearing a hat that says #1 dad on it. He's practicing living up to that, as you can see here.

Jamie had a lot of fun. She was way into seeing the animals and has the child curiosity and interest that I envy and want to make sure I have myself.

Here are Deanna and Leonard (Steve's dad) in front of some turkeys. It was hard to get pictures with animals because the animals were hardly ever close enough. It's so great having family in town and spending time with them. Somehow I neglected to get a picture of Eric :S

Linda (Steve's mom) and our one and only nephew Paul. Linda is such a cute grandmother :) Paul wasn't so interested in animals, but maybe that was because he couldn't really see most of them and when we tried to point them out he didn't seem to notice. He was quite pleased with the bushes, however. He liked to pull on them.










Talie, on the other hand, was very interested in the animals and would point at them as she took notice of them. Here she is with Desire, though I can't remember which animal they were looking at. This picture is an attempt to catch her in the act of pointing.

We saw a really awesome bird show showing off eagles, parrots, chickens, and lots of other birds. It was extremely well done and very entertaining. I hear they have a lot of other great shows/exhibits to give more knowledge about their animals, so I highly recommed for anyone to check out the zoo sometime this summer. It's totally not just for kids as long as you remember to have the interest and curiosity of a child.

Performing, working, and family

This is us posing as if we were bored. We've realized that posing a believable bored face is pretty hard. It's true that our sociality has been suffering greatly, that being our own fault. We, however, are anything but bored.

On Friday June 6th we had a last minute Gashlaria performance at a city event in Nephi. Since it was super last minute (which all of our performances seem to be recently) we could only get Curtis to come along with us. We performed short puppet skits, Pythagorea and the Gnome once, and did some good old storytelling. Unfortunately, we left our camera home, so we could only take cell phone pictures, which we are still trying to figure out...

On Saturday we drove to St. George for a wedding job. It was the first Catholic wedding we've ever attended and we greatly enjoyed it. It was completely Christ centered and the father emphasized to the couple the need to let Christ in their marriage. Steve was doing videography for it and during the ceremony at times we both felt that videotaping was inappropriate because parts of it seem so special and sacred, but they wanted the whole thing taped so we did it.

Between the ceremony and reception, we stopped by the Brigham Young winter home. We were in a ridiculous hurry, so one of the ladies there was nice enough to take us through quickly. It was really awesome to see. Steve remarked that he must be an old grandpa man now because he actually enjoys and took the initiative to see a church historical site. When he was young, his family took some big cross-country car trips to see church sites and it got tiresome. Now he's an old grandpa man :) and insisted that we make at least a little rushed time to see some sites.

Us in front of Brigham Young's winter home.

The reception was a fun experience too. Both the bride and the groom are in the army, so the bride decided to choose different shades of green for her colors. It was actually cute! She even had camouflage ribbon on her cake. Doesn't sound cute, but it really was. We ended our time in St. George by walking around the temple for a bit and learning about how it was made. All I can say is that the Saints living down there were absolutely amazing and hard working.

Yesterday Steve's mom, dad, and sister Deanna made it from Gilbert, AZ to be here for Emily's wedding today. We ate at La Vigna in American Fork. I read reviews before going, and most of them were negative. We all had a great experience and highly enjoyed the food, so I recommend it to anyone! Our waiter was especially good to us as well, and even was willing to take this picture of us.

It's great for the family to be all together. We are missing Eric and Brain in this picture unfortunately. It's fun to chat and watch our darling nieces and nephew interact with the world.

Performance at Showtime Utah

Us with Alex Boye

Last night we performed some puppet shows for "Family Night Live" at the Showtime Utah theater in Pleasant Grove. Alex Boye was the MC, and he repeatedly told us how amazing we were. After the show, he told us that he wanted us to tour with him. He said he was doing gigs all through the country that paid a ton, and he thought we could really go far together. He said he was doing this amazing show called Black Legends, a musical tribute to all the great black musicians of the twentieth century. We didn't understand where puppets would fit in, but we smiled and nodded, stressing that we were very interested. Later Curtis realized that Alex had mistaken us for the band he had been singing with, as we were both wearing black. Apparently Alex eventually realized this, and he smoothly glossed the conversation from Black Legends to the need for puppet shows in the community. He asked for our card, pledging to hook us up with future gigs, but I think that was just an outward act to help dig himself out of a hole. It was a funny situation. Oh well, Alex was an amazing performer. Oh yeah, and we were pretty good too.

Muse Music Performance

Last night we opened for an evening of bands at Muse Music in Provo. We had found out about this concert only hours before, so after a rushed, inadequate rehearsal, we were all a little nervous. As we drove to the fateful event, even more daunting was the vision of a long line of people waiting to buy tickets just outside of Muse Music. Later we realized that these people were waiting to get into the Velour, the concert hall next door to Muse Music, where, I guess, the better bands were performing. In actuality, there were only a handful of people who heard us perform, and most of them were other bands, waiting for their turn.

Someday, perhaps, the world will recognize the brilliance of all the underdog artists out there, but in the mean time, we underdog artists will continue to perform for each other, wishing there's someone who actually cares in the audience, waiting for a fat rich guy to approach us with a contract and check book. Not that we covet fame and fortune. We're all about art for art's sake. But then, it sure would be nice if such art were being admired by a crowd of screaming fans, one of them, perhaps, being a fat, rich guy with a contract and check book.