Memorializing Pop Icons with Puppets

Sisters Amy and Nancy Harrington have made a career based on their love of pop culture. Their positive entertainment content — including interviews, articles and trivia challenges — has been syndicated to Yahoo, OMG!, Examiner, Screenpicks, Fox.com and many more.

They have conducted over 1,200 interviews including more than 50 one-on-one oral histories for the Television Academy's Archive of American Television — including in-depth interviews with Danny DeVito, Ed O’Neill, Tom Bergeron and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

They were handpicked by OWN to be part of the VIP digital press corps covering Oprah’s Lifeclass during Winfrey’s tour of the U.S. and Toronto. And through their work as MediaMine’s Creative Directors they helped to create the Official Hollywood Walk of Fame App, a thousand-question Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson trivia game, a Don Rickles Zinger App and more.

Most recently, they launched their own line of hand-crafted pop culture themed puppets that have paid tribute to legendary icons like David Bowie, Bernie Sanders, Freddy Krueger, Prince and Carrie Fisher.

DW: As women who are passionate about all things pop culture, what made you want to memorialize celebrities? Was 2016 and all the celebrity death the impetus?

The idea for the puppets actually came before the concept of memorializing celebrities. Several years ago we had worked for a company and we created a few sock puppets for a video segment we were trying out there. The company folded and we turned our attention to conducting interviews for our blog and the Television Academy and working on pop culture related projects like creating the Official Hollywood Walk of Fame app for one of our clients. But about a year ago we started talking about how we both wanted to do something more creative. We remembered how much fun we had making the sock puppets and decided we wanted to express our love of all things pop culture this way. We did our Emmy predictions through sock puppets in the Fall, followed by Halloween and election puppets. At the end of the year, we decided that so many sock puppet worthy celebrities had passed, that the best way to end 2016 was to immortalize them in a way that they probably hadn't been honored before.

DW: Why sock puppets?

We think part of it is that it brings us back to being two little kids doing endless crafts together growing up in Braintree, Massachusetts. Our parents were artistic and always encouraged us to be as well. So, we would spend hours making fake stained glass out of crayon shavings and wax paper. We were in heaven when we could waste an afternoon doing anything with papier-mâché. And now, even though we're grown ups, we can do something that reminds us of those early days squirreled away together having fun and making each other laugh.

DW: Any chance they will be displayed in public or is this strictly an online memorial?

Our goal for 2017 is to have a gallery exhibit and accompanying book this time next year. The exhibit will be a tribute to the greatest pop culture icons of all time. We're going to nail down the list and start construction after the first of the year so that we have plenty of time to get things just right and find the perfect location. And, throughout the year, we'll continue to post new pieces. We have an Oscar fashion retrospective planned for February.

DW: What celebrity death hit you the hardest this year?

For Nancy, it was David Bowie. While I have a deep passion for many musicians and entertainers, David Bowie has always been my kindred spirit. His message of individuality and non-conformity shaped my views at a very young age and led me down a path of carving out my own life in the way I want to lead it, not the way society dictated. In fact as a teenager, my hair style very much resembled the yarn hairdo you see on our puppet! His music touches me deep in the soul and his loss was extremely profound for me. 

For Amy, the loss of Carrie Fisher was a huge hit. Seeing "Star Wars" as a nine year old basically changed the course of my life. Not only did I love the movie and saw "The Empire Strikes" back over 100 times but the franchise is one of the major reasons I moved to Hollywood to get into entertainment and why my love of pop culture is so deep. More importantly, Princess Leia and later Carrie Fisher herself represented the pinnacle of what it meant to be an independent woman with a take no prisoners attitude — strong but flawed, sarcastic but not pessimistic. 

DW: Has making these puppets been therapeutic?

It certainly has helped in terms of the In Memoriam puppets. Each one was made with complete love and admiration. We feel like the details are critical to making each puppet work. So, it was fun to stop, reexamine each person in their prime — their hair, their clothes, their accessories and, most crucially, their attitude. It was a nice way to reconnect with what we loved or admired about each of the people that we lost this year. And, in general, it makes us happy that people are finding joy in the puppets when they see them. It feels like, for us and for the growing number of people who are connecting to them, they like them because seeing these people in this way just makes them happy rather than dwelling on the sadness of the loss. 

DW: There has been a lot of discussion and arguments on social media about people grieving celebrities, as if it is ridiculous. What do you think about that?

We have stepped back a couple of times this year and thought, "Why are we so sad to lose someone we never met?" And we certainly wouldn't begin to pretend that our suffering in any way compares to that of these people's family and friends. But people like Bowie, Carrie Fisher, Gene Wilder and Garry Shandling made a significant impact on our lives through their work. They shaped our points of view, our humor, our sense of style. They were always there for us when we needed to be entertained by them. So how could we not be sad to see them go? In our own very small way, these puppets were meant to be our way to carry on their legacies and thank them for all they meant to us.

DW: Thank you so much Nancy and Amy for sharing your puppets on my blog. I love them and can't wait to see then on display. If you want to see more of these puppets, you can like their Facebook Page or follow them on Twitter @PCPassionistas.

It's the End...

Of the year as we know it. And I feel fine. Actually, I don't feel fine. Can you hear that tiny violin playing in the background? No? Well, I suggest you get your ears checked. It's there. Listen closely.

As we all know, the end of December is typically a time of reflection as well as a time to think about plans for the next year. I'm not very typical. I have never liked New Year's Eve, nor do I like the month that follows it. To me, January is a major let down after the consumer holiday frenzy from mid-October to December 25. After that we fast forward from peace on earth and goodwill toward men to the next big event that's not fun for anyone. And no, I'm not talking about Valentine's Day. I'm talking about April 15. This is how my mind works. I mentally go from the expectation of holly jolly wish fulfillment to the bureaucratic nightmare of tax preparation in a nanosecond. This bummer emotion usually hits me on December 28. Debbie Downer, right?

Well, the last two months of 2016 have been a big old Crisco frosted cake left out in the rain kind of downer. I'm not even going to go into it but it rhymes with lump--like a large, orange cancerous tumor of unidentifiable yuckiness at the bottom of your Christmas stocking. On a side note, I hate to break it to you kids, but coal isn't coming back. Maybe Santa will put a renewable energy source in your stocking if you're naughty. Or maybe Santa will be replaced by a nonjudgmental robot who is not only more efficient, but doesn't require quite so many cookie breaks. That should be lump's first executive order. You're welcome.

And then Carrie Fisher died. And the day after that horrifying loss, her mom died. How f-ed up is that? Yes, yes. We all know. 2016 is a killer. It's taking the icons. Gen X and the Boomers are losing their heroes. There are far too many to name. David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Carrie Fisher hit me the hardest. I wrote a post about the first two, but Carrie just happened and I'm just a little bitter right now. I became a fan of Carrie Fisher after reading her memoir, Wishful Drinking. I loved her voice and her sense of humor, so much so that I went to see her show in New York all by myself. That was awkward but I thoroughly enjoyed it. No, I didn't know her. No, I wasn't a Princess Leia fanatic. While Star Wars was truly a cultural touchstone for me as a kid in the 70's, I didn't fantasize about being her. Truth be told, I wanted to be Darth Vader. After donning a Vader costume and scaring a bunch of little kids one summer, I realized that it was much more fun to be the bad guy. Vader had a cool outfit, people feared him, he was powerful, and to top it all off, he was voiced by James Earl Jones. "This is CNN." I know, I'm weird.

Despite Lumpy and the copious amount of celebrity death in 2016, it was actually a pretty good year for me. I traveled a lot, both to promote my book as well as just for fun. I became much more comfortable speaking in front of groups of people. I also lived through a book event in New Orleans where only two people showed up and neither of them bought my book. That was totally awkward, but I lived to tell the story. What doesn't kill us gives us stories! I also finished my second book and I'm almost done with graduate school. So there's that.

So, did anything good happen in your 2016? Doing anything fun for New Year's Eve? Is there black-eyed peas on your grocery list?

Tell me.

Monday Mourning: The Death of a Child

A year ago, an annual FB post was noticed by the DW. I’d not yet read Pam’s book but her request to share my story has scratched at the back of my brain ever since. After reading Death Becomes Us, I knew I could trust her and her audience with my story. As this is a particularly meaningful year for me, it felt like the time was right.

My son, Christopher, was born by emergency C-section 16 years ago, today. He was 4 weeks early. We found out later that I’d gotten a group B strep infection earlier than they tested for and it had killed the placenta. The entire experience was traumatic, in ways that have haunted my nightmares ever since, but I’m not going to relate that here. Suffice it to say that it was an abusive marriage and had been an equally brutal pregnancy. I was alone in every way that matters and everything went wrong. But in the end, Christopher was alive and recovering, or so we thought.

Preemies must prove that they are eating and growing at a certain rate before a hospital releases them so, for two weeks, we believed we had a normal kid that had just gotten a rough start. A midnight life-fight to Primary Children’s hospital changed all that. Did you know you have to promise that you won’t freak out if your kid flat-lines mid-flight to ride with them? With only minutes to absorb the situation, I had to admit that I didn’t know if I could stay calm. They flew off without me.

My husband (at the time) gathered our things from the hospital sleep-room (a temporary room provided to parents with children who’ve been hospitalized) and drove us the hour and a half to where our son had been taken. What followed was five and a half months of fighting for Christopher’s life.

It turned out that when the Group B Step had overwhelmed the placenta and killed it, Christopher had been deprived of oxygen. We were able to save all his other organs that had been affected but in the end his kidneys were destroyed. They only do transplants with adult kidneys so the minimum weight required for surgery is 25 lbs. Healthy babies gain that in the first three months, sometimes less. After five and a half months we estimate that Christopher had gained between 8 and 10 pounds. They estimated he’d be 2 years old before it would be possible and they didn’t expect him to live that long.

When we signed the DNR that March he’d been diagnosed with meningitis for the 3rd time. It’s important to know that there are 3 kinds of meningitis, but most people only know about the worst one, the one that kills healthy adults in days. That’s what our already medically fragile, underweight, and immune compromised infant contracted. You also need to know that, excluding surgeries, they don’t give babies pain killers. That poor kid was practically tortured, for months, by our efforts to save him. If I could go back and change one thing, I would give him pain killers.

So when we decided to stop fighting, painkillers were the first thing he got. The poor kid slept for a week. We were shocked. And then we were sent home from the hospital for the last time. It was terrifying. We had no idea what was going to happen or what his death would be like. Hospice care was scheduled. They hurriedly dropped off the equipment and scheduled a follow up to prepare us for what came next. He didn’t make it to the second appointment.

My baby boy died in my arms at 11:30 pm of April, 11th, six months and one day after he was born.

A call was made to the funeral home that had been arranged by family. I held his body for another half hour as we waited for them to arrive. I was surprised when a man with a white van was all that showed up. He explained that they didn’t really have a stretcher or blankets for babies so we left him in the pajamas and blanket he’d died in. Then I calmly carried my son’s body out to the van. The short walk defied time and space, slipping into one of those forever moments that you can’t forget. A single thought echoed in my head with each step. It said, “ This is the last time you will hold him so remember every second.”

I placed his body on the front seat as instructed. It funny how you think about the need for buckles and safety belts and then have to remind yourself that they don’t matter anymore. I covered his face with the blanket and an ache began in my arms. It turned out to be an emptiness that has persisted to this day.

The van door closed and the husband, who had never wanted a child, guided me back inside as it drove away. The funeral was a rare 5 days after his death, due in part to the fact that even though we had known it was coming I had refused to do any planning. I figured I had a lifetime left to deal with his death but only days to enjoy what was left of his life. I wasn’t going to stain those days with plans for it to end.

I decided on a viewing and a graveside service only. The caskets they offer for infants were little more than overpriced plastic shells and hideous ones at that. So his father made him one out of pine, staining the wood to look like it was cherry and lining the inside with padding and white satin.

I went to Baby GAP and got him clothes. I chose a white sleeper that buttoned up and got it a couple sizes larger because they told me that his body would be stiff and hard to dress. I then found a sleeping cap, socks, and booties to match. The rest of the funeral I planned and organized, making all of the arrangements and printing the programs myself.

For his viewing we invited friends and family to write letters or notes to him that were put in a matching wood box and buried with him. A friend asked if she could take pictures, promising that they would help later. She was right. And it’s something I advocate to this day. For me it is a constant reminder that his body is finally at peace, something he almost never experienced in life. And oddly, since the embalming fluid used is pink, he looks healthier in death than he ever did in life.

There are things we did at and surrounding his funeral that I later learned are really helpful for healing but at the time I was acting on pure instinct. I felt especially responsible to watch over his body until it was safely buried. I think that’s why, at the end of the service, we stayed to finish it.

Once everyone had left I tucked a stuffed animal, one that had been with him during every hospital stay, under his stiff arm and kissed him one last time before the casket was nailed shut. Those nails might as well have been going through me. My husband and I lowered his casket into the cement vault after he removed the handles we’d been told wouldn’t fit. (He’d used chrome towel racks, the ones usually meant for bathrooms, as the handles and I later found out that he returned them to the store. It’s weird to me to think that those ended up in a stranger’s house.)

The box with everyone’s letters and rose petals were placed in the cement vault with his casket before the cap was lowered. The workers expected us to leave but I asked for a shovel. They produced two and we began to fill in the hole. When they realized we weren’t moving aside to let the tractor finish they picked up more shovels and helped us finish. I finally stood back when they brought out a machine to tamp down the remaining mound. Fresh sod was laid and just like that, the ground appeared to have never been disturbed.

We couldn’t afford a head stone so I had prepared two shepherds crooks. I hung a set of wind chimes on one side and a candle lantern on the other. A handmade wooden plaque on a chain held the two crooks together and was the only marker. Later it would be stolen by vandals that thought anything left in a graveyard was free game and the city would pass a law that only allows stone markers. So now, only a plain, uncut, unfinished, granite stone marks his grave; placed there by his father during a manic episode that had taken him up one of the nearby canyons. Someday I will save enough to put the stone bench there that I dream about, one with a little cherub on one side, waiting for someone to talk to.

The saddest part to me has come in the aftermath. You see, when adults die, we do our best to remember them for their life. Sure, it’s our way of fending off the pain but it’s an important coping tool for their family as well. When a baby dies, that’s all people hear. The idea of the pain of such a loss obliterates any opportunity to remember the good times. You learn not to talk about your child beyond the basic facts, because nothing that was good about his life could overshadow the tragedy, he died, and nobody wants to hear about a dead baby.

The reality is, my son was astounding, not just for what he endured but for what he evoked in others. In his first month of life he brought people into the same room whose hatred and loathing had divided families for over a decade. Members of the family I’d been cut off from since my marriage came back in full force and so many walls came down between people. Friendships were born that I treasure to this day. Specialized nurses changed their shifts to care for him, an RV was lent to us by a company so I could stay at the hospital with him, and in the end he didn’t die until everyone had had a chance to say goodbye. There were hundreds of precious, beautiful, and even funny moments. But I never get to tell those parts of the story, because things change around you after your baby dies.

Suddenly no one who knew wanted me to hold their baby or touch their children, as if I was somehow bad luck. The silent ache in my arms grew. 16 years later and I still worry about new mothers finding out, because when they do, they get that same look on their face; a mixture of pity and fear. The friends that have let me hold their babies will never understand the gift they gave me.

But if they read this perhaps they will understand better why, except for two days of every year, my life goes on as if I’m completely fine with losing him. And then, on the day he was born, and the day he died, my life stops. I don’t work. I don’t make plans. I let those days be whatever they need to be. Some years they are no big deal and some I relive every moment like its happening all over again.

And this year he would be 16. How am I old enough to have a 16 year old? I divorced Christopher’s father a few years later and he in turn disowned his son. It was a blessing that we’d never had any more kids together but when I married again the plan was always to have more kids. That’s one of the questions I’m always asked. Do I want more kids? Can I have them? There is no medical explanation for why they’ve never come. Even adoption has eluded us, though not for lack of trying. So much of other people’s lives are measured by what their kids are doing. Not having kids sometimes feels like living outside of normal time. But if I’m only ever going to have one kid, I’m glad it was him.

So what do you say to someone like me? Its easier than you think but probably the safest question is: what do you wish you could tell people about your kid? Or how about: what’s your favorite memory? What’s the funniest thing he did? Ask us questions like we are ordinary parents, ordinary people, that want to share the best of our memories.

Everyone says this stuff gets easier with time but if you’re counting, I’ve barely allowed myself more than 32 days, just over a month, to feel the pain as deeply as it asks to be felt. I hope that someday the world makes a place, makes it acceptable to grieve for as long as is needed. Until then, I don’t know what else to do but let it tear me apart, put it away for six months, then open the box and see what is next for me to work through in a day, before I put it away again and go back to my life.

Jennie lives happily with her husband and their 2 dogs in Portland, Oregon. She is an award winning poet, a published author and an editor with her own business, Myth Machine ePublishing where she helps other writers prepare for the publishing process. They travel every chance they get and love new adventures. 

Thank you so much, Jennie, for sharing Christopher with my readers. Grief can be isolating, so it is my sincere hope that someone out there will feel less alone by hearing your story.