Cheryl’s Websites: Puppets For Pittsburgh & Studio Capezzuti
For Puppets: For more info on Cheryl’s many puppet projects, visit the Puppets For Pittsburgh website here.
For Lint Art: During the episode, Cheryl talks about one of her current projects, “The National Lint Project” where she makes art sculptures out of dryer lint. More info about this project can be found on her website here.
Cheryl’s Upcoming Shows
Cheryl is going to be a part of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s 2023-2024 Featured Artists Exhibition that starts on March 9th and runs until May 17th, 2024. For more information on this show, visit the show page on the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s website here.
Cheryl has an upcoming show at the Contemporary Craft, located in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville, as part of their “Hereafter” exhibition. The exhibition opens on May 31st, but further details about the artist lineup have yet to be released. Check back here or on their website here in the coming weeks for more specific details about the show.
Giant Puppet Dance Club
Cheryl talks during the interview about her after school club called Giant Puppet Dance Club that she started at University of Pittsburgh Fanny Edel Falk Laboratory School, where she currently works. Their youtube page, where you can view videos of students having fun and dancing around in puppet costumes, can be found here. They also have an instagram page, that can be found here.
Bread and Puppet Theater
Founded in 1963, the Bread And Puppet Theater started out as a mobile puppet stage that co-founder Peter Schumann created out of his father-in-law’s trailer. After traveling all over New England with his mobile puppet show, Peter returned to New York, where he and friends Bob Nichols and Mabel Dennison rented out a small loft space on Delancey Street. They quickly converted the space into a theater and puppet museum, and soon began putting on weekly performances, where Peter’s skills and interest in dance and sculpture were fused in puppetry. Also being an avid baker, Peter would bake bread and distribute it to audience members to enjoy during the performance, leading the men to name the space “Bread And Puppet Theater.”
The theater still offers shows, and they also have a puppet museum that houses a massive collection of the puppets, masks, paintings and graphics of The Bread and Puppet Theater that can be visited as well. For more info about visiting the theater or museum, visit their website here.
Source: https://breadandpuppet.org/
11th Hour Brewery
Eleventh Hour Brewing is a brewery located at 3711 Charlotte Street, in the lower Lawrenceville area of Pittsburgh. They offer a variety of beers that can either be picked up and enjoyed at home or in their taproom, which features a rotation of different local food trucks. More info on them can be found here.
Todi, Italy
Todi is a town in central Italy, about 95 miles, or about two hours, north of Rome. It’s perched atop a large hill that overlooks the river Tiber, giving great panoramic views from anywhere in the city. With a name meaning “border” because it once bordered the territory of Etruria, it was founded in the 8th-7th century BC. Pictures of this beautiful city are below.
Sources: Wikipedia
Photo Sources: Tuscany Now & More and Expedia
Sharpsburg Recycling Policy - Does It Actually Get Recycled Or Do They Just Bury It In A Landfill?
I couldn’t find anything about the borough of Sharpsburg specifically doing this, but overall, a startlingly low amount of U.S. waste actually ends up getting recycled. According to the EPA, only about 32% of trash, or municipal solid waste (MSW), in the U.S. gets recycled, and the other 68% gets disposed of in landfills, is incinerated, composted, or disposed of by some other means. This isn’t necessarily due to, say, lack of knowledge of proper recycling practices, but more so because of the type of material this waste is made of.
Some common types of waste that can be recycled are paper/cardboard, glass, aluminum, and plastic. Paper products, glass, and aluminum are fairly easy to recycle; glass and aluminum can actually be recycled an infinite number of times. The problem area is plastic. Some plastic items are designed in ways that make them difficult to recycle, so because of this, when they are recycled they are often turned into lesser-quality material, and unlike glass or aluminum, plastic can only be recycled a couple of times before it degrades. For that reason, only 6% of the plastics produced in the U.S. get recycled. So if they aren’t getting recycled, where are they going? Unfortunately, most of these plastics end up in either landfills or incinerators. Both of these options are harmful to both the environment and our health.
A good way to prevent plastics from ending up in landfills is to pay attention to the “resin code” imprinted on it. You may have noticed that many plastic items are imprinted with small numbers surrounded by three interlocking arrows. This is something called a “resin code”, and indicates what type of plastic the product is made out of. As a general rule, plastics labeled with a number one or two are most likely to be recycled. Those are the rigid plastics like water bottles and milk jugs, which usually get recycled into things like fleece jackets, carpeting, plastic lumber and picnic tables. Plastic labeled with a five, found in things like yogurt pots and shampoo bottles could potentially be recycled in your community, but its acceptance varies so it’s important to check with your local recycler to confirm which plastics they accept. The other plastics—three, four, six, and seven—are more likely to be dumped in a landfill if tossed in your household recycling bin.
The only way to fully prevent plastic from entering the environment is to decrease or eliminate altogether the use of these plastics.
Sources: Plastic Pollution Coalition, National Geographic, EPA, Recycling 101, and EPA
The Jim Henson Foundation
The Jim Henson Foundation was founded in 1982 by Muppets creator Jim Henson to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States. As the only grant-making institution with a mission to promote puppetry in the United States, the Jim Henson Foundation has become a major advocate and resource for puppet artists, awarding more than 1,200 grants to over 400 American puppet artists for the creation and development of innovative live puppet theater since its inception.
Source: Henson Foundation
Puppet Movies & Shows: New “Dark Crystal”, “Team America”, & “Avenue Q”
Several different TV shows and movies that involve puppets were mentioned in this episode, including the new “Dark Crystal” TV show, “Team America”, & “Avenue Q”.
“Team America: World Police'' is a 2004 film produced by “South Park'' creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone as well as Pam Brady. The film is a satirical comedy of common action movie tropes as well as the current state of U.S. politics at the time. The film utilized 270 marionette puppets for its characters. It can be streamed on Paramount+ here as well as on Apple TV here, or can be rented on Amazon here.
Source: Wikipedia
“Avenue Q” is a musical comedy featuring both puppets and human actors that is supposed to be a parody of “Sesame Street” but with more adult concepts. The show premiered Off-Broadway in 2003, and later that year, in July, moved to Broadway where it ran for six years. The show then moved Off-Broadway again where it played until 2019. In total, the two productions played 6,569 performances. The full show, with the original Broadway cast, can be watched on YouTube here.
Source: Wikipedia
Jim Henson Creature Shop
Creator of “The Muppets” Jim Henson founded “Jim Henson's Creature Shop”, a special/visual effects company, in 1979. The company was originally created to facilitate the production of the film “The Dark Crystal”, and was later used for the production of “Labyrinth” and “The Storyteller”. Following Jim Henson's death in 1990, the shop was relocated from Hampstead, London, to Camden Town, where his son Brian Henson took over. They opened another location in Burbank, California to service the Hollywood area, and one of its first projects was the “Dinosaurs” television series. When the company first started they mainly specialized in practical effects, but they’ve since begun to develop something called "digital puppetry", a form of computer animation that controls a digital avatar using manual puppet controls to animate them more quickly and easier than if it was entirely digital.
Sources: Wikipedia and Jim Henson Creature Shop
Balloon Ride Fantasy Songs With Puppet-like Sounds: Behold, Princess Twilight Sparkle & Advance With The Mayor
Bethany mentions a few songs that her and Chris’s band, Balloon Ride Fantasy, have released that have cool sounds and vocal tracks in them that have a puppet-like sound. Those songs were the cover of the My Little Pony song “Behold, Princess Twilight Sparkle” they did for the charity project “A Little Bit for Charity” and the song “Advance With The Mayor” that is a track off their self-titled album “Balloon Ride Fantasy” released in 2015. Both of those tracks can be found below.
Behold, Princess Twilight Sparkle: Listen here
Advance With The Mayor: Listen here
CBS Pittsburgh Talks Segment With Cheryl
During this episode, Bethany mentions an interview Cheryl did with CBS Pittsburgh on their “Talk Pittsburgh” segment with one of her students. If you are interested in watching that interview, it can be found on Youtube here.
First Night Pittsburgh Parade
“Highmark First Night Pittsburgh'' is an event put on by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a non-profit arts organization that focuses on the cultural and economic development of an area of Downtown Pittsburgh known as the Cultural District. “First Night” is a yearly six- hour New Years celebration that starts at 6pm New Years Eve and ends just after midnight. As a part of the celebration, there is a parade that features loads of different performance groups, including Cheryl and her giant puppets. It starts at 8pm at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, and ends on Penn Avenue just past 6th Street towards the Allegheny River. If you are interested in dancing in a giant puppet costume, you can meet Cheryl on 10th Street near the Convention Center at 7:15pm on New Year's Eve to join in on the parade.
Sources: Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, About PCT and first Night Pgh
First Night Origins
New Year’s celebrations are recorded to have started as early as 2000 BCE in Babylon, the southern capital of Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the world’s oldest recorded civilization, and was situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, an area of the Middle East that today spans parts of Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey. The Babylonians considered the first new moon following the spring equinox in late March to be the start of a new year, and celebrated the occasion with a massive religious festival called Akitu (derived from the Sumerian word for barley, which was cut in the spring) that involved a different ritual on each of its 11 days. Over the centuries, the calendar fell out of sync with the sun, and in 46 B.C. Julius Caesar, in consultation with astronomers and mathematicians of his time, created the Julian calendar, which established the 365 ¼ day year and the January 1st start date that we are accustomed to in the modern day.
Sources: History, Britannica and Wikipedia
First night celebrations began in the U.S. in Boston in 1975. The idea was conceived by Clara Wainwright, and a small group of artists and musicians were organized to perform on stages, both indoor and outdoor. The event also sought to avoid the emphasis on alcohol typical of New Year's Eve parties, and focused more on being a family-friendly event. The idea quickly caught on, and by 1999, First Night celebrations were being held in more than 200 cities.
Sources: Wikipedia
Little Amal Puppet
During the episode, Cheryl talks about her work with the project “Little Amal”. “Little Amal” is the 12 foot puppet of a 10 year old Syrian refugee child built by Handspring Puppet Company that makes “walks” around the world that aim to draw attention to the huge numbers of children fleeing war, violence and persecution. Her urgent message to the world is “Don’t forget about us”. Since July 2021, Amal has traveled to 160 towns and cities in 15 countries and been welcomed by two million people on the street and by tens of millions online. For more info about the project and its future events, visit their website here.
What Disease Does Bruce Willis Have?
After first being diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder that affects a person’s ability to speak and communicate in 2022, Bruce’s family announced in late 2023 that his condition had progressed to frontotemporal dementia. Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a term used to describe a group of brain disorders affecting the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain; these are the areas associated with personality, behavior and language. In FTD, these lobes atrophy—or shrink—leading to certain behavioral, speech or movement symptoms depending on which areas of the brain are affected.
Sources: NBC Los Angeles and Mayo Clinic
Famous News Reporter In Pgh - Not Sally Wiggins
Chris tells a story about how his father was featured on a news broadcast that did not go as expected, and referenced the newscaster but can’t remember her name. The news anchor Chris was mentioning was Patti Burns.
Cheryl’s Segment of Ellen
Cheryl talks during the interview about her experience being on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Cheryl was featured on episode 39 of season 3 of the show that aired on October 27th, 2005. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to stream this episode currently online. If this changes, we will be sure to update this page, so if you are interested in seeing it, make sure to check back here or our socials for a clip from the episode.
Source: IMDb
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