Friday, June 4, 2010

Floppy!

I went in for a massage and Kelly, the wonderful masseuse, was wearing a Floppy T-shirt.  She said she had worked on the Floppy show.  I said no way. She said way, she worked at WHO-TV as a floor director.  Sometimes she'd be behind the camera, sometimes out giving cues to the talent.  Kelly's a native Des Moinesian and grew up with Floppy. She was even one of the kids on the show!  So Floppy is a person to her.  Just like Miss Piggy is a person to me.  Which explains why she occasionally gave the cues to Floppy.  The show was live so cues had to be given by hand signals and Duane would be talking to the kids so he wasn't paying attention.  But the puppet was looking right at her, so Floppy got the alert.  Until she remembered to catch Duane's eye. Just one of the pitfalls of puppet shows. If you'd like to read more about the Floppy Show and Duane Ellet, here is a list of newspaper articles.  You can just pop in to the Central Library and read these on our microfilm!
The Floppy Papers