the marriage of missy mouse
close to 12 years ago, a bunch of us from chinese school met in my parents’ basement and got high inhaling markers for almost an entire weekend. supervised by our parents. i’m not even exaggerating!
we were making shadow puppets for chinese school. shadow puppets is one of the reasons why i think li-ming was amongst the most awesome chinese schools growing up. because it offered truly unique and interesting lessons in chinese culture. i mean, everyone had chinese brush painting and calligraphy (boring if you ask me!) and chinese yo yos and dance, etc. etc. but li-ming was THE original shadow puppet school. (i think senior year, i heard rumors another chinese school was also doing it… but i don’t think as awesomely as us 
)
so 12 years ago, we made a bunch of puppets out of cardboard (not the traditional leather… too hard) and put on the show, The Marriage of Missy Mouse. it’s crazy that it was so long ago. it was one cycle of the chinese zodiac ago. fred’s voice (mr. cloud in the recording) sounds like a little kid’s because he was so small!!
since this year was the year of the mouse again, it was time for missy to make her comeback. they got a bunch of new little kids to perform the show. in fact, one of the kids is YOUNGER (10 years old) than the puppets… another kid is ONE YEAR older than the puppets. it’s ridiculous to think that we created the puppets 12 years ago!!!
since none of the original puppeteers really got the see the video of the show, i recorded the last rehearsal by this year’s troupe right before their performance at the library. the rehearsal actually wasn’t as awesome as their actual presentation, but i wasn’t able to record their actual performance (which was awesome) and the school performance (awesome as well). and actually, the camera picked up ann and i talking (and whining when they were missing/slow on transitions) because we were dumb and hadn’t realized we’d be picked up by the mike (along with a bunch of other background noises because everyone else was getting ready for their performances). the puppets are actually brightly colored but because of my camera/lighting in the room, they come up rather dark. the video really does the show little justice oh yea, and i have rather unsteady hands… but enjoy! i think the story is a GREAT story. really cute.
