And you with a book signed ventriloquism and here is a bibliography that George McIntyre put together and it has many, many, many books have been written on ventriloquism. Here is a course called Ventriloquism Made Easy. It is a tape course and I have a whole box of things, there is on puppets from one way street newsletter, the owners are friends of mine from years back. And there are all kinds of books available with ventriloquist and figure dialogues that you can get and I can send you the address where you can get them. They say be a V for ventriloquist and F for figure but that can be used for puppets, just have two puppets or you can have the teacher on the outside and the puppeteer on the inside. I have this whole box that is just full all this things.
Here is another big book Douglas Craig’s Ventriloquism From A to Z. The more you can read and understand and try things for yourself now, as I got into to ventriloquism, I first started buying just the dummies and excuse me, you are never supposed to say dummies, you are supposed to say ventriloquist figure. That is what they teach you first of all. But they have, this is out of the Pennies catalogue, they have Chalres McCarty, Lester and Howdy Dudy. And I have had Danny, O’Day, Willy Talk, a lot of the different ventriloquist figures. But there is a couple of things wrong, you use these and I tell you what they are. First of all, they are hard to operate. There is a string right here in the back to make the mouth work, this is Emma Kelly so you pull string. You notice when you are talking, first of all they are very small. When you are talking, their head will bop back. And it is very annoying and the snap, you can hear the snap on his mouth.
But that is what I started out with nearly 20 years ago. And the other thing was this, as soon as you were entertaining or teaching with these figures you gotten out of the catalog, someone in the audience was bound to say I have one just like that at home which really blows what you are trying to do but maybe it is just pride, I do not know. I thought that I could not afford, one reason why I made my puppets was I could afford to spend the amount of money that they cost, they cost a lot of money. There are different books that will tell you how you can build your own, but that is very difficult too. So, I was at a convention on time for ventriloquist and magicians and I ran into a 16-year-old boy who worked a deal that I trade him one of the puppets that I have made and some money I remember and I got this dummy named Joey. Joey not even really mine anymore, I just borrow him back because I just sold him later on.
In fact, he is bald because his owner has the hair off right now. But this was made like I said by a16-year-old boy and at that time I thought that I had to have one of these figures that had a mouth that moved, he has got a winking eye too. And it looks a better if he has his hair on. But his apparatus is all here, he has got an arm that moves with an apparatus that is inside. But I found that after I got him, that he was not really me. Somehow when you make your figures and your own puppets, they are really you. And so I really did not use him hardly at all but later on, I sold them. And I had to have though because I just thought I was not the true ventriloquist back there 20 years ago. I was not a true ventriloquist unless I had a wooden dummy.
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