I frequently get email from people who have either seen some of my work, or who are interested in a career as a puppeteer (or both). They usually ask how I got started in the business and got to where I am now. I found myself answering those questions with the same story over and over, so I thought I would write it up and post it here for all those who are interested to read.

I would not be where I am today if it wasn't for lucky timing and two phone calls out of the blue from friends. I was a sophomore Physics major at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, when I decided that I would rather be on stage than in the laboratory. I signed up for a second (double) major in Drama and thought I should check out the call board in the Theater office. This is where information like local casting notices were posted, and indeed I was looking for acting work. The very first time I checked out the call board (this is where the timing comes in), I saw a casting notice for puppeteers for a new PBS series called The Letter People, to be taped at the local PBS station, KECT (which, coincidentally, was right next to the campus). They were looking for people who could do character voices and manipulate puppets.

Now, I knew I could do some voices ever since my time at Miami Beach Senior High School, when my friends and I would do virtually entire album sides of the Firesign Theater in our rooms. So I went to the audition prepared with a Firesign Theater-like vocal piece consisting of the voices one would hear as the channels were changed continually on a television set. The man who was auditioning me (King Hall, who built the puppets and was the head puppeteer) was impressed enough to proceed to the next part of the audition: he went and got a puppet and gave it to me. And as I put it on, I realized that I had never--not once in my childhood that I could remember--never had a puppet on my hand before that moment. As I started working with the character, I simply discovered that this was something I could do.

And I did it well enough to get the job. We ended up doing 60 fifteen-minute episodes of The Letter People during the last two and a half years of college, earning $100 per episode--a tremendous amount of money for a college student in the mid-1970's. I don't think I ever had to ask my parents for money again after that. We recorded the dialog on Thursday afternoons and taped all day on Friday. I just skipped classes and made up the work during breaks in taping. Still, I managed to graduate summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, if I may blow my own horn.

When I left Washington University, I went on to the California Institute of the Arts, where I got my MFA in Acting from the Theater School, graduating in 1978. (I also met my future wife, Diane, there.) I got a day job at Leo's Stereo in Los Angeles and pursued an acting career, landing some small jobs and extra work.

Then around 1980, came the first of the two phone calls. My friend Jerry Gelb called to tell me about an ad he saw in one of the trade papers. Sid and Marty Krofft were looking for puppeteers for a "puppeteer school"--actually an extended audition to build up a talent pool for upcoming projects. At first, I didn't want to get involved with a school, since I had already worked professionally as a puppeteer. But then I thought, what the heck, my friend called for a reason, and the school would probably be fun and keep me busy. I auditioned and was admitted. This group proved to be full of talented puppeteers with whom I've been privileged to work ever since, and the roster reads like a Who's Who of working puppeteers in L.A.: Bruce Lanoil, Kevin Carlson, Terri Hardin, Tim Blaney, Pat Brymer, Carl Johnson, Todd Mattox, Greg Williams and Steve Sherman. Many of us worked on a number of Krofft productions after that. And we formed a network; we stayed in touch and helped each other out. I continued to work over the next few years both as a puppeteer and an actor, about fifty-fifty.

Fast forward to 1990. Things had slowed down considerably. I was teaching acting part-time at Glendale Community College and Antelope Valley College to make ends meet. I felt I had paid all the dues I cared to pay. My thoughts were mainly for the well-being of my wife and two small children. I was thinking seriously about leaving "the business" to go into teaching full time.

Then came the second call. I believe it was Kevin Carlson who called to tell me he submitted my name to the Jim Henson Company. They were in Los Angeles looking to fill crowd scenes for "Muppetvision 3-D," the movie that's now playing at the Disney-MGM Studios. I auditioned for Jim and got the job. It was my first time working with this group of puppeteers whom I'd admired since high school, and I felt ten feet tall. This was definitely the Big Time compared with any other job I'd done. Most of the people from the Krofft workshop were there, along with many others, and we worked two weeks, during which time one of Henson's lead puppeteers, Richard Hunt, scouted for talent for upcoming projects. ( This was at the time when Disney was planning to purchase the Henson organization, and they were anticipating more production in Los Angeles. Most of Henson's work until then was in New York and London.) On the last day of shooting, Richard tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I put in a good word for you with Jim." It felt like the Red Sea was parting--or at least that a door was opening; and once I walked through, my life would never be the same.

Jim died just a few months later. I remember thinking how fortunate I was to have had a chance to work with him, even as the prospects for the future seemed so uncertain. But around February of the following year came a phone call inviting me to a Henson animatronics workshop. It seems they were gearing up for a TV series called Dinosaurs, and needed more talent in that area. Twelve people took the two-week workshop, which, again, seemed to us at the time like a really long audition. Initially, four of us went on to do the series: Bruce Lanoil, Terri Hardin, John Kennedy and myself.

We did 65 episodes of Dinosaurs over two and a half years, and it was one of the greatest professional experiences of my life. A year after it ended, two of the producers from that show were helping to put together a sitcom for a new network. The script called for a talking bunny, and one phone call later, I was working on Unhappily Ever After for the WB Network.

Things once again slowed considerably after about 2001, and again, I began to hate sitting around the house waiting for the phone to ring, so, in late 2004 I decided to return to the stage. It had been 17 years since I appeared in a play (a production of Taming of the Shrew at the Old Globe in West Hollywood), but I jumped right into a production of Much Ado About Nothing near my home in Santa Clarita. I enjoyed it so much, I followed up with Brighton Beach Memoirs and Hamlet. In May of 2005, Brian Henson formed the Jim Henson Puppet Improv group, of which I am an original member, giving me another opportunity to perform in front of a live audience once again. So far, the improv group has performed at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

I'm asked quite often to give advice to people who would also like to be puppeteers. All I can tell you is what I've learned: keep working, don't settle for OK, and keep learning. Practice in front of a camcorder and monitor until what you see on your monitor looks like what you see on TV.

And stay open to the opportunities that come knocking. When I was at CalArts, my friend Don Lake and I used to half-joke about being a professional actor one day, driving to the studio every day and waving majestically to the security guard on the way to our reserved parking spot. Well, this is what happened to me (and, for that matter, to Don), but not quite in the way I imagined it originally.