Judy Brown:  

After I graduated from Halsted, our whole family moved back down to Greenwich Village, where I had lived the first seven years of my life. My parents hated the suburbs and really missed the eccentric and rather bohemian life they had left when moving to Riverdale. I graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then attended NYU, majoring in theater. One day I saw an ad in Backstage for people to do ¿puppet¿ voices. I didn¿t even know what that meant but it sounded different enough to peak my interest. I auditioned, got the job and was soon on my way to becoming a puppeteer, performing fairy tales in the NYC public school systems. My brother-in-law, my sister Jill¿s husband at the time, told me about an organization the was specifically for people involved in puppetry. I attended their annual convention in Miami and there pet Bob Brown who was to become my husband six months later. We¿ve been married for forty three years, and creating , producing, and performing puppet shows around the world all this time. I come up with the ideas, he creates and builds the puppets, I direct the productions and we both perform. Our first big break came when we were commissioned by Orbach¿s Department Store on 34th Street in NYC to create a Christmas productions in their four front windows. Each window offered a short, ten-minute marionette production performed to music, each scene complete within itself but then continued in the next window. The shows ran continually, one after the other, for ten hours a day. We hired puppeteers who worked in teams of three, each team performing one complete cycle, then the other team would take over. The following year Woman¿s Day Magazine had us create The Barn Yard Frolics, a puppet production with puppets, set, and script, published in the magazine. This led to my writing three Christmas scripts for the magazine over the next several years. Two years later we were asked by the Smithsonian to come to Washington, DC and create the Smithsonian Puppet Theater. We performed twelve shows a week, changing the productions ever...Expand for more