Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Phillip Jones/Vent Haven Museum..
In Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, there’s a haven for ventriloquist dummies.

Whenever I saw ventriloquist dummies in childhood, I was fascinated that they could seem to talk. You don’t see them nowadays that much, and it seems that fewer people are learning the skills that let them appear to “throw their voices” into those dummies.

Mina Tavakoli , a neophyte ventriloquist, writes at N+1 that there’s a place in Kentucky where the art is alive and well.

“A half-nude, three-foot figure called me to a table just beside the vending machines. … ‘I’m Dicky!’ he squeaked.

“I wagged my pen in front of his tight little face. ‘Dicky,’ I repeated. [It was then] right as Dicky’s jaw flung open, that his ventriloquist  —  his father, his frère, his semblable; the standard abbreviation going forward is vent  —  sneezed. At that second, Dicky did too. The vent trumpeted into his tissue and held it in front of his wooden child, who did the same, loudly and juicily. …

“We were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion. … Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.

“The human delegation was only slightly less mixed. Many attendees were entertainers  —  clowns, cruise-ship performers, Santa impersonators, balloon artists (known in the trade as ‘twisters’), theme-park proprietors, theme-park employees, and (hugely overindexed) magicians  —  clapping one another on the back and nodding like Marines celebrating dockage on home soil. …his was the ConVENTion’s welcome reception, where the cream of ventdom was swarming the warm and ferny lobby to relive the lives and re-die the deaths of the vaudeville. …

“The man with the chef’s hat and meatball puppet … calmed hospital patients and veterans through a nest of spaghetti. Just past the gurgle of the lobby fountain was Barbie Q. Chicken, a 4-year-old bird who was both Broadway prima donna and antibullying activist. Beside the wall of potted plants was Danny, an underweight and barefoot hillbilly from the mountains of West Virginia, and further beyond him was Herman the Worm (pronounced ‘Hoiman Da Woim’), a cross-eyed caterpillar made out of a dryer vent hose. Beep, a monkey, was kitty-corner, behind me were Doodle the toad and the handsomely breasted showgirl Miss Trixie, and now approaching with tensed biceps was Rocco, the muscular pit bull from Staten Island. … Some had that sort of vaporizing charisma; some, one could tell, had the limper, more sheepish personalities of those whose lives are defined by long stretches of extreme silence. As the lobby mushroomed with figures of felt, wood, and PVC tubing, they formed a great chorus of flopsy [creatures] that would not shut up.

“First-timers formed lines against the marble  —  our official title was ‘red dotters,’ after the distinguishing round stickers on our name tags. … Men, eager to know what brought me to ventriloquism, showed me photos of daughters, wives, dogs, farms. Men, who were not full-timing entertainers, were retired dental hygienists, hairdressers, firefighters, ranchers. Retired anythings. …

“Northern Kentucky was never exactly a likely mecca for the ventriloquial arts. In the 1920s, barrooms across the nation boomed with the surrealist showbiz acts of American vaudeville. From Midwestern saloons and small-town beer halls to New York’s glitzy Palace Theater, most cities welcomed troupes where magicians charmed, plate spinners spun, contortionists contorted, and ventriloquists  … threw their voices across club circuits that sold the business of analog enchantment. When the theaters darkened in the Depressive ’30s, televised variety shows shuttled ventriloquism safely to the entertainment capitals of Los Angeles and New York, though the rise of more sophisticated special effects began to render dummies anachronistic as early as the mid-’60s. By the early ’70s, when vent-prominent programs like The Ed Sullivan Show had sunsetted to make way for sitcoms, the ventriloquist-and-dummy act was already approaching something like near-obsolescence.

“A tile salesman, one William Shakespeare Berger, homed his collection of dummies in his garage in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. Before his passing, in 1972, he donated his entire estate to establish Vent Haven, the world’s only museum devoted to ventriloquiana. The Vent Haven ConVENTion, now in its forty-ninth year, is presently six miles away from the original site of Berger’s family home, and functions as ventriloquism’s true earthly haven:. …

“The general act of learning ventriloquism is tedious, because the puppet is an instrument, and only one half of the theater routine. It is an ancient art, a maze of gestures and shadow gestures. … Nimble fingers tweak at little pinches and squeeze-boxes stuck inside the cavities of the ventriloquial dolls … while the tongue operates flawlessly under confinement. …

“There is no real ‘throwing’ of the voice, alas; the ear’s deficits are made up for by the eye, which focuses on the puppet’s moving jaw, forming the suggestion that whatever’s being said by you is said by your companion. The most problematic letters of the alphabet  —  there are five of them  —  inspire too much frottage between lips, which explains why puppets often have jeery, whiny, heavily accented, broken, or otherwise goofy voices: these are coping mechanisms, rerouted into hallmarks of the form.

“Take the letter p, an annoying plosive. Under the standard ventriloquial straitjacketry of (1) a relaxed jaw, (2) slightly open but stiffened lips, and (3) a closed set of teeth, a phrase like ‘I like to hike’ is shockingly easy to pronounce, whereas ‘I prefer puppetry’ is humbling. To dodge the automatic, upper-to-lower-lip kiss involved in expressing the letter p, ventriloquists hump the back of the tongue against the soft palate and vault air right through the back. In practice, this sounds much like the letter t. The ventriloquist thinks p, says their muffled t, and does this ad nauseam until the letter is strong and clear. (‘I trefer tuttetry.‘)”

Lots more at n+1, here. Did you ever try to do this?