JQ: You mean the little doll like this?
MD: Yeah, little stitchier and they wanted to know what their stories were about. And so this one – the performance I’m going to be doing at the NOW Festival is called Object of Her Affection, and it’s about a woman who falls in love with inanimate objects – so I thought it would be a good topic for a puppet show
JQ: And so you wrote it?
MD: Yeah – I wrote it –
JQ: So what’s the story?
MD: It’s about Andrea Lowe –
JQ: Andrea
MD: and she
JQ: Does she just sit there?
MD: She moves around and there’s different versions of her like a baby – we find her after she’s just fallen off a building and the whole thing’s in flashback
JQ: Is she all flattened out falling off the building?
MD: She’s a little disheveled and bones and stuff out of place
JQ: And then how do you make her talk?
MD: Well I move her head when I’m talking as her
JQ: Do you just leave her on the table like this and have her talk?
MD: Grandma’s a little easier,
JQ: Show me how you do that
MD: She lives in a chair and she can..
JQ: Oh, you use this stick
MD: Yeah and so
JQ: And so when grandma talks, what does she do?
MD: “I’m going to stitch up your pretty little face in no time”… She’s kind of a hoarder. Like she’s got a Raggedy Anne and a lot of abandoned dolls that she likes to repair
JQ: Is she part of the show?
MD: She is – She’s Andrea’s grandmother
JQ: So what does she tell Andrea?
MD: Well – so Andrea comes to live with her after her mom dies and she volunteers as a church organist and she works at a doll hospital and that’s when we discover that Andrea has an infatuation with her blanket, Blankey –
JQ: I like that
MD: She has a lot of other relationships – like with a hunting rifle
JQ: Oh – those are the kind of inanimate objects she loves?
MD: She has a lust for the Berlin Wall, but she never gets to meet him cause we all know what happens – SPOILER ALERT – and then the World Trade Towers – that’s kind of edgy
JQ: So you tell stories about all this? And how long is your show?
MD: It’s an hour
JQ: Oh wow!