LITTLE ROCK — There’s no business like show business, particularly when your business is entertaining children.
Singly, by the pair or by the troupe, they ply the highways and byways, playing schools, libraries, festivals and birthday parties.
By and large they book their own gigs, but there are helpful tools: The Arkansas Arts Council maintains an Arts on Tour roster, which helps subsidize school and library shows by reimbursing organizations for 40 percent of the total artist fees.
Here’s a look at three ways people are making a living amusing young people, via music, magic and puppetry.
KINDERSONGS
Singer/songwriter Brian Kinder chose the right name to be an entertainer for youngsters. (“Kinder” is German for “children,” as in “kindergarten.”)
He and his wife, Terri, have created Kindersongs, and put on what they call “rollicking good-time concerts for kids” at libraries, schools, fairs, corporate family gatherings, churches and birthday parties.
Brian Kinder plays guitar and banjo; he and Terri sing. The act also includes a couple of stuffed-animal puppets.
“This is what we do for a living, which is incredible,” Brian Kinder says. “Most musicians dream of doing something like this for a living.”
Offstage, he handles the artistic side of the business; she handles the business side.
“I do the work in the studio,” Kinder says. “Terri - I would be so lost without her. She schedules all the performances. She handles the Internet [merchandise] orders. [The Web site is kindersongs.com.] She handles the scheduling, she handles all the taxes; anything in the office, she handles.
“When we perform, we’re right there together. When we first started performing, she said, ‘Well, I’m not a singer.’ And I said, I’ve got a Mother’s Day song on one of my CDs ... and I asked her, ‘Would you sing this ?’
“So she sang it and she did a great job. Since then, she’s gotten several solos, and especially around Christmas time, she sings almost as much as I [do]. She’s got songs that are her songs.”
The Kinders’ act, which they perform in Arkansas and surrounding states, is 1 about 8/2 years old; they’ve been doing it full time for about two years, followingBrian’s retirement from the Little Rock public schools, where he taught fine arts for 20 years; he says Terri quit a job at Ortho Arkansas to join the act full time.
“We’ve worked on this for a few years, knowing I was going to retire, and this is our plan,” Kinder says. “When [I said], ‘We’re going to quit our jobs and take off,’ she said ‘I’m with you, baby.’ How many women do you know who would say that?
“And we’re having fun, a lot of fun.”
They’re also doing a lot of work. For example, the week before Thanksgiving Kinder recounted their schedule: “We were in Fort Smith on Sunday, Blytheville Monday, Pocahontas and Corning yesterday, and now we’re up in Missouri,” from whence he hails.
The Kinders’ program changes around Thanksgiving to include their original Christmas music, which they recorded in 2006 on a CD titled Joy to the World It’s Christmas. (Their most recent album, Brian & Terri Kinder, Traveling On, came out in May.)
They’re busiest at this time of year and in the summer. “From Riverfest [end of May] ’til August, we usually do about 80-something [gigs]. November and December get totally filled, but after that it averages two or three a week,” Kinder says. Early fall and midwinter are slack periods. “And thankfully so.We take a little vacation.”
All that traveling isn’t glamorous, at least not yet, he says. “You know those great big Silver Eagle buses? That’s what we’d love to have, but right now we travel in a van. We’ve looked at motor homes, and someday ...”
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
Tommy Diaz, aka Tommy Terrific, does magic shows.
In a minivan whimsically painted with his logo, phone number and Web site, tommyterrific.com, he takes Tommy Terrific’s Wacky Magic to schools and libraries all over Arkansas, birthday parties, museums, “pretty much anywhere that has events for kids,” he says. “I’ve performed at various festivals, [including] Riverfest and Toad Suck Daze. I’ve performed at the Clinton library and the Mosaic Templars museum.”
Diaz’s blend of magic tricks and comedy frequently takes an educational approach, focusing on having fun with books.
“Basically, I dress up like a big kid, and I have with me a huge magic trunk, and inside the trunk is a huge Magician’s Handbook. And since I’m just a big kid, I don’t know how any of the magic is supposed to work. So I need all the kids in the audience to follow along with me in the book. What makes it such a fun show is I rely completely on the kids to tell me what to do.”
Diaz grew up in North Little Rock. After he graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., outside Chicago, he took off for New York to pursue an acting career. He got married, and his in-laws took him into their family business.
“My father-in-law does a similar magic show in Canada, in Saskatchewan; he’s known as Weldon the Wacky Wizard,” Diaz explains. “He’s the one that built the trunkand got me started doing all this.
“From the first moment I did the show, I just loved it.”
Diaz has been doing the magic show for about five years; 2 1 /2 years ago, he moved back to Little Rock with his wife and young son and is restoring a historic downtown house.
Diaz has put almost 6,000 miles on his minivan each of the last two years; in 2008, his first full year back in the state, he did 150 shows, and expects this year’s total will be a little higher.
It’s not hard to rack up the miles - Dec. 5, for example, he followed shows in Dumas in the morning and Little Rock in the afternoon with an evening birthday party in Jacksonville.
Pretty much all his shows have been in Arkansas so far, but “this coming year I’m going to be doing my first outof-state shows. I’ll be going to Kansas City, Tulsa, Springfield, Mo., and hopefully a few other [places].
“I’ve created lots of different versions with different magic tricks, everything from Dr. Seuss to being drug free,” he says. “I have an educational version about having fun with books, and a version for Black History Month - for this February I’m going to do one on black cowboys of the Old West.
“And, of course, I customize. I like finding creative ways to fit the show to a certain theme. A year ago I did a show for the libraries in Bryant and Benton, they were celebrating the 80th birthday of Mickey Mouse, so all the magic tricks I did I tied into the Mickey Mouse theme.”
STRINGS ATTACHED
The Stevens Puppets have been around for more than 75 years. Dan and Zan Raynor took over the company in the early ’90s and recently moved its headquarters from Indiana to Rogers.
“We have been doing puppets since 1933; my personal involvement has been since ’93,” Dan Raynor says.
The Raynors were professional actors who had gotten their starts in high school - Dan in San Jose, Calif., and Zan in Elkhart, Ind., where they were living when they spotted an opportunity in the Elkhart Truth.
“The people who formerly ran the company ran an ad looking for a retired couple to tour marionette shows across three states, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio,” Raynor recalls.
“My wife and I were in our early 20s and we applied; even though we were not retired, we wanted to be retired.
They hired us on our theater experience.
“Eight years later, I bought the company.”
The Raynors and their five children moved to Rogers a little over a year ago after Zan got a job as a parochial school principal, a job from which she later resigned “because she didn’t want to be a principal of any school any more,” her husband says.
According to the Web site, stevenspuppets.com, Zan does all the new carving for Stevens Puppets and restores the “original Stevens marionettes,” some of which date to 1949, and Dan does the performing.
“We tour extensively in 25 states,” he says. “We have offices in Rogers; Washington, D.C.; Austin, Texas; and northern Indiana, in Elkhart.It’s kind of like a franchise, but it’s not a franchise.
“We have nine different stories, and at the end of the summer, when the libraries and the festivals are winding down and the schools haven’t started up yet, we get together and switch all the shows, so if Wizard of Oz is touring Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, next year it will tour Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, and the year after that it will tour Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Every show is different. We all do different stories each year, and we do each one a year at a time.”
Between the four offices, Stevens Puppets puts on 800-900 shows a year.
Raynor anticipates Arkansas bookings will start picking up in January and February: “There’s going to be a ton of shows from libraries, since that’s when they usually book for summer,” he says.
“It takes about a year or maybe a year and a half or two years to set up a tour, and we’re in the middle of setting up a tour in Arkansas,” Raynor says.
“So it’s kind of a tricky situation because you get some tours [together] much faster than others. In Arkansas it’s taking a little bit longer because of the physical distance between the two shows. Up here in Bentonville and Rogers it’s easy; but it’s a three hour drive to Little Rock.”
The shows are mostly based on fairy tales or classic stories - Beauty and the Beast, Rumpelstiltskin, Aladdin, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Wizard of Oz, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Cinderella and The Wonderful World of Puppets, which Raynor describes as “a trip around the world seen through puppets from around the world.”
A Robin Hood show is in development.
“In Austin they asked us to be the puppet company of choice for a brand new Sherwood Forest Renaissance Festival in February, so we are creating a couple of new shows for that, since it runs six weeks. But it’s not going to be marionettes; it’ll be hand puppets. We specialize in marionettes, usually,” Raynor says.
“We’ve had the Robin Hood show in the past, but we had a puppeteer many, many years ago, before my time, actually go rogue on us and stole the puppets and nobody has seen them since. It was a kidnapping conspiracy with puppets.”
Family, Pages 35 on 12/30/2009