Puppet show

[imomus]

I'm in Paris, staying with my wonderful friends Gilles and Flo. Yesterday we scoured their district, the predominantly Indian quartier de la Rue du Fabourg Saint Denis, for scrub gloves and vegetables which Flo Manlik then transformed -- by magic and sewing -- into glove puppets. These were then distributed to the audience at my reading (I say "my reading", but in fact commissioning editor Xavier Belrose and translator Marie Surgers made an excellent performance of the first two chapters) and manipulated according to what the characters were doing at any given point. I even gave one to an infant sitting in the front row -- a child, thankfully, below the "age of comprehension" (although it's conceivable he could have suffered horribly by putting the hot pepper in his mouth).