Bringing Us In

What a roller coaster ride the last few weeks have been! Like many of you, I’ve been on edge over the presidential race, and things looked pretty grim for most of the summer. When Joe gallantly handed the campaign to Kamala, everything changed so fast.

I’ve been a Kamala fan since attending her campaign launch party in Oakland in 2019. I’m thrilled to see her rise to the challenge. Some of my friends had doubts, but I said let her take the stage and she’ll show you who she is—a powerful fighter for all of us.

I love this new guy, Walz. It’s great to have a Midwestern dad (and a bald guy like me!) rounding out the ticket.

Here’s my latest cartoon, “Bringing Us In.” I hope you like it.

Vote Blue!
Paul

Garden Staples Saved my Behind!

I recently was getting ready to perform another puppet show in my Wobbly Toggle Puppet Stage, and REALLY wanted to add a feature to it: set pieces…background and foreground paintings that would enhance each scene. They had to be lightweight, quickly changeable and easily packable.

I painted on 20 x 30” corrugated plastic sheets, duct taped together. The stage is made of 2-inch PVC pipe covered in fabric. A major challenge I had that I couldn’t work out in my head was how to fasten the set pieces to the stage, in a way that was quickly changeable. I went through my roster of favorite building materials: nylon zip ties, bungie cords, clips, velcro, etc. Nothing was fitting the bill.

I then imagined bending coat hanger wire into hooks I could tape onto the back of each set piece, so I could hang them on the “apron” of the stage.

Unfortunately, time was of the essence. On the morning I was working on this, I had a show that afternoon, and my little family was hovering around getting impatient to do something fun.

How would I make these hooks? Quickly?!

I ventured into our basement where the landlord has miscellaneous stuff laying around, paint buckets, jars of nails, etc. I was hoping to find anything I could use. And then, it happened.

Rarely in my life does any object appear that so perfectly solves a problem than what I discovered: Garden Staples.

They were perfect. Already bent in the shape that I could tape to the back of each board that created a hook that could fold down for storage.

YES! Within the hour I had rigged 5 foreground and 2 background pieces using these awesome little garden staples, a new addition to my Macgyver toolkit.