The storytelling festival is absolutely awesome! If you have never been, and can be in Utah County this week, it really is worth checking out.

Every year, they invite ten or so of the most accomplished national and even international storytellers to come to Utah to teach workshops and perform for the festival. The festival is well known among professional storytellers, and each year the tellers comment on how impressive the event is when compared to similar events nation wide. Thousands of people attend.

Most of the daytime events are held at the beautiful new Mt. Timpanogos Park, just up the mouth of Provo Canyon, which Orem City built specifically for the festival. Large evening performances are in the SCERA Shell Amphitheater at SCERA Park in Orem.

My Puppetry Troupe, Maxed Out Puppetry, has performed as part of the festival as local entertainment, for at least six years.

This year, though, we have the first-time opportunity to provide the pre-show entertainment for the Bedtime Stories event on Friday Night at 5:30pm. It should be a ton of fun.

Additionally I will be performing briefly on Saturday Morning at 11:00am with local, professional Mime, Joe Flores. Joe has been teaching me mime on and off for the last few years, and I have performed with him periodically before. Mime is such a cool form for theater. And the kids love it.

If you have never been to the festival before, I recommend going to the “Laughin’ Night” event at the SCERA Shell on Saturday night. The ten featured storytellers each tell their funniest stories. You’ll laugh until you choke. Tickets for just that event are available.

You can find out all about the festival at www.TimpFest.org .

See you there!

My cousin Rus Wilson, his wife Kelly, my close friend Sean Healy, my wife Chastity, and I founded the Maxed Out Puppetry – Puppet Comedy Troupe nearly a decade ago while still students and recent graduates of Brigham Young University. Since then we have performed at museums, libraries, festivals, parties, churches, and many other venues, primarily in Utah County, but also as far north as the Davis County Library in Layton and as far south as Filmore.

Since then we have been joined by additional puppeteers: Caitlin Shirts, Patrick Svensson, and David Wilson.

We are very excited to present our brand-spanking-new website:

www.MaxedOutPuppetry.com

As usual, the website is still partially under development, but it already has some fun features.

For the first time, those of you outside of Utah can enjoy Maxed Out Puppetry’s original material. The website features a Video Section with streaming video to which we hope to add continually. So far, the response from kids and adults who have visited the video section has been excellent.

You can subscribe to the video podcast with iTunes or another podcatcher and watch the videos on your video enabled iPod. For those of you who, like me, don’t have an iPod, you can still subscribe to the normal video feed with a feed reader like Google Reader. For those who like it even more basic, you can even subscribe to receive notifications of new videos in your email.

For those of you who do live in Utah, the website also features a Calendar where you can find out about upcoming live performances. Like the video, you can subscribe to the calendar with a feed reader or by email to keep abreast of upcoming events.

One additional, experimental feature is a new Puppet Blog, where the puppets themselves will be posting thoughts, observations, and responding to questions and fan mail from visitors. This represents a creative writing endeavor for the members of our puppet troupe.

Two of our puppets will be traveling to Europe at the beginning of September and posting a puppet travelogue, we hope along with some video.

The Puppet Blog also features RSS Feed and Email Subscriptions to help you keep up with new posts.

Feel free to let me know if you run into any bugs on the website.

So gather your kids around the computer and check out some Maxed Out Puppet Videos, then come back to see what is happening on the Puppet Blog, or to find out about upcoming shows. Also feel free to have your children send questions, comments, or fan mail to the puppets through the contact form on the website.

A big thanks to all of you who have supported our quirky hobby through the years! It’s has been, and hopefully will continue to be, a blast!

PS – www.MaxedOutPuppetry.com is rated PG – “Puppet Guidance Suggested” for moderate puppet violence and imitate-able behavior)

If you live in Utah or will be visiting during the week of Independence Day, bring your family over to the Tahitian Noni Auditorium in north Provo, near Provo Canyon, on July 6th for an evening of family-friendly music and dancing with the former members of the local Ska Band Skook. The concert is free, but they will be accepting voluntary donations for LDS Humanitarian Services.

Brothers Ben and Joe Wilson formed Skook about 10 years ago in Cache Valley as a ska-influenced punk trio. Soon thereafter they moved to Utah Valley where they added some excellent horn players and their sound evolved into their own flavor of ska. From the beginning Skook was decidedly anti-popularity, and the theme is reflected in their lyrics. From the sarcasm of “I wanna be a suave mac-daddy man” to the still popular anthem “I shop at D. I.,” Skook was cool because they rejected what was “cool.”

Listen to a 5 minute sample mp3 of excerpts from nine Skook songs

Excerpts: Popularity, I Shop at D.I., Y2K, Obladi Oblada (Beatles cover), Da Bomb, Elephant Skank, With or Without (U2 cover), Cheese, Mac-Daddy Man

(most of these were recorded live without sufficient recording equipment so forgive the sound quality and enjoy the music)

Skook disbanded, as is usual here, when the members all left on LDS missions. Since then they have done a few reunion shows, but most of the members have their own musical projects now, several of them performing with some of the most accomplished musical groups on BYU campus.

This will likely be Skook’s final reunion show as the members move on to graduate and medical school. Each member will showcase his current musical projects as opening acts with the original Skook band as the headliner.

The 9th Street Jumpers
Cut a rug to Jump-Swing Music in the style of the neo-swing bands of the late 90’s like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

timothYoung
Deep dance beats, soaring guitar lines, lush chords, and thoughtful songwriting in a staggering variety of musical styles—and every sound you hear is produced, live on stage, by one human voice.

The Aaron Southerland Trio

Sean and Isaac Hess

Ben Wilson

Come enjoy the music and donate to LDS Humanitarian Services if you can. I’ll be there with my family, so if you’ve been reading my blog, bring your family and have some fun with us.

The artists of that era were truly amazing performers and their energy and talent is often missing from our modern entertainment industry.

Watch the amazing video above, from the film “Stormy Weather.” It showcases the extraordinary talents of some of my favorite performers from that bygone time: the fantastic Cab Calloway and the stupendous Nicholas Brothers . Fred Astaire said this sequence was the finest piece of tap dancing ever filmed.