The Hayes Valley puppeteer, and his dragon treehouse

It’s not every day that one sees a dragon rising out of San Francisco’s fog. 

So when I saw a life-sized dragon puppet suspended from a treehouse in Hayes Valley, I knew I had to meet its maker. I slipped a note through the gate of the nearby Victorian and hoped the rain wouldn’t smudge my handwriting. 

Edward Winslow, a dad, dancer, and internationally-touring puppeteer of 20 years, responded. 

Winslow, now 64, had the Bay Area version of a storybook childhood: His mom, Marilyn, owned a toy store in Los Altos called Mud Pie and the Jester’s Eye, where she sold handmade Renaissance Faire toys.

Winslow, at 11, would play with their stock of finger puppets, but it wasn’t until he moved to New York in the late 1980s that he picked up his first life-sized puppet. 

At the time, Winslow was getting his master’s degree at New York University. A broke dance student, he worked odd jobs as a handyman in his spare time. Then, he “got a phone call from a woman in Rockland County who had a desperate need for a puppeteer who could dance.” 

The audition, Winslow said, lasted 30 seconds. He walked onstage and picked up the “nine-foot-tall hunter puppet” set aside for Hudson Vagabond Puppets’ upcoming production of “Peter and the Wolf.” He started “moving the head and romping around the stage and doing some dance moves.” 

By this point in the retelling, Winslow has risen from his desk chair and begun re-enacting the performance. “And she was like, ‘Okay, the audition is over,’” he said, sitting back down. 

Those 30 seconds “rocket started” his puppetry career. Immediately after landing the job, Winslow went on tour with a 14-foot-long trailer full of puppets, performing almost 200 times a year across the country.

The company also went abroad — not always comfortably. For three days, Winslow performed in an outdoor stage adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck” in Chihuahua, Mexico. 

It was 110 degrees out, and the performers were stuffed inside foam ducks. One character twisted her ankle, and “all she could do was just sit in her nest and look around,” Winslow said, miming a sitting duck. 

“The show didn’t come back,” he said. “All the puppets were stuck at the border, trying to get back into the United States.” 

While that show was in English, the company also performed to recordings of Greek translations for a tour of Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2008. “You just kind of flap your mouth and try to memorize it,” Winslow explained.