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.
In his two decades with the Hudson Vagabond Puppets, Winslow became a jack of all puppetry trades: Performer, puppet-builder, choreographer and producer. He designed productions for kids from the ground up, putting comedic spins on school curricula or classic literature.
He also has an original show concept that has yet to be produced: “Zero: The story of an outer space intergalactic obelisk that makes all the numbers.”
“What do you mean, ‘makes all the numbers?’” I asked. “Exactly,” he responded.
In Winslow’s imaginary world, all the digits except zero have been created, and the other numbers are having a difficult time without it. Then Zero, who Winslow described as a “non-gender-specific character with a backpack full of nothing,” enters the scene.
“You guys gotta lighten your load,” the Zero puppet, described as a Michael Jackson-like “easy, scooty dancer,” would say. “Be like me.”
By the end of the show, Winslow imagines, kids in the audience will have learned something about math.
In 2011, Winslow left Hudson Vagabond Puppets to move to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his two children and now ex-wife. Even there, the puppet world found him. An opera house reached out, saying they needed “a giant teacup” for a production of Maurice Ravel’s “L’enfant et les Sortilèges.”
Winslow did them one better. He built a set out of trash — cardboard, bubble wrap, and boxes — that came to life, morphing into a 60-foot-wide moth complete with fishing poles for antennas.
“The person that ran the opera company was like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life,’” the dancer said. “And neither had I.”
In 2014, Winslow moved to San Francisco to manage his sister’s event planning business from her Hayes Valley home (though her scruffy rescue dog, Scuppers, appears to be the real manager of the house). His most recent project involved purchasing a professional paper cutter to construct 60 paper churches for a GLIDE Memorial Church fundraiser.
When his sister asked if that was really necessary, Winslow responded, “I’m not okay with being a beginner. I need to be an expert.”
He misses the theater. He misses the dance community. He misses the creativity and “thinking big.”
But now, he says, being a dad is his priority.
When Winslow’s son, Tyler, who is now 17 and applying to colleges, was in 6th grade, students at his elementary school wrote a show about a giant dragon. The former puppeteer offered his services and created “Matilda,” as Winslow’s 14-year-old daughter calls her, installing her on a tree in the family’s backyard.
The creature that now adorns (and defends) Ivy Street was born.
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