The MARKO PUPPET THEATRE

I've been puppeteering all my life (so far), and when I was a kid I used to make believe I was doing my own TV show version of The Chuck McCann Show (hey! we have the same initials!)

Me and my puppets "having fun" as Chuck McCann.

Then in HIGH school I discovered that puppets can say - - and do - - anything. At about the same time I found R. Crumb and ZAP comix. This was my version of the 2001 ape-with-bone discovery, and lo! (or rather HIGH), the Marko Puppet Theatre was born!

FIRST MARKO POSTER

I met DUG COHEN in my theatre workshop class - - I bopped backstage and there was this tall lanky long-haired weirdo with prisms in both eyes, madly pulling levers on the lighting board as myriad strobes flashed in crazy patterns on the stage behind him. He turned to me and gushed "you GOTTA see this, man!!!" while screwing the prisms into my eyes. We immediately became best friends.

DUG

So together Marin & Cohen became MARKO: I made all the puppets and sets, Dug designed and executed crazy lighting stuff, and together we "wrote" the trips - - er - - scripts. The next semester Dug went to Harpur College in Binghamton, NY, and it was there in a little hall called the Broome Closet that we debuted our first two act excursion into dimensional psychedelic visionry, on Halloween no less: "1795" and "THE FAMILY". Minds. Were. Blown.

pictured: St. Stephen. His eyes were lightbulbs and we floated him

out over the audience's very altered heads. Then? We crucified him.

(above) The Grass Growin' stars of THE FAMILY - - The Family.

By now KENNY MIELE (below) had joined the company as lighting guy, musician and all around mensch-who-makes-stuff.

Kenny (l) and me. We began to write orginal music for the Marko shows.

FLASHBACKS TO FOLLOW. . .