On a Saturday in late August, on the lower patio of Dreamstate Cafe on Lyndale Avenue, a sold-out crowd sits knee-to-knee, packing in the standing room for Puppet Palooza. The adults-only event, organized by Minneapolis artist Dominique Herskind, features drag acts, burlesque performances, storytelling, and, perhaps most intriguing, puppetry. The inclusion of an artform usually relegated to children’s entertainment had the crowd wondering: What does a puppet show for adults look like? And why is it so horny?
1969: Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon, Jim Henson’s Sesame Street debuts on PBS, and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers are fighting in Vietnam. Among them is Gene Salko, who starts a mail correspondence with a stateside woman he seems to fancy. The contents are suitably explicit for letters written by a young man whose only company is that of his platoon in a pre-internet porn era, noting in one that he was “hornier than a ruptured bull-frog!! And that’s horny!” rendered in fine cursive befitting a gentleman.
“Hello Marie, in case you’re not sure who’s writing, let me identify myself: Gene Salko,” reads the introduction to the first letter.
The recipient is 28-year-old Marie Hudson, a Mustang-driving salon owner raising three daughters—hellions, as Hudson’s daughter Dennise Perry describes herself and her sisters—in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. A single mother after a six-year marriage, she never remarried after her divorce, though she was asked on more than a few occasions. She’s familiar with Salko, as the letters allude to a shared history between the two, but nobody in Hudson’s family knows the full extent of their relationship, even now.
Hudson kept Salko’s three letters for decades, secretly stowed away in a little green box under her nightstand. Perry and her daughter, Herskind, discovered them while going through Hudson’s possessions after she died in 2020.
A fire was lit in Herskind. The puppeteer, mascot maker, and mind behind Puppet Palooza was already known for her boundary-pushing puppetry, and the letters were the perfect raw material for another raunchy show. After ruminating on the topic for years, she produced 1969 late last year.
Now, she’ll perform the show at the National Puppet Slam on September 4 and 5 in Atlanta.
Herskind was 16 years old when she began performing puppetry with the Apple Valley Puppet Wagon, a parks-and-recreation initiative started in 1978 involving a then-rustic, wood-paneled trailer hitched to the back of a van. Herskind grew up watching its puppet performances at the park, and eventually came aboard for a summer job.
“That really is what started my love affair with puppeteering,” Herskind says. “It’s been like 15 or 16 years of me—oh my god, like half my life—doing puppets.”
Herskind didn’t watch The Muppet Show or Fraggle Rock as a kid. Instead, the surreal, strange, and uncanny offerings of Adult Swim and Nickelodeon captivated her; she recalls Moral Orel and Mr. Meaty with particular fondness. After multiple summers on the Puppet Wagon, Herskind attended UC Santa Cruz and, as a final for a puppetry class, she made Rogi, the first of her many creations.
The trajectory of Herskind’s burgeoning puppetry vocation was permanently altered when she watched Meet the Feebles at 19 years old. Feebles, a pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson effort, centers around a puppet variety show that features nudity, gratuitous violence, and the signature black comedy of Jackson’s early career, similar to his films Bad Taste and Dead Alive.
“[Meet the Feebles is] dark and seedy and funny, and it's also really messed up,” Herskind says. “But I just thought it was cool to see what you could do with puppetry outside of the typical Sesame Street stuff that you see.”
Back at Dreamstate, a harsh spotlight reveals two desks on deck. A dialogue between purple puppets Marie and Gene unfolds, as the puppeteers pantomime writing letters to one another, the forms of Herskind and Grace Barnstead barely concealed behind the tables. Barnstead, a singer, actor, and another Puppet Wagon alum, plays Gene, whose waist is deliberately hidden from view. Marie, as played by Herskind, is draped in a loose-fitting but luxurious silk robe.
“Right now, I’m hornier than a ‘four-balled rat in heat’ and I know you’ve got just the remedy to cure me. Ummm!” Gene writes.
“Oh my god, such an imagination on this man!” Marie swoons.
Marie and Gene take turns writing increasingly explicit letters to one another, as the stage lights illuminate the puppet currently writing. Then, around the halfway point of the show, Marie’s bust explodes out of her robe and Gene whips out a rather large lime-green appendage, flops it on his desk, and gives himself a few tugs for good measure. As you may expect, this typically gets one of the bigger audience reactions of the show.
Tantalizingly little is known about the real-life Salko; Hudson never mentioned him or his letters to her family. Herskind has formed a phantom of him based on the content of the letters and some investigative work. What she does know is that he appears to still be alive in Pennsylvania and may have married at some point. As for his relationship with Hudson, it's probably safe to say the two were very good friends at some point.
Everything from Gene, including the aforementioned ruptured bullfrog and four-balled rat lines, comes straight from the letters. Herskind doesn’t have access to what Hudson sent to Salko, so she had to interpolate Marie’s dialogue—including the unique task of matching Salko’s odd animal-based turn of phrase—based exclusively on his writings.
Hudson was a natural brunette but dyed her hair blonde for decades, a detail Herskind lovingly paid homage to, giving the puppet dark roots just barely visible on the very top of the shock of blonde. While Marie and Gene were created specifically for 1969, Gene’s muppet member, complete with faux fur and pipe cleaner veins, was a prop Herskind already had on hand, created for a Kermit doll she owns.
The comedic dissonance between puppets and mature subject matter is present in nearly all of Herskind’s shows. Puppets provide a familiar canvas for her bombastic and sometimes crude slapstick, while also serving as her outlets—literal mouthpieces—to probe into topics like sexuality, nudity, mental health, and drug use.
“These themes are more interesting to explore to me as an adult,” Herskind says. “I think there needs to be more adult themes in puppetry, because so often it's associated with child-friendly entertainment. And I think that is so limiting of the medium.”
As with the real-life correspondence, the show ends with Gene revealing that he’s moving stations, and Hudson’s letters most likely won’t reach him.
“You needn’t write anymore,” Salko’s third and final letter reads. “It’s not that I don’t want you to, it’s just that I won’t be here to receive any of your letters, OK?” before ending with “Keep it warm.”
It's unknown if Hudson and Salko saw each other again after the war.
1969 is Herskind’s celebration of her grandmother, and a tribute to a correspondence fated to end due to the realities of the Vietnam War. Its multifaceted nature is a welcome surprise for unprepared audiences.
“It’s very gratifying that people resonate with the sexuality of the piece, but people also really resonate with the sweetness that comes through,” Herskind says. “Like, people are very sympathetic towards Gene, which is such a wild response, but I love it.”
Among the audience at the Dreamstate show: Herskind’s mother, Dennise Perry.
Perry knew Herskind was producing a show based on the letters since Herskind asked to keep them in 2020. She saw the first performance of 1969 last year and loved it, noting that Hudson would’ve loved it too, as her daughter explored the novel topic with comedy and maturity.
“When [my husband and I] saw the first one, we were in shock,” Perry says. “We didn’t know it was going to be that funny. It was just such a pleasant surprise.”
“It being my mom you know, being kind of horny, and this guy is horny for her, was kind of like ‘Oh my goodness!’” Perry continues. “But hey, she’s 28 years old, she’s a beautiful, hot lady. It makes sense. But you don’t want to think of your mom that way!”
Perry says the three generations of women—Hudson, Perry, and Herskind—shared the same sense of humor, something that became evident as Herskind undertook the task of creating the bust for her grandmother’s puppet, another thing Perry says Hudson would’ve loved.
“My mom’s cracking about that, she had huge boobs, there’s no way around it!” Perry says. “For her to be depicting my mom like that, I think it’s great. My mom would be cracking up.”
Herskind is performing 1969 at the National Puppet Slam on Friday and Saturday in Atlanta, after the show was nominated in a local puppet slam. As with Puppet Palooza, Herskind and Barnstead will close out both nights.
Herskind’s biggest worries were that she’d be able to create writing desks she could take onto the plane, and a canker sore starting to form on the tip of her tongue. She has no plans to perform the show after the slam—instead she’ll develop other naughty puppet shows.
“I generally like to keep things fresh, and performing the same show eventually becomes a little monotonous,” Herskind says. “Like it could be really fun when you have a great show, but it’s more exciting to me—the act of creation—than having repeat performances.”
