Lilian Monique Valle is a senior sociology and international studies double major in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences. She picked up puppeteering at a young age and now uses her talent to teach children in her church.
People have asked me what my favorite hobby is, and until a couple years ago, I always thought it was soccer. I saw soccer as a hobby even though it took up most of my free time.
When we were 10, my best friend Katie and I would have dinner every Tuesday night at Fazoli’s, a casual Italian restaurant, before heading to puppet practice. Her parents were friends with a mother-daughter duo who organized our community church’s traveling puppet ministry. Most of the puppeteers were adults, so both of us started out simply watching the shows, though we occasionally helped out with props or worked as stagehands; essentially, we did whatever was needed from us.
Little by little, we got more time with the puppets. With practice, I was eventually performing alongside leads for full acts. My favorite show was a glow-in-the-dark performance to the song “Live Out Loud.”
Around the same time, my dad was in the midst of establishing a Seventh-Day Adventist church with Brazilian friends. My mom became the head of the children’s ministry for a while and got creative by introducing six puppets to the weekly children’s service from a Sabbath school magazine edited by my paternal step-grandfather in the late 1950s. The story was called “Nosso Amiguinho,” which means “Our Little Friend” in Portuguese.
We commissioned a carpenter from the congregation to build a wooden stage, painting it white after adding hinges and finishing it off with red curtains. With six puppets, you need three sets of hands, so I reached out to a couple friends who would occasionally come over for practice under my direction. After a few years, I started high school and stopped puppeteering.
It was not until college that my appreciation for puppetry came back. My mom and I drove to a store for her teaching supplies and I found an entire aisle of hand puppets. While she shopped, I examined each puppet carefully, even dreaming up possible characters and deciding which to take home with me.
After this, the puppets stayed in a box for months and I didn’t even use them when I started puppeteering again. My friend Michelle came across a friend from her community center who owned a full-body puppet with arm rods and wanted to use him for a show in an upcoming event. I puppeteered at the show and rediscovered my skills.
Less than a year later, I moved closer to NSU and became a member of another church. Then, on my birthday this April, the children’s church organizer reached out to me, saying that my interest in puppetry was the answer to her prayers. I was taken aback, but decided to do a couple shows.
For each one, I wrote a five-to-10-minute script that expresses a moral through Bible verses. The children really began to enjoy my one-woman shows and parents would thank and compliment me. Under my direction, this puppet ministry began advertising to anyone interested in learning puppetry show skills like mine.
Now, almost every Wednesday evening, I hold puppetry classes at church in order to prepare my crew for upcoming shows. I do voices for show recordings and direct movements between puppet characters on stage. Puppetry has become a hobby; I like to perform various personalities and make them not only enjoyable, but valuable for children’s spiritual growth.
