XIII
PUPPET FESTIVAL
THE Festival had shifted from the Art Museum to the
Hotel Gibson, which is in the centre of Cincinnati, a
thousand-room affair comprising a series of exceedingly
smart and well-decorated restaurants, tea-rooms, cafes,
cafeterias, bars and a Rathskellar. It was full of very trim
men and women—business-looking people—quietly and in-
tensely following their business. The American business
men and women are naked professionals. They do not seem
to operate by a deceptive veneer of drinks, little card parties,
and funny stories, but you feel their heads to be dancing
with statistics and neat theories, involving questions like
turning your disabilities to assets, capitalising your psychosis,
profiting by genuine service, or being evolution-conscious
and preparing to sell the public what it should historically
develop into wanting to buy next week.
As puppet showmen we felt a little lost, but the Festival
committee came to the rescue and led us off to the magni-
ficent, gilded and mirrored ballroom in which the puppeteers
were to sport for the next four days. It looked delightful,
the handsome room with a stage, pictures on screens, and
the long buffet table through the arches gaudy with gay f
puppets. We were given identification labels to wear; there
were introductions and enthusiastic greetings all round, and
we met Paul McPharlin with all his height, and Stevens
with an Elizabethan beard—we were at the second annual
American Puppetry Festival.
K 137