At The Refuge Pre-History

I guess it all started while I was out at college.  I was a sophomore at a small liberal arts school in Ohio called Hiram College.  Twice a year we had a school wide community service day which has come to be called "Campus Day."  However, shorlty before this day arrived I had been diagnosed with mono.  Thus when it came around I was not able to do "real" community service (that is physical work such as raking leaves, picking up trash, and various other campus beautification activities), so I wound up inside making sock puppets for hospitalized children.  And low and behold I had fun and made some quite impressive sock puppets.  Well from then on, every Campus Day I would be inside making puppets for sick children.

Several years went by and I joined AmeriCorps.  Durring one meeting that my group was having it came up that the state commission wanted every AmeriCorps group in New Jersey to come up with an artistic way to explain to the other AmeriCorps groups what they have done over the year.  Our site coordinator, Lisa, suggested doing a photo board or the like.  Me, being the creative guy I am suggested that rather, we do a puppet show.

Greg Barna, Cindy Heffley, Stacey Blatchford and myself practicing for the show.

This puppet show reflected much of our involvment in the working of the refuge over the year.  There were three "acts" each written by a different member and then I edited them together with some ducks and "wrote" a closing song.

Click here to read the script

Act I:  The Handicapped Accesable Boardwalk

Act II: The Tree Planting

Act III: The Burning of the Phrag

The show went over very well, everyone at the state confrence loved it, as the the refuge staff.  In fact the refuge staff loved it so much that they asked me to put together another puppet show, only in this one I would have a decent budget to work with and it would be used to teach kids about National Wildlife Refuges, and specificly Edwin B. Forsythe NWR.  Thus the birth of At the Refuge.