First of all I think of puppets as sculpture. They are sculpture that moves. You could label it any way you want, but for me it always starts in my mind as a sculpture.

Puppets allow a person to express things through this surrogate that wouldn't normally get expressed. You know there's famous techniques of puppet therapists. Put this hand puppet on and tell me what the problem is.

But nobody predicted anything of this magnitude in terms of resistance. And in part, the magnitude of the resistance was spurred by our failures in reconstruction.

It would be really embarrassing to introduce yourself as somebody who makes beauty.

I throw dignity out the window, and just become a creature of the moment on the stage. I act like I'd never act in real life.

I'm neurotic in the sense that I can have a crowd of 300 people cheering you, applauding you, standing O, but one guy come out of the audience and go, "Hey man, you should have cut 20 minutes. That wasn't so good." And I'll just obsess on that one guy. After all this love, I'll obsess on him and want to smash his face in and strangle him and kick him down the stairs and I'll be pouting about that one guy all night.

When I perform I'm very extroverted and I wear my heart on my sleeve and some people don't like that. They're embarrassed for me.