This is a bit overdue, but I wanted to start this with a little bit of a celebration over how far we have gotten with this club. First, thank you to everybody who joined this group! This club saw big growth in 2025, bringing us to 40 members!
This was also the year that we introduced new opportunities for engagement between members. We held our first couple of club meetings over zoom which helped support our performance team, now called Pleasant Puppets.
This performance team put on two live performances in July, and then one in December. We were also guests on WNEM 5’s Focus on Five segment and interviewed for an article for Epicenter Mt. Pleasant. I’m super proud of our accomplishments, and I want to thank Tonya Huber, Danielle Collins, and Tree Rutherford for all of their hard work and dedication.
Looking ahead to 2026, I’d like to continue to meet as a club on a monthly basis via Zoom, and then maybe in person once or twice a year. Eventually, I hope to introduce other types of meetups such as workshops, collaborations, or projects involving performances and video productions. Anybody who is interested is welcome to reach out about joining the Pleasant Puppets team. Or, collaborate with other members on projects.
If you have ideas for other ways that a club like this might help its members, please share your suggestions either in the comments below this link in Facebook, or by sending an email to editor@puppetverse.net.
Already, we have a lot of opportunities coming up for performances or other chances to represent the art of puppetry:
We are also continuing to build relationships with different organizations including the Detroit Puppetry Guild, the West Michigan Puppetry Guild, the Chippewa District Library and Friends of the Broadway Theater.
Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, I’m excited to see where this growing momentum takes the club, and the things that we will be able to achieve together.
