When I was a kid, I used to do
puppetry. I'd do
birthday parties and also entertained people at
arts and craft shows and
flea markets while my parents made and sold the
puppets to passersby. It was a lot of fun. When time came for us to actually make it into a
business so my Mom could do the
taxes properly, they asked me what I wanted to call the puppet company. I thought
Rainbow Puppets was a neat name, since the puppets I used contained all the colors of the
rainbow:
red,
orange,
yellow,
green,
blue,
indigo and
violet. Well I didn't have an
indigo colored puppet but you get the idea.
But then when I got into junior high school kids started making fun of me. Puppets were baby toys and the fact my hero Jim Henson managed to make a good living at it was irrelevant. Then I found out that a rainbow was actually a symbol for homosexuality. Needless to say I was a little embarrassed. This mighta worked if I were actually gay, but I'm not so it just made me feel like an idiot. I guess we could have just changed the name of the company, but my Dad already invested money in T-shirts for all of us. By the time I got into high school I was just too busy for it, and my parents eventually dropped it. I still kinda miss it though. It was fun, and for awhile there it looked like I was going to be able to turn it into a career. I wonder what woulda happened if I stuck with it?