When we told you that the Saline Arts & Culture Committee was planning to hit the ground running today with Bixby marionette asset organization yesterday, what were the first thoughts that came to mind? [1,2,3]
Perhaps more importantly, why did it take well over a year to get from initial charter to action?
As anyone who’s taken intended inference from the closing scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark should know, there is a world of difference between acquisition and preservation, and access. The United States Library of Congress is a peerless collection that consists of “more than 167 million items.” Equally important was its ability to fulfill over a million reference requests in 2017 alone. [4,5,6]
Ideally, materials from the 1998 museum that housed the legacy of master puppeteer Meredith Bixby (shut down in 2008) would not just be accessible to modern day interests, but also structured for connection at any scale. As adjunct discovery for casual tourist who only just learned of it as tangent to the 3,286 acquisitions in the Saline Area Historical Society catalog. [7,8,9]
Or in facilitating access to its rightful place at the tables where scholarly appreciation of this craft continues to happen, here and there, around the world. [10]
“We came into today with a number of ways we thought it would be helpful to cross-index these papers,” John Anderson told Saline Journal at the site of activity on the lower level of City Hall yesterday morning. Mr Anderson is Vice Chairperson of the Arts & Culture Committee and project lead here.
[Meredith Bixby’s] tax records were very detailed, and it looks like we have complete files, all years, so far from the ’80s back to the 1960s. These tell us what it was like to run Meredith Marionettes Touring Company as a business. Where were the performances? How was money spent for repairs and new things?
We can look at scripts. Finished scripts and earlier versions of scripts, with original revisions.
We need to start with initial sorts — these folders go here, in this stack — based on some general similarities. Then we have to look from organized stack to organized stack to see where it might also fit, somewhere else, based on some completely different need for the records.
Mr Anderson went on to say that he was pleasantly surprised, impressed with the existing organization of these documents as initially accessed that morning. “Meridith’s own records were amazingly well organized. The records related to the museum were, too.”
“It was important to see that,” Erik Grossman added. “Meredith had his own way of keeping his files. It might not make sense to anyone else why some things were together with other things. But it made sense to him.”
“Understanding that piece is as important as everything else we’re doing here,” John Anderson concluded.
In a written report prepared that evening, he put numbers to the day, running 9:00am to 4:45pm. A total of fourteen volunteers, eight of which were high school students, two from Saline Area Historical Society, and four from Arts & Culture. Three major classifications for initial classification were agreed upon. Like the seemingly mundane script pages, paid invoices, and precisely scaled engineering drawings for set construction, this is the stuff of which the truly grand productions of their day were made.
That is why it took just over thirteen months to get here, following an initial entreat from our mayor. That is why it will clearly take longer still to move from this first step to the next.
If the Meredith Marionettes Touring Company does indeed have a place to be properly recognized on the world stage, the work described above must be recognized as among the most important steps in getting it there.
References
- “Study Of Puppeteering Is About To Get A Lot More Organized, Thanks To Saline Arts And Culture Committee” Dell Deaton (December 24, 2018) Saline Journal.
- “Arts & Culture Committee” Saline.
- “Bixby Marionettes Trust” Saline.
- “Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)” IMDb.
- “Raiders of the Lost Ark (10/10) Movie CLIP – Top Secret (1981) HD” Movieclips (May 5, 2016) YouTube.
- “General Information” Library of Congress.
- “A Brief Look Back On The Meredith Bixby Marionette Story, Part II: Saline Once Hosted Museum, Held Puppet Festivals” Dell Deaton (September 21, 2018) Saline Journal.
- Saline Area Historical Society (home page).
- “How Well Do You Know the Community Impact of Your Saline Area Historical Society?” Dell Deaton (April 19, 2018) Saline Journal.
- “Once Upon A Time, Marionettes Set The Stage For Entertainment Techniques That Remain Relevant To This Very Day” Dell Deaton (September 10, 2018) Saline Journal.
