This series was first broadcast in December of 2002. I would like to dedicate its appearance here to the memory of my friend Taylor Stoehr, who patiently urged it into existence.

Taylor and I got to know each other when he took an interest in my book Ivan Illich in Conversation. (Illich had been a good friend of Paul Goodman, and Taylor was Goodman's literary executor, as well as the author, by then, of several books and long articles on Goodman's life and work.) As our acquaintance grew into friendship, and Taylor got to know the work I had done at CBC Radio, he began to insist that Peter Schumann, the founder, director and inspiration of the Bread and Puppet Theater belonged in what he generously called my "pantheon."

I resisted, repeatedly, on the grounds that Peter Schumann was, and is a great visual artist whose work would be quite impossible to represent on radio. Taylor did not relent, and so I eventually agreed to call on Peter at his and the theatre's home in Glover, Vermont. Peter didn't initially seem that interested in the idea of a radio series, but he did remark at that meeting that he had always been dissatisfied with video representations of his pageants, circuses and puppet plays. That made me understand, on reflection, that Taylor might be right after all, and that radio, whose subjects appear only in the imagination, might be a very suitable medium to convey something of what Schumann and his many collaborators have accomplished.

Eventually Peter and I sat down for a long interview in the CBC's New York studios, everyone else concerned proved friendly and cooperative - except for the late Stefan Brecht, the author of a marvelous two volume study of Bread and Puppet who curtly rejected my advances - and the series was made.

For me it resulted in friendships, and an attachment to Bread and Puppet that continue to this day. I hope new listeners will agree that the series still justifies Taylor's marvelous confidence that it could and should be made.

Used with permission. Originally posted at davidcayley.com

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