Marketing Professional Produces Giant Puppet Performances for Extra Cash

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Greetings friends inside us little school listeners. I'm so glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Got another story for you today. And today we're gonna talk about puppets.

Giant puppets in fact. The story features a marketing professional who earns $800 a month on the side, leading performances of those giant puppets. This takes place in Berkeley, California, shocking. And as you'll hear, this project not only makes money, but it also reinforces a creative expression, which is another great reason to have a side hustle. Last but not least, we'll have a step-by-step instructional guide for anyone interested in doing something like this themselves.

Puppets, giant puppets, presumably other sized puppets. And after the story, I'll tell you where to go to access that. Giant puppets coming right up. [Music]

Tony McCulco works in marketing and fundraising for a nonprofit children's museum in Berkeley, California. On evenings and weekends, she has a related, but way more artistic side hustle, puppets.

We're not talking sock puppets. We're talking about huge handcrafted puppets held up by multiple sticks as she walks underneath them. How does one get into puppets? Well, it was a circuitous journey. Took her all across the country from Brooklyn to Vermont to Seattle, back to New York, and presumably California at some point, though I'm not clear on how that worked.

Now let's go back to when Tony was in college and she organized three seasons of the vagina monologues. During that time, her college friends would often go to a place called Bread and Puppet Theater, which offered good old fashioned sourdough rye bread in combination with a variety of interesting puppet shows. But Tony would only see snippets of the place in the photos her roommates brought home. You see, the Bread and Puppet Theater was in Vermont. And to her, it seemed like this magical mysterious club, but she was never able to make the trip.

After college, Tony got into marketing and fundraising for a large nonprofit in Brooklyn. While she appreciated that it was a mission driven organization, she eventually became unhappy in her job. She had a passion for performance art that wasn't being fulfilled behind a desk. So she would find herself staring out her office window that looked out onto the Brooklyn Bridge, thinking about how she had never pursued her dream as an artist. She began missing deadlines and taking longer lunches.

Finally, it just got to be too much. So she quit her job with dreams of checking out that Bread and Puppet place she had always heard about. It turned out they had an apprenticeship on offer. During that apprenticeship, Tony learned how to build and repair puppets, how to walk on stilts, and all kinds of other skills, including vocal training, designing posters, everything that would be puppet master needs. Each weekend, they did performances for hundreds of people in a large meadow, and the whole experience was transformational.

Still, at the end of the program, she wasn't sure what to do or where to go next. So what did she do, or did she go? While Tony headed to the only obvious destination, she went to Burning Man. She managed to get a ride with someone that was driving from New York to Nevada for the festival. She connected with the Bread and Puppet community at Burning Man and says it was the first time that she felt she really found her tribe.

After Burning Man, she ended up in Olympia, Washington, where she received a grant from the Arts Council and also got a job as a studio manager running art workshops. By networking in the local community, she got more and more puppet gigs, getting more and more experience. She did parades, festivals, parties, and also created art installations. The next step was a website, which she created using WordPress, along with a Facebook page, both under the name Giant Puppets Save the World. The name comes from a practical aspect of this kind of puppetry.

Sometimes it takes more than one person to operate these huge puppets, which requires synchronized efforts to work together. And if we could all work together, not just in the puppet kingdom, but also on the planet, we could save the world, hence the name. This is a pretty low-tech side hustle. Most of Tony's initial startup costs went to purchasing materials to build those puppets, but she says that the cost of creating them does vary greatly. Some puppets can come together with no more than a $20 investment.

Others require a much larger investment, hundreds of dollars, maybe $1,000 or more. Tony eventually moved to Berkeley, California, where she began working in marketing for a museum. With this steady source of income and a more permanent place to live, she's been able to let her creative project be what she always wanted it to be, a passion project and creative outlet without the pressure of financial reliance. But still, it's making money. She's bringing in a consistent $800 a month between puppetry performances at music festivals, conferences, and street fairs, as well as in-person hands-on workshops for other people in the community who are eager to learn.

Her job at the museum provides a full-time salary. So Tony says the extra cash is great, but really you can't put a price on the creative expressions and the feeling that comes from making something original and magical for other people to enjoy. [Music]

Well, what can you say about giant puppets? You know, in yesterday's episode, I talked about freedom being the greatest motivation and reward for a side hustle, at least for many of us. I also mentioned that there are different kinds of freedoms.

Well, creative expression can be a kind of freedom, and you don't necessarily have to make a living from your art. You don't actually have to make any money from it at all if you don't want to. But isn't it nice to be able to do something that you're excited about and other people seem to enjoy, these puppet performances, learning how to do puppetry, while still getting paid for it? Maybe not getting rich, but at least having that extra $800 a month come in. Now, as I mentioned, if you happen to be interested in puppetry, if you're like, this is my calling, well, my star, wonder assistant, Whitney Karinek, who does all our show notes and all kinds of other stuff, she has put together a step-by-step instructional guide for anyone who'd like to know more.

Naturally, that is freely available to you. It's on the show notes page at sidehustleschool.com/343. If you wake up at night and can't stop thinking about puppetry, be sure you come and check that out. And of course, don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thank you for listening today.

I'll be back tomorrow with the weekly recap. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.