It appeared to be curtains for Lamb Chop, the little sock puppet who rose to TV stardom in the 1960s, when her creator, Shari Lewis, died in 1998.
Then family friend Dom DeLuise encouraged Lewis' daughter, Mallory Tarcher, who had done a bit of hand puppetry on her mom's shows but not once voiced Lamb Chop, to keep the little lamb alive. Tarcher, who had served as her mom's executive producer on the PBS revival of "Lamb Chop's Play-Along" and some specials, decided that letting her little "sister" pass away too was "unacceptable."
Mallory Lewis (who changed her last name to honor her mom), 46, comes to Atlanta and Gainesville this month as a key draw of the "Puppets Take Atlanta & Beyond: An International Festival of Magic and Wonder," kicking off Monday.
Q: How come you never voiced Lamb Chop?
A: If you have the world's best chef in your kitchen, do you bother to cook? Things came alive and talked to me all the time. Shari was the voice of everything.
Q: Do you take a different approach to Lamb Chop?
A: The distinction is Lamb Chop was Mom's daughter. Lamb Chop is my sister.
Mom was there to counsel her and guide her. She is there mostly to make fun of me, as sisters do. She does not consider me to be the most experienced, the one in charge or the one who people are actually coming to see, and she's not wrong.
And it's OK with me. I do love and indulge her, but she is a much brattier little lamb than she was to my mom.
Q: How about your approach to performing?
A: My mom did not like to have children onstage. I love having children on the stage. ... I love kids, and they get that I love them and that I want to play with them. Mom was much tighter to her script, and she was a consummate entertainer in terms of, she performed at people, whereas I like to perform with people.
Q: Your experience was in TV. Was it hard to start acting live?
A: I feel very lucky because Mom was so much loved and so much revered, and I have gotten the benefit of all of America's love for my mom. The audiences are always mine to lose. I guess that's more pressure, but for me, since I don't tend to mess up, it gives me confidence.
Q: What's your topical "Lamb Chop After Dark" show like?
A: Lamb Chop can get away with saying things that I cannot. She can tell jokes that I can't.
Q: Is Lamb Chop into Obama?
A: Oh, yes. Raging!
Q: Not a George Bush fan?
A: Not so much. Lamb Chop's a Jewish Democrat.
Q: Does Lamb Chop know she's Jewish?
A: Oh, yes, there's a reason she's not a Pork Chop.
Q: Outside of the U.S., where is Lamb Chop most popular?
A: Japan is huge. They like cute things, even though her eyes are the opposite of anime. Anime eyes are huge; Lamb Chop's eyes are just lashes. It breaks every rule for what sells a character.
Q: Is there room for a sock puppet in a Twitter world?
A: Oh, completely, completely. Because the fact of the matter is nothing has changed since men were in the caves.
We all want to laugh, we all want to feel tenderness toward something. We all want to share a wonderful experience with our children. We all want to have a moment where we touch our own childhoods because adulthood is frightening. ...
So I think in a Twitter world, people are even more needing of something simple than they were in a simpler world where they were looking for things that were more complicated.
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