LOCAL CULTURE

Face time: Wilma Swartz surrounds herself with puppet love.

That’s Ventertainment!

Straight outta Trevose, Wilma the Ventertainer takes her dummy number on the road.

by Avi Steinberg

At her trailer home in Trevose, Wilma Swartz opens up a giant chest of personas, and starts digging.

“I feel like I’ve spent half my life doing this,” she says as she rummages. In the chest, cartoon eyes bulge and wink, furry arms and legs fly every which way.

“Where is she?” she says under her breath.

“I’m down here … ” says a muffled voice.

Finally Swartz finds her.

The dummy jumps to life: Squirrelly Shirley—a rodential sexpot with red-painted cheeks, long wavy blond tresses and a big, subtly mischievous grin.

“Isn’t she fabulous?” says Swartz, combing out her hair. “She was a male, but I turned her into a female. She’s like Miss Piggy, but in squirrel vision.”

Fabulous or not, Squirrelly Shirley didn’t end up making the trip with Swartz to the 31st International Ventriloquist Convention in Fort Mitchell, Ky., earlier this month. Swartz could fit only some of her friends into the VW bug she drove 650 miles to the convention. She took only her very best friends, her superstars—dummies like the 6-foot-tall ostrich named Sandy Twinkletoes.

Swartz has been to the convention before. But this year was different. Everything had to be perfect.

This year she was on a mission: to publicly thank celebrity ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, star of his own multiplatinum-selling Comedy Central special, for calling Swartz’s mother on her deathbed last year. The phone conversation, it turned out, was actually conducted by Dunham’s star dummy, the permanently scowling curmudgeon Walter.

“It was her dying wish,” says Swartz. “She said she wanted to speak to her favorite ventriloquist. I was only her second favorite.”

In many ways the convention is a family affair. Many vents have known each other for decades. Some have grown up professionally in the community that’s sprouted around Fort Mitchell’s Vent Haven, the world’s foremost museum and archive of ventriloquism. These vents communicate daily over an Internet email group.

The recent family reunion included more than 400 Hawaiian-shirt-wearing vents and at least that many alter egos—cutesy animals, wisecracking NASCAR dudes, winos, dimwits, fast women, smart alecks, lecherous cockroaches and lots of grumpy old men.

For four days vents performed and attended sessions on all aspects of their art. But they mostly did what they do best—gab.

Like many families, the world’s ventriloquists are as divided as they are united. A significant percentage of vents, including Swartz, use their art to evangelize. At the convention, the religious/secular divide was palpable. Any off-color joke was met with scattered laughs and many more stony faces.

When a British performer cursed onstage, a vent in the audience—a guy from down South—whispered to his wife, “It’s okay if they curse, but if we even hint about our Lord and savior, they get all up in arms.”

Dunham wasn’t exempt. His rambling, sheepish apology for cursing in his Comedy Central routine had the distinct feel of a wayward son returning home to the Bible Belt and apologizing to his disapproving uncles and aunts. Dunham then announced that his forthcoming DVD would be family-friendly.

“I decided to do this because it was the right thing to do,” said Dunham. “And also because our market research concluded that clean acts are, hands down, more successful than dirty ones.”

The crowd gave this announcement an uproarious ovation, including a smattering of “hallelujahs.”

One of the convention’s main vendors, Colorado-based One Way Street Inc. sells yarn-haired dummies and books on incorporating Christ into comedy shows. At the show Liz VonSeggen explained her company’s name: “We believe there’s ultimately one way—that there’s a one-way street to salvation.”

She says the rise of “puppet ministries” came about as a result of the hippie-fueled Jesus revival movement of the ’70s. “We took Sesame Street and made it a one-way street.”

VonSeggen says vent works in ministry not just because it’s fun and compelling, but because it involves a conversation. “It’s not just a preacher up there telling you what to do. It’s a conversation—or the illusion of a conversation—that allows for doubts and for questions to be answered. Christ didn’t just preach. He also listened and responded.”

But before and during the life of Christ, ventriloquism was synonymous with black magic and necromancy. The “Witch of Endor” episode in I Samuel is widely believed to have involved an act of ventriloquism.

But vent, says Swartz, might’ve saved her life. Once, when she was working at her former job as a private investigator, an assailant held her at gunpoint. She “threw” her voice behind the gunman, confusing him long enough for her to grab and cuff him.

Another P.I.-related encounter left her with a wired jaw for a year and a half. She spent the entire time communicating through ventriloquism. Once healed, she decided to use her talent to teach the faith that had sustained her through the ordeal.

Today she works full-time at church venues as well as at corporate and educational gigs, parties, functions, bachelorette parties, picnics, casinos and cruise ships. Wilma the Ventertainer, as she calls herself, is almost always performing somewhere in or around Philadelphia.

When her moment to see Jeff Dunham at the convention arrived, Swartz was nervous. It wasn’t part of the program. But during a lull in the Q&A, she raised her hand, jumped out of her seat, grabbed her nephew Rob—who’d made the trip for the sole reason of shaking Dunham’s hand—and leapt onto the stage, where she presented Dunham and Walter with a tape of the deathbed conversation.

Walter, perpetually nonplussed, replied, “A tape? What the hell are we gonna do with that?”

Ignoring this crack, Swartz thanked Dunham and Walter for their kindness.

Dunham, keeping Walter under wraps, smiled warmly and accepted the gift.

The price of puppet fame: $1.98, apparently

After the session, when the other vents had cleared out to browse the vendors’ tables, Swartz remained in her seat, lingering to speak with some of the overwhelmed audience members.

“You don’t know how much that meant to me,” she said. “I was just trying not to cry. That’s why I brought Rob. To keep me composed.”

After the convention Rob and friends pile back into Swartz’s VW. She has a PA system on the car, and is trying to rig a bicycle brake system into a moving mouth to put on the front of the car, between its two headlight eyes. Swartz spends a good deal of her time thinking of ways to put mouths on things.

But as she leaves Kentucky—already thinking of returning next year—she muses on her vocation.

“There’s nothing like being onstage,” she says. “All the pain you feel just goes away when you’re up there. It comes back when you’re done, of course. But when you’re up there, it’s like you’ve never even felt pain in your life.”