One of the few highlights of the 6-21-06 America’s Got Talent show was the ventriloquist act of Kevin Johnson
. Armed with Matilda and Clyde, cockatoo and buzzard puppets Kevin’s act is refreshing and entertaining.
He thrilled the audience and judges of America’s Got Talent with his rendition of Godzilla theather in which his ventriloguist act took on a whole new level. Not only did he gesture out of sync with his mouth in the fashion of a delayed Japanese Translation, Matilda nd Clyde’s comentary was superb.
Kevin Johnson, age 35, has been performing since the age of 9.
In a recent article from USA Today we find out more interesting tidbits of this Potential America’s Got Talent winner.
Johnson is a ventriloquist. In fact, a right fine ventriloquist. Two years ago, an international theme park association named him best male park performer in the world. Yet in this age of insta-Idols and millionaire Survivors, he’s off the cultural radar. Or worse.
“Puppet boy, the guy with socks on his hands. Yeah, yeah, I hear it all. I can’t let it bug me. It’s all I ever wanted to do.” Johnson shrugs. “Maybe this is the year of change.”
Maybe. Johnson has come close, pitching a children’s show to cable featuring his alter egos, Matilda and Clyde, cockatoo and buzzard puppets who bicker like children while Johnson mediates. “But producers keep telling me the same thing: ‘People will think it’s fake, that the voices are taped, so why do we need you?’ ”
That’s rich. Did the question come up when Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, stormed radio (think about that one) in the 1930s? And how about Shari Lewis and her Lamb Chop? A 40-year streak of TV fame.
But these days, throwing your voice could mean tossing your talent away. Yet Johnson, puppets in hand, paddles upstream. Why?
The mural artist
Mastering a craft can be a challenge, but get close, and it’s like a drug. You float into a zone whose seductive high can erase the need for big paychecks or impressive titles. It’s just you and your muse.
“At a time when many of us work mostly because it pays, to find meaning in what you do can be a radical stance,” says Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do with My Life? “Some job choices might seem out of step with the times, but the question is, does it provide fulfillment?”
If the answer is yes, the price often is worth it.
Danielle Acerra had a nice thing going, using her college art degree at a wallpaper manufacturer where she helped brighten homes with her renditions of fruits, vines and other suitably subdued designs: “I felt, you know, that I’d made it,” says Acerra, 29, of Ocean Grove, N.J.
Until another voice in her head piped up, the one that wanted to unify communities with mural art in the spirit of the great Diego Rivera. So three years ago, she and a partner formed The Muralists. They do brighten public spaces, but much of their time is spent in nurseries and dens, cranking out visions of ducklings in ponds and revelers at the beach.
“Sometimes I think, ‘I can’t paint any more palm trees in this life!’ ” she says. Other career hazards include loud working conditions (think mall restaurants) and knee pain (from squatting). “But I’d be miserable doing anything else.”
The ventriloquist
Johnson was camouflaging his misery just before the Welk performance. Pre-show jitters. Every now and then, in a nervous tick sort of way, he’d bark out a seal-like honnnnk followed by a whispered What-evah, the Blanche DuBois meets Valley Girl signature line of his “bird” Matilda.
But as soon as the laughs started flowing from the crowd — his crowd, folks who know who Bergen is! — he is determined to wow them. After all, Bergen had only one dummy.
First, gruff Clyde yodels like a three-pack-a-day smoker, only to be topped by Matilda, who belts out a glass-shattering God Bless the USA. Thunderous applause.
In the lobby after the show, a couple wait for Johnson near a life-size cardboard cutout of Welk. “It’s a shame you don’t see more of this, it’s such good, clean entertainment,” says Marillyn Thomas, who has escaped the cold of Great Falls, Mont. “And this young man is so good. I mean, he could be on a cruise ship.”
Johnson has heard that grandmotherly advice before. The money would be good, but it would mean weeks away from his family. And though it’s a nice compliment, cruise entertainer is not his definition of The Big Time. “I think I’d go a bit crazy on a boat,” he sighs.
With Matilda and Clyde in the back of his battered Saturn, Johnson drives a half-hour to his home in Vista, picking up Mexican food along the way. When he gets home around 10, sons Cameron, 7, and Cody, 3, want to hear about the show. It’s tough for wife Cherie, 29, to get the two to bed. It doesn’t help that Dad, wired after his gig, keeps gabbing.
“I want to be on TV,” he says.
It’s a mantra, really. If he says it enough, maybe it will happen. He also knows he wants out of this place, a rental home that’s no more than 1,000 square feet in a dusty working-class neighborhood.
“I want more for my sons, and I know I can make it. But I don’t belong in this age. Now you have to do so much to impress people. My art, maybe it’s just too simple.” He sighs. “But I was born to do this.”
Following in the family business
Some feel the pull from the cradle.
Franklin Graham could have avoided the pulpit, but with the Rev. Billy Graham as a father, the die has been cast. And what of Arlo Guthrie? With a dad like Woody, a legend who moved a young Bob Dylan to become a singer, it’s unlikely he considered much else.
Following in such footsteps isn’t easy. And sometimes people beg you to avoid a profession that would appear to offer a long row to hoe.
When a young Miller Williams, the son of an eloquent Arkansas minister, told a college adviser he wanted to major in languages, he was told he had no aptitude for it and diverted to biology. After a dozen years of teaching college sciences, Miller, who had never stopped writing his beloved poetry, was hired in 1961 as a teaching poet at Louisiana State University.
So he followed his bliss. He even was invited to read his work at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration. But true fame has eluded the man. Which is fine by him.
“All that’s really important is going to bed with joy,” says Williams, 75.
His daughter took that advice to heart; she also writes. But by putting those words to music, three-time Grammy winner Lucinda Williams has slain obscurity.
Kind of magical
In the recesses of his backyard shed, Johnson keeps a piece of the past that signaled his destiny.
“This,” he says, “is Raymond,” hauling out a black chest and snapping back the lid to reveal a dummy dressed like a train engineer.
Johnson’s grandfather, a sheet-metal engineer who did magic on the side, made the Howdy Doody-like sidekick for him; by age 13, Johnson was opening his shows.
Johnson kept at it during college, after which he worked a series of odd jobs and briefly considered a life in the ministry. But the pull of the puppets was too strong.
“Well, howw-dy,” Raymond drawls, eyes clicking faintly as they dart from side to side. Johnson’s boys are riveted; they’ve never seen Raymond. After the dummy’s eerie gaze spooked kids at a birthday party in 1991, Johnson benched him for good.
But neither of Johnson’s sons is put off; in fact, the 3-year-old keeps tapping the dummy on the leg to get his attention. Through Dad’s skill, this hunk of wood and fabric is alive. “Kind of magical, huh?” Johnson says.
The boys have the bug; each has his own array of hand puppets. They might even have a showbiz gene: Johnson’s homemaker mother played a clown at parties, while Cherie was Snoopy at Knott’s Berry Farm and then a Lego character at Legoland, the theme park where the couple met and where Johnson draws a steady paycheck.
“It’s hard to see him struggle,” Cherie says. “People who’ve seen him at Legoland come up to him and say ‘Oh, you’re the bird guy!’ But he can’t get a bigger break. The age of technology doesn’t seem to go with ventriloquism.”
But Johnson isn’t giving up. He has had worse jobs, notably a miserable gig as a forklift driver. “At least I’m not there,” he says as Raymond’s eyes lock on the horizon.
The inspiration
Never underestimate the power of a cruddy job to inspire a dream.
“We’ve all had bad jobs in our lives, which is good because they help us focus on doing something that we love, even if sometimes that thing is strange,” says Justin Racz, who cataloged a bizarre array of métiers in 50 Jobs Worse Than Yours. Oddest included maggot wrangler and garbage barge skipper. “What’s interesting is they all loved their jobs.”
So does onetime newspaper delivery man Bryan Bowers, who left that job behind for a life on the streets playing the autoharp, that odd contraption made famous a half-century back by country music’s Carter Family.
Bowers is now in the Autoharp Hall of Fame (yes, there is one) and has cut records with big Nashville stars. But that’s only after decades of the minstrel’s life.
“I’d play all morning outdoors in Seattle’s market, then head over and perform at a church, then a coffeehouse, and finally over at the rough bars ending up with all the drunks,” says Bowers, 65, of Sedro-Woolley, Wash.
He still relishes the challenge of luring a few coins from passersby.
“Once I played a job for $1,000. But I put that check in my pocket, hit the street to play and in a few hours had $17 for a steak,” he says. “That was the best-tasting steak I ever had. It reminded me that back when I had nothing, I could still put food in my stomach doing what I loved. I’m lucky.”
Making it work
The morning sun spreads out across San Diego County like a golden blanket. Not a cloud for miles. Johnson is back in the Saturn headed for Legoland in Carlsbad.
On the wall of the dressing room are photos of performers who hope their shtick here will soon lead somewhere, preferably up the 405 Freeway to Hollywood.
“Anthony Edwards came up to me after a show once because his wife didn’t believe I was really throwing my voice,” Johnson says of the former ER star. “He always says hello when he comes back. That’s a nice friendship.”
But it hasn’t led to any TV work. So for now, Johnson’s audience remains antsy kids, three shows a day, five days a week. These tots don’t know Candice Bergen, let alone her father, Edgar, and yet they eat Johnson up.
Maybe it’s the puppets and their Punch-and-Judy war of words, or maybe it’s the goofy way Johnson shoots one eyebrow skyward, Jim Carrey-like. What-evah. It’s 20 minutes of open-mouthed guffaws.
Matilda asks to sing.
“Go ahead,” Johnson says.
Matilda: “Did you just call me goathead?”
The kids howl. Pure gold.
Source: USA Today
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