I stayed off Facebook the rest of the day after I sent that e-mail and went to school the next day without any qualms. My day went pretty normally. After school I went home and did my daily Puppetry Club Facebook group check and noticed the group had one less member than yesterday. After looking through the group members, I realized that it was that same girl I singled out in the e-mail who left the group. It was then I realized what I had done. I was devastated, nearly cried myself to sleep that night and was excessively grumpy to everyone the rest of the week. I spent the rest of the week avoiding her, terrified of her. It didn't help we had two rehearsals that week where I would have to be around her. Since this was right before our President's Day week-long break, I figured I'd let it lie low, keep quiet and hope she forgets by the time we get back.
Perhaps it was my temper in that e-mail and the end result of it, but at those two rehearsals the reception toward the club was the same as it had been before: nobody cared. Not a single soul. I had pushed the boulder over the hill and was able to keep it up there with persistence up this was probably about the time it began to roll back down.
That week after when I was in Orlando, rather than spending a night in Mickey's part of town I sat out on the deck of my hotel room looking out at the on-property golf course and, farther back, the taller structures in Disney World you could see from the hotel. I was thinking over everything that had happened over that last month. I came to a final decision: we had to scale back. With that, the 2009 Puppetry Club variety show was officially canceled. With our big project in the can, for the first time I didn't have a solution.
When we came back from President's week break and I broke the news to the three people who had stood by me through thick and thin, they were not over-the-top surprised. I told them I had no idea what we were going to do and I'd keep them posted if anything were to come along. That was the last meeting. We never got together as a group again.
That wasn't completely my fault. My school's production of Little Shop of Horrors was the next week and the week after that (note to all: Hell Week will be the most time-consuming thing you'll ever encounter), the overtly-silly award ceremony wherein I was performing for the second year in a row was two weeks after the end of Little Shop, I got roped into other puppeteering gigs for weeks afterward, not to mention I had other school work to keep track of. The club periods went by without the Puppetry Club being brought up once, I crawled back to the TV Studio/AV Club instead. With the final club period of the school year having passed - it was all over. Puppetry Club would be a thing of the past.
But I realized something through all these performances. All the years I had been doing puppet shows and people loving them, I have always been a solo act. The thrill of having an accomplishment that you made the initiative with alone is so much rewarding in that you have to handle everything on your own. That doesn't go for everything, but with puppetry and for me at least, it goes very well. I didn't need a club or a show to show that, and I was much happier without the burden of having handle a group like that, something I'm clearly not the person to do that. I've taken everything I created for the club and now put under my new puppet troupe which emphasizes it's my troupe, this is entirely a BobThePizzaBoy project. I haven't really gotten off the ground with it just yet but, call it arrogance if you want, I have a very good feeling this future project could me a lot more happiness than the Puppetry Club could have ever brought.
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