We arrived at Bread.and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont, last Friday evening to learn that our friend Linda Elbow had just died. She began working with the theater in the early 1970s, when it was in residence at Goddard College in Plainfield, followed the theater to Glover in 1978, and had worked with the company ever since. “I think a good example of our impact on American culture is when the police raided a puppet workshop before the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000 and seized/‘arrested’ all the puppets,” she told Bill Marx of The Arts Fuse in 2013. In addition to performing, she became the theater’s booking manager and business manager and gardener. She created many of her own shows too—including the iconic “Runaway Pond,” performed every year at Glover Day. Her hands-on dedication to making a better world—big and small—was evidenced by her service on Glover’s library board, the Garden Club, and at the Recycling Center. She was fiercely dedicated to Bread and Puppet, to social justice, to getting things done. She could be intimidatingly no-nonsense. She had a dazzlingly wicked laugh. Linda’s mind had been going in recent years. I last saw her at a Bread and Puppet Circus performance three years ago, I think. We’d known each other for two decades, but she no longer recognized me. I was happy to see her in such smiling good spirits, at home, among the crowd of thousands, this community, this world she loved, as the raucous band once more kicked off the show. Last week, when friends learned it was near the end, they gathered with her to sing Bread and Puppet’s traditional shape-note songs, to so sweetly accompany her on her way. <3
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