{"id":26469,"date":"2025-07-22T08:08:42","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T12:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=26469"},"modified":"2025-07-22T09:12:47","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T13:12:47","slug":"goodbye-linda-elbow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2025\/07\/22\/goodbye-linda-elbow\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Linda Elbow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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. \u201cI 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\/\u2018arrested\u2019 all the puppets,\u201d she told Bill Marx<\/a> of The Arts Fuse in 2013. In addition to performing, she became the theater\u2019s booking manager and business manager and gardener. She created many of her own shows too\u2014including the iconic \u201cRunaway Pond,\u201d performed every year at Glover Day. Her hands-on dedication to making a better world\u2014big and small\u2014was evidenced by her service on Glover\u2019s 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\u2019s mind had been going in recent years. I last saw her at a Bread and Puppet Circus performance three years ago, I think. We\u2019d 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\u2019s traditional shape-note songs, to so sweetly accompany her on her way. <3<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Linda
Linda Elbow runs with a flag in “Hallelujah” at Bread and Puppet, Glover, Vermont, Aug. 25, 2019. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26474,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,110],"tags":[13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26469"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26473,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26469\/revisions\/26473"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}