BLESSABLE ME - Choosing The Right Friends SKIT

BLESSABLE ME SERIES - Choosing The Right Friends Skit

Three of the JR. Leaders in our Children's Ministry wrote this skit for our upcoming Blessable Me series. 

 

                Cast:     

                                Dr. Nefario

                                Margo

                                Edith

                                Agnes

 

                Setting: 

                In the girls’ bedroom at Gru’s house, Edith is in a huff and packing her belongings into a
                 Walmart bag.

 

                Skit:

 

Margo and Agnes enter the bedroom.

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          What are you doing?!

 

                                                                                          EDITH

                                          I’m leaving!  I’m going back to Mrs. Hattie’s!

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          If she’s leaving, I’m leaving, too!  And I’m taking my
                                          unicorn with me!

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          No one’s leaving!

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Is Gru leaving?  I like him. He’s nice.

 

                                                                                          EDITH

                                          And scary….

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Like Santa!

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          No, Agnes, Gru’s not leaving.

 

Nefario enters immediately on his motorized scooter .  His scooter moves slowly toward the girls, but his expression is very concerned.

 

                                                                                          NEFARIO

                                          What?! Who’s not breathing?  Hop on!  I’ll take you to
                                          the ER!

 

Motorized scooter barely moves.

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          No, Nefario… No one’s leaving.

 

                                                                                          NEFARIO

                                                  (pulls out a switch)

                                          Who needs a beatin’?

 

                                                                                          ALL THREE GIRLS

                                          Gru’s not leaving!

 

                                                                                          NEFARIO

                                          You’ve already eaten?

 

                                                                                          ALL THREE GIRLS

                                          WE SAID GRU’S NOT LEAVING!!!!!

 

                                                                                          NEFARIO

                                          Oooooh.  Why are you talking about leaving?

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Gru won’t let me get the new unicorn from Dollar Tree! 
                                          It’s so fluffy, I’m gonna die!!!

 

                                                                                          EDITH

                                          Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat.

 

Edith starts leaving.  Nefario cuts her off on his scooter and holds up a stop sign. 

 

                                                                                          NEFARIO

                                          Stop!  We don’t bounce like that!

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          Edith, you aren’t leaving.  We’ll tough it out TOGETHER. 
                                          Just think abot all the things we say we’ll have when
                                          we’re grown.

 

                                                                                          EDITH

                                          Like my very own bug collection?

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Pretty unicorns!!!

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          Our own dance studio!

 

Nefario begins to exit on his scooter but stops suddenly inspired by their conversation.  He realizes getting rid of the girls and refocusing Gru’s attention on stealing the moon might not be so difficult after all.

 

                                                                                          NEFARIO

                                          You know, girls, Vector would be able to give you
                                          everything you ever dreamed of.  A dancing unicorn in a
                                          studio made of bugs.

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Wow!

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          Gross!  I don’t want bugs in my dream studio!  And isn’t
                                          Vector the “World’s Greatest Villain”?

 

                                                                                          EDITH

                                          I don’t care!  As long as I get what I WANT!  Who cares
                                          how mean he is?

 

                                                                                          MARGO
                                          But, Edith, listen is he gonna love us like Gru does?

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Gru loves us?  Are you sure?  He’s kinda scary.

 

                                                                                          MARGO

                                          Yes, of course!  Remember how he reads us THREE
                                          LITTLE KITTENS.  And buys us as many tickets as we
                                          want at the carnival.  And he did win you that unicorn,
                                          didn’t he, Agnes?

 

                                                                                          AGNES

                                          Yes!  And it’s soooooo fluffy!

 

                                                                                          EDITH

                                          Yeah…. I guess it’s not as bad as Mrs. Hattie’s BOX OF
                                          SHAME.  And Gru does seem to love us.  Even if he doesn’t let me           take the minions to dance and dress them in tutus. 

Misadventures In Puppet Building (Sketch to Foam)

A professional puppet builder would probably cringe at our chaos; however, taking into account the fact that we've never made a puppet, didn't buy a pattern, and have a limited knowledge of puppets, I say we are off to a better than expected start.

Foam is expensive.  We did not even get the foam we wanted.  We settled for the 1" thick roll of polyfoam from the craft section at Walmart just in case our puppet making adventure was a complete flop, we didn't want to be out of a lot of money.  Excited to have the foam finally, we came home and stared at it.  How in the world are we going to make a big round minion outta this stuff????  I thought making a puppet pattern would be simple.  Needless to say, it was quite the time consuming project.  I'm quite certain we went about it all the wrong way, but we eventually got a puppet that somewhat resembles our original sketch.

We started by taking thin poster board and trying to form it into the shape we wanted for our puppet.  Originally, these seemed like the simple and obvious way to create a pattern.  Unfortunately, poster board doesn't bend and form together as easily as foam so we abandoned that idea all together.  I was all ready to post a quick article about our failure when inspiration struck!  A baseball hat is the same shape as the minion on a much smaller scale.  We tore a part a baseball hat to get the pattern for one of the pieces.  After a ton of geometry and mathematics, we finally came up with a pattern for our head.  We cut out six pieces (because the hat was six pieces) but only ended up needing, five pieces to complete the top of the head.

Naively, we rejoiced assuming everything else would be relatively simple in comparison to the head.  Then, we realized figuring out how to make the mouthplate was going to be much more difficult.    The mouth plate does not function exactly the way it should.  There's a trick to getting the mouth to open and close.  It was the best we could do with our amateurish puppet building skills. 

The arms are hot glued on to the puppet and therefore, are not able to be moved with rods.  This was intentional.  Because puppets are so large and bulky and require two hands to move the mouth plate, we chose to make the arms stationary.

Misadventures In Puppet Building

As I previously wrote, we hope to give our church's puppet ministry a makeover.  I absolutely love the Thistledown Puppets and Puppets, Inc.'s Toon Puppets .  So, I set out to discover just how difficult creating our own puppets would be.  I'm a huge fan of vaudeville comedy (particularly Abbott and Costello) and would love to do puppet skits/sketches similar to Kids On The Move.  Our puppet inventory is fairly sparse, so we'd like to add a few more characters to our team.  I know we may never be able to create the same quality puppets as we like, but there's something very appealing about the creative freedom of creating our own puppets. 

I'll be chronicling our first puppet building project more for your entertainment than education.  At the moment, all I have is a basic idea.  Maybe just maybe I can get it finished before our Blessable Me series begins next month.

I've got a few rough sketches drawn (forgive me, I'm not very artistic).  From the material I've read and all the Youtube videos and tutorials I've watched, I think/hope, it'll be an easy beginner project.  I pray I'm not in over my head.  Well, my expectations are pretty low, so there's not alot of room for disappointment.