A blond lady with blue eyeshadow and a cupcake hat may not be the first image that comes to mind when you hear the phrase “puppet show,” but once you’ve experienced Miss Pussycat‘s trippy fantasy world in person, you’ll never look at puppets the same way again. Born and raised in Antlers, Oklahoma, Miss Pussycat (a.k.a. Panacea Theriac) first got into puppetry as part of the Christian Puppet Youth Ministry at her church, but began creating to the beat of a different drummer after being drawn in by the siren song of New Orleans. Together with her musician husband Quintron, she’s been putting on “swamp tech” multimedia spectacles for underground audiences since the mid-nineties, and has recently graduated to more high profile venues like the New Orleans Museum of Art and VBS.tv.
On the final day of the cruise, Miss P threw a breakfast that included a live action performance of a story that’s hard to summarize but involves a famous supermodel/archaeologist named Jackie Joe Johnson falling into the ocean, turning into a sea monster, feeling sad, defeating the Coast Guard in hand-to-hand combat, and eventually falling in love with one of her fellow sea monsters. (Favorite line: “I’m not a monster! I’m a supermodel and an archaeologist! Save me!”) I sat down with her after the show to chat a bit about her adopted home city, puppets, and the various parallel worlds she inhabits. More »