In Kentucky: 600 Unmoved Lips

Out in the middle of America one summer weekend (to be precise, at a motel at the intersection of Interstate 75 and Buttermilk Pike, in Fort Mitchell, Ky., just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati), there was a gathering of about 300 people who can talk without moving their lips (reading, that is another matter). Ventriloquists all, they brought their dummies. There were people everywhere not so much talking to other people as talking through their dummies to other people's dummies (just leave it alone, folks, and lower that eyebrow).

What it was was the Twelfth Annual Ventriloquist Convention. They hold it in Fort Mitchell because it is the home of the Vent Haven Museum, said to house the largest collection of ventriloquist-related paraphernalia in this or any other hemisphere. The museum was founded by William Shakespeare Berger, a wealthy businessman and amateur ventriloquist who collected dummies from 1916 until his death in 1972. In one room of the museum, scores of dummies sit on folding metal chairs. The effect, on anyone who came along in the high celebrity days of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney and Senor Wences too, is bizarre. Lacking animation, still, with their eyes wide as silver dollars and their goofy grins, they lend the room an air of the grotesque.

Speaking of which, there were people at the convention who thought their puppets were alive, truly. Jeff Dunham, a rising star from Dallas who was in the touring company of the Broadway hit Sugar Babies, explained this frame of mind: "If you convince yourself that the dummy is really alive, that he is a separate entity, it works much better onstage. It is much more convincing to the audience. Even Bergen, who was far from crazy, talked about Charlie as if he were alive. However, it does get a little spooky sometimes if you let yourself get carried away with it."

"Hi," one dummy in the motel corridor said to another. "I'm Oscar from Cape Cod. Where are you from?"

"Dearborn, Michigan."

The people on whose arms these characters rode exchanged not a word.

But wait! Historically -- one learns just in the nick of time -- balance is what nearly every account of this yearly meeting has begged. It is not all weirdness going down. It is, in the words of Dale Brown, a ventriloquist from Waukesha, Wis., "a family affair aimed at educating young and amateur ventriloquists, promoting the art of ventriloquism, and providing a spotlight for some of the country's best-known professionals." Further, according to Brown and other organizers of the event, the vents (for that is what they call one another) are a little ticked off at being picked on by the press as odd, for theirs is no more odd than a gathering of philatelists. They desire a sober and evenhanded report for once, and so, as far as this department is concerned, they shall have it. The dearth of seriousness in the lines that preceded these is regretfully noted, and the clerk is instructed to strike them from the record.