Two Puppeteers on a Mission: 'It's OK to Be Different'

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Cecilia Arana, left, and Mindy Pfeffer perform with the puppet Mark. Photo: Courtesy of NYC Kids Project

Demonstrating with their teacher, Sarah Rookwood, Ce­cilia Arana shows kin­dergartners how a blind person can discover a person’s features. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Child­ren go through an ex­er­cise that helps them relate to the ex­perience of a blind person. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Peck Slip School kindergartner Thomas Kimes meets the puppet Bobby, held by Mindy Pfeffer. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Cecilia Arana shows the insides of a "beeper" ball used by blind children. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Arana turns on the beeper ball and tells kids, with eyes closed, to point to it. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Arana introduces kindergartners to a "blind" puppet and the stick she would use to help her get around. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

After a NYC Kids Project performance, P.S. 51 3rd graders gather around their wheelchair-bound classmate Amir who had come up to meet the puppet Mark, also in a wheelchair. Photo: Courtesy of NYC Kids Project

Seated in front of a class of kindergartners at the Peck Slip School, Mindy Pfeffer held Bobby, a puppet in a wheelchair, and asked the children some questions.“Could you be friends with Bobby and maybe hang out in the park?”

A chorus of “No’s” came back at her.

Pfeffer gave the kids a quizzical look.

“Can he do everything you do in the park?”

“No!”

“Can he do some things?”

“No!”

That was Pfeffer’s cue to turn to the puppet.

“Can you go up a ladder, Bobby?”

“Well,” said Bobby, as Pfeffer’s voice turned husky and kid-like, “I can’t go up a ladder by myself, but I can with help.”

Indeed, Pfeffer explained to her audience, Bobby and other disabled kids are more like them than they are different and—most important—it’s okay to be different.

That’s the message—mantra really—of NYC Kids Project, a nonprofit organization run by Pfeffer and fellow puppeteer Cecilia Arana, that offers class visits and performances before large groups with puppets that are blind and wheelchair-bound and, for older kids, characters with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and learning disabilities, too.

“When you say to kids, ‘We’re going to play superheroes,’ they can’t see at first that you can put a cape on a wheelchair,” said Arana, who has two sons in P.S./I.S. 276. “And when you play jump rope, if you can’t jump, well maybe you can turn the rope. Those are the aha! moments that get exciting in the room.”

Pfeffer and Arana have many years of experience with a similar, long-running state-supported program that lost its funding in 2011. Having formed their nonprofit, they are working to revive its mission with the help of corporate donors and other sources. To be fully funded, they said, would require at least $400,000.

For now, the pair charges a small consulting fee for classroom visits as they keep alive the dream of again having teams of puppeteers performing in schools throughout the city, regardless of means. “There’s a million ways to do this,” said Pfeffer. “We just are new to running a business so it’s trial and error right now.”

For more information, go to nyc-kidsproject.squarespace.com.