← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Celebrate New Jersey Folklore With 'The Devil & Daisy Dirt'
00:27:48
On Thursday evening, New Jersey folklore is coming to the East Village.
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- [00:02]
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Dan Deanna
Let's go.
- [00:36]
Will Rogers
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
- [00:48]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Hey, we want to remind you that our get lit with all of it book club event is happening this Monday night at the library. We are talking to Eric Larson. What book is we're discussing is the Demon of Unrest. It is the run up to the Civil War. We ask our listeners if you want to join us for the live stream. It is sold out by the way. You should go to wnyc.org it's our most we have a musical guest called Sons of the Town Hall. They're gonna reach up to us and we'll go to a little bit of their song.
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Musical Performer
Yeah, I was in the washtub and then I went to wall. Hard to know how that could be. You were in the footlights and crawling across the floor. Been trying to trace the line between young and old love and war green and gold, you and me. From dawn to dusk sky and sea lie between you and me. The line between.
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Alison Stewart
That'S to remind you On Monday night, September 30, sons of the Town hall with Eric Larson. It is sold out, so if you have tickets, I will be very excited to see you there. If not, please join the live stream for for more information, head to wnyc.org getlit if you find yourself hanging around St. Mark's, you might find yourself face to face with a cryptid horror from New Jersey. According to legend, the New Jersey devil haunts the Pine Barrens, plodding along on hooven legs and spreading its leathery bat wings, trudging through the woods, peering around with its horse's head. Or maybe it's a goat's head or a kangaroo head, depending on who you ask. A new and very strange stage production called the Devil and Daisy Dirt. An alt folk New Jersey gothic musical about the Jersey Devil. It was written by Alex Dawson. According to a review from the Cinema Retro magazine. The show Quote, half creature features half country song, narrated on stage by Dawson himself, is poignant and moving. You feel for the devil you do for Karloff's monster or King Kong. Without being preachy, this brisk campfire tale addresses issues of acceptance and intolerance. Joining me now to talk about the devil and Daisy Dirt, please welcome its writer, director and narrator, Alex Dawson. Joyce Carol Oates once said of Alex, a riveting, one of a kind storyteller. Alex, nice to meet you.
- [03:47]
Alex Dawson
Hey, nice to meet you, Alison.
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Alison Stewart
Also joining us is a puppet designer and operator, Hollywood horror effects designer, Dan Deanna. Nice to meet you.
- [03:55]
Dan Deanna
Dan, Nice to meet you.
- [03:56]
Alison Stewart
And we also have Will Rogers here. He's the host of the paranormal podcast called Guide to the Unknown, and he'll help us understand the story behind the Jersey Devil. Nice to meet you.
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Will Rogers
So nice to meet you.
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Alison Stewart
So, listeners, we want to get you in on this conversation. When did you first hear of the Jersey Devil? How does this local monster play into what it means to call yourself a Jersey stater? Our numbers, 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. You can call in or you can text that number. Okay, we're going to start with you, Will, for fol heard about this piece of particular folklore. What is the story of the Jersey Devil?
- [04:32]
Will Rogers
The Jersey Devil is, you know, I think a very familiar kind of creature. It's a creature called a cryptid, a type of monster. I think a lot of people might point to Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster. But the special thing about New Jersey is that we have our very own named after the state, the Jersey Devil. And that makes it kind of unique. But one of my favorite things about monsters is not just the monster itself, because a lot of people would say that if you go south of New Jersey down to the Pine Barrens, you're entering the Jersey Devil's lair. And that's essentially where it stalks after the sun goes down. But some of the stuff that I like about monsters and about folklore is trying to unravel the quote, unquote, real stories behind it all. And so not to burst the bubble of the Jersey Devil, because quite frankly, there is no easy answer. But here's the simple folklore most people point to. In about 1735, there was a family, the Leeds family. Some people say this happened down in Burlington, but no one really knows for sure. All they say is that this family had 12 children already. And so you have to imagine that Mother Leeds was maybe a little tired. A little tired. I think she Needed a little bit of rest. And so for some reason, according to legend, she blurted out, let this 13th child be a devil. Now, I don't know what that means.
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Dan Deanna
All right.
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Will Rogers
But be careful what you wish for.
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Musical Performer
Right.
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Will Rogers
So.
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Alison Stewart
Oh, my goodness.
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Will Rogers
They say that it was a dark and stormy night when the 13th child to the Leeds family was born. And at first, it was perfect. A perfect birth. A perfect, beautiful baby. Until the curse took hold. And all of a sudden, the child's feet started to turn into hooves. Enormous wings sprouted from its back, its neck lengthened, its head turned into a horse head. They say it took one swipe and everybody collaps collected in the room, knocking them off their feet and then went right up the chimney, disappearing into the night, and has become a mystery ever since. And there have been, you know, supposed sightings, a very, very famous one. There was a hunter that had gone out stalking for prey and noticed a set of uneven hoof prints in the snow. One foot larger than the others, until abruptly, the footprints just stop. Where did the creature go? And then, with a horrible screech, he turns and this enormous winged creature attacks him. And he later went home and was told, well, you just spotted the Jersey Devil. And if that wasn't a fun enough twist, this hunter was Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, who perhaps just needed a little attention of his own. I'm not sure. Maybe his brother was getting a little too much.
- [07:09]
Alison Stewart
So what makes this story a creative opportunity for you to write a musical?
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Alex Dawson
Well, it's not exactly a musical. I think we kind of term it a bluegrass tall tale.
- [07:22]
Dan Deanna
Okay.
- [07:22]
Alex Dawson
With live music and, of course, an eight foot wearable puppet creature suit designed by Dan. Diana. You know, Dan and I have both always been interested in Cryptids and interested in spinning any sort of monster tale. So the monster comes out appearing mythical as opposed to monstrous, and the tale is populated with monsters that are human. Why the Jersey Devil? Well, I think. Let me go back to. So growing up, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up on the border of Alabama and Georgia on a ranch in the woods filled with sort of cougars and bobcats. My stepfather used to call them swamp screamers. My mom believed that there were witches in the woods, that there were lizards in the lake the size of dinosaurs, that there were fairies in the camellia bushes and little folk in the tree hollows. And my stepfather, he listened to Johnny Paycheck, Waylon Jennings, Meryl Haggard. The movie theater was an hour away and across the state line, but my mom was a huge film Buff. So consuming all these creature features like gremlins and the thing, probably too young to see the thing. So all that, that's what I grew up on. And that's the kind of stuff I write. And I think even though I didn't grow up in the Pine Barrens, you get deep enough in the woods, the sentiments and the voice are very similar. So I was interested in writing. You know, I've lived in New Jersey for 30 years now, at least 35 years, and I was interested in writing something that was Jersey centric, but that I was able to sort of draw on all the things. Most of my stories are set in Alabama or in the South. And I went to a place called Lucille's Luncheonette, which is a loose inspiration for the restaurant where this is all set, called the Devil's Diner. And they actually have a chainsaw carved Jersey Devil, you know, maybe five feet tall out front. And I think it started with that. I think I was just very inspired by talking to the people that worked there and, you know, sort of kind of boning up a little bit on the. The Jersey Devil legend. And then Dan, maybe Dan will tell you about the first time we did a haunt called Catch the Devil. You want to tell them about that? That's where it maybe started.
- [09:50]
Dan Deanna
Yeah, sure. So, as you mentioned earlier, I was in Hollywood for about a decade, you know, building monsters, doing a lot of art, fabrication, things like that. Moved back in 2019, and before that, before I moved out there, Alex and I actually first met doing a stage production of Nosferatu. So we kind of had this working relationship already. I left. You know, we were on the phone all the time talking about when you come back, all this stuff. So we got together, I came back, and Alex actually was the officiant of my wedding. And at my wedding we were talking about, okay, what's next? What are we going to do now that you're back? And because we're both from Jersey, we had been talking about the Jersey Devil, and we decided to do a Halloween haunt in Alex's backyard where we invited the community out. We had, you know, around the block, people waiting to come through to see these individual little vignette scenes that were played out as the crowd came through. And at the end, of course, they would be met with this 13 foot tall, very kind of simple puppet that would come up out of the woods with fog machines and lights. And, you know, we would hope it would scare the pants off of anybody, but we. What ended up happening was actually all these people Were just staying there, looking at the puppet, you know, so we had to, like, usher them out. And so after that was all done, we're like, you know, we got something here with this kind of mindset, this storytelling, and we kind of just took it from there.
- [11:12]
Alison Stewart
Would you describe the puppet for our listeners? I know we're in audio, but it will help people get an idea.
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Dan Deanna
Sure, yeah.
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Alex Dawson
You have two. Two puppets?
- [11:19]
Dan Deanna
Yeah. So the first one was a really simple. Just upholstery, foam, fur, and PVC with movable joints so I could kind of hoist it up. It would stand up to its full glory. I had, like, a rod puppet on its head with a. With a movable neck so I could move the head around pretty naturally and look at everybody. But it was stationary. So for this time, when we decided to bring it to stage and incorporate it into the show that Alex wrote, it had to be a little different, you know, and so doing a lot of research on different puppets, puppeteers, at first, I was like, you know, we will need more than one person to do this. And, of course, when you're doing things like DIY like this, it's. We have to do everything as DIY as we can. So pared that down to just one person being in it. Me. And so I took inspiration from my childhood, Carol Spinney from Big Bird, and just diving into that, learning more about what that was like, and actually being inspired by the tiger puppet from the Life of PI Broadway. So if anyone's ever seen that, it is puppeteered by three people, and it's just beautiful. And the movement is incredible. It looks great, but you can see the puppeteers. And at first, I was a little bashful about that, wanting to conceal myself in the puppet. But seeing these three puppeteers, it actually opened me up to the kind of like, double mint enjoyment of watching the puppeteers and then watching the puppet and not having anything taken away from the experience. So from that, we decided to move forward with the design that we had. And so now it is mostly carbon fiber, foam fur, some 3D printed materials, and just me and one of my colleagues built it over the course of about a month. And I just strap into this thing on a camping backpack, and I kind of get inside of this thing, and whatever movement I want to do, I can kind of have it do.
- [13:18]
Alex Dawson
Yeah, it looks very authentic. A lot of people think that you used animal carcasses, but no extra bones were involved. It was all printed and painted, all printed and painted. And I also want to say that Dan got Married on Friday the 13th on the top of a mountain under a full harvest moon. So in keeping with all our interests.
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Dan Deanna
That's right.
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Alison Stewart
We're talking about the devil and Daisy Dirt. We're talking with Alex Dawson. He's the narrator and the writer, puppet master and operator Dan Deanna and Will Rogers, the host of the paranormal podcast Guide to the Unknown. What's the plot of the show? I'm just gonna give it the basic plot.
- [13:54]
Alex Dawson
Yeah. So most reductively, it's a Pine Barrens ET with a wounded cryptid instead of a stranded extraterrestrial, deer hunters instead of federal agents, and a magic portal that opens just above the Apple Pie Hill fire tower. A midnight lightning strike instead of a mothership shaped like a Christmas tree ornament. So that's essentially the story. And it's all set on the night. I know you had somebody talking about savory treats earlier. It's set on the night of an annual appetite contest called I Ate the Devil on Devil Day, October 30th. So it's a good time to see this show. And Daisy Dirt, who's a waitress at the Devil's Diner, AKA Lucille's Luncheonette, finds something wounded in the dumpster behind the restaurant. And she realizes that she's been, you know, she's been harassed and sort of catcalled and hissed at and hooted at, you know, for so many years. And this is her first moment of kind of power, and she realizes she has to save this thing, but she can't do it alone. So she. She has collaborators. And the villain of the piece is a. A. A deer hunter named Tasty Murder because he wears a T shirt that says meat is murder. Tasty. Tasty Murder.
- [15:30]
Alison Stewart
So, Will, let me bring you, in this context, this idea of the Jersey Devil as a sympathetic creature. What do you make of that in terms of the history of Cryptids?
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Will Rogers
It's incredibly unique, especially for the Jersey Devil itself. I think that there are a lot of people who've talked about, you know, Bigfoot in the context of conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest. You know, these are supposedly. Cryptids are creatures. They're just animals. Often they're magical in some sense. But by and large, with the Jersey Devil, if you look at film history, if you look at TV history of how the devil is used, it's usually purely a monster. It's purely, you know, a creature in the woods that it's exclusively there to chase you and eat you. And one of the fascinating things about the devil and Daisy Dirt is that it, I think, for the first time crafts a story where the Jersey Devil is a wounded figure, thereby paralleling Daisy, the protagonist, and really provides this. It brings back some of the sweetness and the care to the idea of a magical creature and the idea that even if something is other or weird or strange or scary, it itself can also be in danger or wounded. And Daisy, as Alex just laid out, is certainly a character that is in need of some healing herself. And so I feel like the Devil and Daisy Dirt is the first time that the devil has become a sympathetic sort of hero in a sense. But there are so many other layers to it, obviously than that. But the Devil and Daisy Dirt is certainly unique. The Devil is not just a capital V villain.
- [17:19]
Alison Stewart
Got a Texas says. I went to a boarding school in the Pine Barrens called Greenwich Greenway Academy. I was 12 and the legend was alive and well. During my time there, I got lost in the woods and it was sc.
- [17:30]
Will Rogers
Oh, I don't doubt it. There are stretching back a few hundred years. Most recently, most recently, I'm taking you back to 1909, but there was a spate of sightings of the Jersey. This is my childhood, 1909. Nobody can tell, but I'm actually 200 years old. But there were school closings because somebody said that they encountered the devil in the woods. And all of a sudden all these kids got to stay home and watch Whatever the 1909 equivalent of, you know, the price is right.
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Alex Dawson
So instead of Snow day, it was a Devil day.
- [18:01]
Will Rogers
It was a Devil day. You got to have a devil day.
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Alison Stewart
Alex, somebody else texted in. Can you tell us about the Pine Barrens? What is that? Someone who doesn't know.
- [18:09]
Alex Dawson
So, you know, it's interesting because I just want to mention that the. The show features two other performers. Devin Brikowski as Daisy Dirt, who is actually a Pine Barrens native, and Arlen Filas, who's the balladeer and wrote and plays some wonderful music throughout the show. So Devin could better answer this question, but it is a stretch of pinelands in New Jersey that is insistently rural and consists of just long sandy roads and tall straight trees for miles and.
- [18:52]
Dan Deanna
Miles and miles, almost from the coast of New Jersey to Philly, almost.
- [18:58]
Alex Dawson
And even driving, I think it's maybe Route 9 that might take you straight through. And even driving on like a six lane highway, you almost feel like you're on a sort of a twisting back road. I mean, it's just you feel the kind of. You feel the weight of the pines on you as you Drive through it. Yeah. It's a very evocative and atmospheric place.
- [19:24]
Alison Stewart
The Devil and Daisy Duke will be playing at under St. Mark's Theater Thursday through Saturday. Let's listen to a little bit of the music that you'll hear. Let's listen.
- [19:33]
Musical Performer
If you're feeling hungry don't you get your feelings hurt Let me tell you about a story of the Devil and Miss Daisy Dirt. It was business just as usual. The regular crowd again. But something didn't feel quite right. Maybe it was gonna rain. There was a smell coming from everywhere. It was a smell you couldn't taste. Was a smell safe for a memory that never had. I'm going to hang his antlers from my back door. Nothing escapes from me. Some hang his antlers from my back door. Nothing.
- [20:20]
Alison Stewart
So, Dan, how are you thinking about the way your puppet costume moves when you. When you hear the music? Now that we get a sense of it, what were you thinking about in terms of your movement?
- [20:33]
Dan Deanna
Well, movement came second, I want to say. First was the weight.
- [20:40]
Alison Stewart
Oh, interesting.
- [20:41]
Dan Deanna
Knowing that, like, I was going to be completely inside of this thing for an hour or more. It had to be as lightweight as possible. And then, you know, movement. There was a few different iterations. I mean, I knew that I wanted to try and do the big bird thing where my arm was through the neck and I was controlling the head. And going back to the haunt we did. I had made a very kind of budget friendly neck mechanism of plastic for all you little monster makers out there, of plastic flower pots, which I used a band saw to cut concentric rings and attached all that together with bungee cords so that I could essentially have this thing move similar to the anatomy of a horse's neck. As far as the arms went. Again, I took a cue from the Life of PI, where my arms would strap into the arms of the puppet. So I would essentially have not so much a telemetric movement, but as I moved my arms, the arms of the puppet would move. And then the legs are my own legs, just with some padding and some fur. So, again, like, this is kind of a prototype to stage situation with some adjustments happening. But, yeah, I mean, I'm not doing acrobatics on stage. It's really just kind of an atmosphere and a feel and. And always when we're building this stuff too, I mean, you know, having this, you know, the best that it could be in my mind. And a lot of times, you know, as a creative, I mean, it never really gets to that place, but you kind of have to shoot for 110% and hope that it gets somewhere near it. So, you know, we had all these different eye designs and maybe light up stuff and smoke coming from the inside of the skull and then reality hits and that stuff just doesn't make it. So we make the eyes glossy and black. Right. Like. Like a. Like a doll's eye.
- [22:27]
Alex Dawson
Right.
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Dan Deanna
As someone said before us.
- [22:29]
Alison Stewart
Does that work for you?
- [22:31]
Will Rogers
Honestly, I was trying to bite my tongue from jumping in because I'm effectively here as the audience. I have nothing to do with this show.
- [22:37]
Alison Stewart
You're just giving me. Good.
- [22:38]
Will Rogers
I just got caught up in the orbit because I'm friends with Alex Dawson. But as an audience member, the thing about the. The devil puppet itself that is so incredible is that it, it feels alive. Your movement is so sympathetic and animal like. It is so relatable and it is very listening audience. Alarming and frightening. Yes, because it's the Jersey Devil. But I have to say that there is also such a sweet core to it that I actually, we went with my daughter Zoe. She's, you know, three years old. I don't know how she's going to respond to this thing. So we sat far away. Well, within minutes of the show ending, she wanted to walk up, look at it a little more closely. And then when she finally got what I thought was her full, we walked away. And Zoe goes, why are we walking away? She wanted to go back and pet the Jersey Devil on the nose. This is, I have to say, like, you know, there are many things that make the story a standout feature, but the creature itself is really remarkable. And I think audiences out there are going to be blown away by the spookiness and the sweetness. You're going to want to see this thing up close.
- [23:46]
Alison Stewart
Well, it sounds like you didn't want to make the monster a monster.
- [23:49]
Alex Dawson
Right. But let me say also, do not bring your three year old.
- [23:54]
Will Rogers
She's a very special three year old.
- [23:56]
Alex Dawson
Unless you personally know me. It's a PG13 piece. There's no profanity and there's no gore, but dark themes, you know, just. Yeah, Dan and I talked a lot about how the puppet should move, creature suit should move. And just to echo what Will was saying and what Dan was touching on very modestly himself is, you know, Dan is a new. You know, he was a prop fabricator and taught makeup, studied with Tom Savini, but he's relatively new to puppetry. And so it's even more impressive knowing that this was a sort of a skill that he Sort of started to teach himself. But we talked a lot about it being, you know, like sort of the titular character from your favorite boy and dog book or girl and horse book. And so there's a lot of head tilting. Right. You know, sort of like, you know, and there's a lot. You know what's incredible, you know, it's funny because we were on the COVID Thank you, Mark. On the COVID of weird New Jersey this month. And this is a testament, I think, to Dan's movement because they actually very lightly put pupils into the black eyes. Right. The eyes on the puppet are dead black, and yet they're not. I mean, they convey a wealth of expression. And it has all to do with how Dan swings the head, because the expression on the puppet, you think it's changing, but it never changes. There's no little motors in there like an ET's face. And yet it's evoking the same sort of sympathy and the same sort of empathy. I think that something like ET does, which is really just incredible. I've seen it, obviously, many, many times, and I'm still. I can't really watch Dan. That's the probably biggest sort of.
- [25:46]
Dan Deanna
Because you don't want to.
- [25:48]
Alex Dawson
I can't bear to look at you. No, I'm too Busy delivering my 15,000 words to the audience. Yeah.
- [25:54]
Alison Stewart
This says, in the woods with my friend, it was the 1960s and we heard hooves and his bell never ran so fast. Couldn't quite see him, but he was like a shadow and mood fast. Only time I've been scared. That's Tom.
- [26:07]
Will Rogers
A Bell jersey. A bell.
- [26:09]
Alison Stewart
I love that.
- [26:10]
Will Rogers
I love thinking about the Jersey devil wearing like a collar from Petco.
- [26:13]
Dan Deanna
I like to think of who actually got close enough to put the bell on.
- [26:16]
Will Rogers
Yes, good point.
- [26:17]
Alex Dawson
And let me say that the play is maybe almost as well written as Tom's message.
- [26:22]
Alison Stewart
And this is the final text is, are there any plans to extend the run? It's too short just to be learning about it. Sounds amazing.
- [26:28]
Alex Dawson
So, yeah, there, I mean, we're. We've done this, we've designed this to be more of a one off and less of a thing that is done on stage in theaters, though, you know, if Broadway came knocking, we wouldn't mind a chandelier hanging over us. But we designed it to do in barns and breweries and barbecue joints. I said all the places Tom Waits might play if he was a nobody. So we are touring with this. We're doing a really cool brewery in New Jersey that's in an old barn on a farm. We're doing a great place in French town called the Mix, which is this sort of artist commune in the woods down by a creek with a bonfire. And we're hoping to take this thing to Paris, to Dublin and a tour of the deep South. So maybe Alison will share the website. I don't know. But that's the best way to sort of catch the devil because, yeah, we'll hopefully be coming to a town or a patch of pineland close to you.
- [27:27]
Alison Stewart
Well, Rogers, thank you for joining us. You can see Dan Deanna and Alex Dawson in the Devil and Daisy Duke. It'll be showing. Excuse me, Daisy Dirt. It'll be showing tonight as well as tomorrow and Saturday nights at the under St Mark's Theatre. Thank you so much for coming in.
- [27:42]
Alex Dawson
Thank you.
- [27:43]
Alison Stewart
Let's go out. A little more music from the show.
- [27:49]
Musical Performer
The water runs but you can't drink. The fire burns but there's no heat. My mother's breast has run dry. The devil's meat will probably.
- [28:32]
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- [28:59]
Dan Deanna
Let's go.
- [29:01]
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