4. How to Be a Puppetry Artist

Summary

Podcast Summary: How to Be Anything

Host: Emily McCrary
Episode 4: How to Be a Puppetry Artist
Release Date: July 30, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the life and career of Heidi Rugg, a professional puppetry artist. Host Emily McCrary guides listeners through Heidi’s unconventional journey: from childhood passions and pivotal college moments to years spent creating, performing, and advocating for the art of puppetry. The conversation is rich with insights about building a multifaceted art practice, confronting creative doubts, and the community behind puppetry. This is a nuanced portrait of an artist who quietly invents her own work, continually expanding the boundaries and impact of her medium.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Finding Puppetry: An Unexpected Path

• Heidi discovered puppetry as a way to combine diverse interests—art, building, storytelling—finding a unique and fulfilling calling she hadn’t anticipated.
  • Heidi Rugg [01:34]:
    “If I did puppet shows, it would combine together all these interests I have that don’t seem connected. But if I put them in this box called puppetry, they can all be happy and coexist here.”
• The inclusive, interdisciplinary nature of puppetry is a home for “majoring in everything.”

2. Early Artistic Influences and Challenges

• Family support was key; visits to her great aunt’s painting studio and private art lessons fueled her imagination.
  • Heidi Rugg [02:24]:
    “My family was actually really supportive ... I just like working with all the materials.”
• But institutional skepticism was real—her high school counselor advised against pursuing art:
  • Heidi Rugg [03:23]:
    “I feel like we don’t realize until much later that the grownups around us are just people who are bumbling around. We’re all just kind of bumbling around, doing our best.”

3. Discovering Performance: Overcoming Stage Fright

• Heidi’s first puppet, an Anne Frank marionette for a fifth-grade book report, became a tool to conquer anxiety about public speaking.
  • Emily McCrary [03:03]:
    “[She] realized her classmates were looking at the puppet and not at her. Heidi finally felt comfortable in front of an audience.”

4. Building a Career: From College to the Stage

• Initially studying sociology, Heidi switched to art at VCU, finding her “people” and creative community.
  • Heidi Rugg [04:14]:
    “It was nice to be around other weirdness. And that normalized my weirdness…”
• Her first show, “Little Red and the Gingerbread Man,” was a solo, highly interactive performance that’s still in her repertoire.
  • Heidi Rugg [05:05]:
    “It’s a mishmash of Little Red Riding Hood and the Gingerbread Man… I started doing my first live performances in December of 1997.”

5. The Reality of Puppetry Work

• Heidi wears many hats: writing, designing, building, performing, and teaching.
• Her work is itinerant—often performing for children in venues ranging from schools to hospitals, with up to 100 shows a year pre-pandemic.
  • Emily McCrary [05:55]:
    “Heidi does it all, the whole process, from start to finish. She writes her shows, builds the sets and puppets, and performs them.”
• The work is demanding and unpredictable, involving “shifting between different work modes.”
  • Heidi Rugg [07:05]:
    “You’re writing, you’re building, you’re designing, you’re throwing your hands up in frustration… It really took me a long time to figure out... it takes time.”

6. Getting Comfortable with Creative Failure

• Heidi stresses the importance of enduring beginner’s discomfort and resisting perfectionism intensified by social media’s public eye.
  • Heidi Rugg [08:13]:
    “There’s this point at which, when you’re trying to make things where you recognize that your work sucks... it’s okay to be bad. Everyone has to go through that hard space before they can do their work.”

7. Themes and Storytelling

• Childhood fascination with nature (sparked by encyclopedias) led to “Galapagos George,” a show with strong environmental themes, inspired by the story of the last Pinta Island tortoise.
  • Heidi Rugg [10:06]:
    “…sometimes you have an idea and it just... will not leave you alone. You know, it, like, keeps pulling on your shirt and waking you up.”
• Transitioned from classic fairy tales to original, values-driven work.

8. Teaching About Puppets: Process and Awareness

• Many children’s first exposure to live puppetry is through Heidi’s shows, though media like Sesame Street obscure the fact that they are watching puppets.
  • Heidi Rugg [13:07]:
    “I know for many, in many communities, I will be the first exposure to live puppetry. They’ll have seen puppets on TV… but they haven’t maybe put together that they're puppets — they’re just like, it’s Elmo.”
• The boundaries between puppetry, robotics, and digital performance (e.g., “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings”) are increasingly blurred.
  • Heidi Rugg [14:59]:
    “I would be like, yeah, it’s like digital puppetry. So it’s weird, but technically puppets...”

9. Process and Participation

• At craft fairs and public events, Heidi notices children’s instinctual draw to puppets as objects to play with—evidence of puppetry’s accessibility.
  • Heidi Rugg [18:25]:
    “Children are always way more enthusiastic and much bolder about coming up to you… when you have puppets just out, kids really see that as an invitation.”
• She emphasizes the value of understanding and teaching how things are made, and the time investment of artmaking.

10. What’s in a Name: Puppetry Artist vs. Puppeteer

• “Puppetry artist” best reflects the self-sufficiency and creative ambition behind Heidi’s practice:
  • Heidi Rugg [20:14]:
    “People have assumptions about what [puppeteer] means. And so I started using the term puppetry artist… I write and develop stories. I create worlds.”

11. The State and Future of Puppetry

• Despite perceptions of decline, the field remains strong—institutional programs may wane, but community learning and global connection (especially post-2020) are robust.
  • Heidi Rugg [21:08]:
    “People will be like, oh, puppetry, it’s really too bad it’s a dying art form… But there are many opportunities for learning in less traditional ways for people who are a little bold and willing to sort of go off-roading a bit.”
• Puppeteers are often eager to share knowledge, contrasting with more secretive artistic communities.
  • Heidi Rugg [22:35]:
    “Puppeteers are more like, yes, come, come and see behind… I’ll bring you backstage and you can see.”

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On artistic discovery and synthesis
  Heidi Rugg [01:34]: “Naturally, as a puppeteer you are really able to ‘major in everything,’ so to speak.”
• On creative frustration and process
  Heidi Rugg [07:05]: “You’re throwing your hands up in frustration, and you just need to go walk the dog… it takes time.”
• On failure and learning
  Heidi Rugg [08:13]: “There’s this point at which... your work sucks… But it’s okay to be bad. Everyone has to go through that hard space before they can do their work.”
• On children and puppetry
  Heidi Rugg [18:25]: “Children are always way more enthusiastic... they see this stuff out, and when it’s out, like when you have puppets just out, kids really see that as an invitation.”
• On human imagination
  Heidi Rugg [22:35]: “This is a really human thing, you know, this puppet thing that we do.”
• On community and resilience
  Heidi Rugg [22:10]: “The puppetry community as a whole got better connected in 2020 because we were all sitting around going, what do we do?”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:34] — Heidi’s “aha moment” choosing puppetry
• [03:03] — Childhood puppetry as a solution for stage fright
• [04:14] — The creative atmosphere at VCU and first solo shows
• [07:05] — Realities and rhythms of a puppetry artist’s day
• [08:13] — Creative self-doubt and the importance of allowing failure
• [10:06] — The genesis of “Galapagos George” and making environmentally themed art
• [12:32] — Are children today still familiar with puppets?
• [13:45] — Media confusion: Robots, digital characters, and what counts as a puppet
• [18:25] — Kids and the instinctual playfulness with puppets at public events
• [20:14] — The distinction between “puppeteer” and “puppetry artist”
• [21:08] — State and future of puppetry as a field; global connections

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Final Thoughts

The episode paints an intimate picture of what it means to forge a career out of an art form that combines play, performance, craftsmanship, and storytelling. Heidi Rugg emerges as both an artist and an advocate, deeply aware of the power of puppetry to educate, connect, and delight audiences of all ages. The discussion illuminates both the joy and labor of creative work, and underscores puppetry’s ongoing, deeply human relevance.

Transcript

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[Emily McCrary]

In the early 1990s, Heidi Rugg was a student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Like many college students, she was wondering what life would look like after school. Heidi's chief concern was how she might make a career out of being an artist. One afternoon, Heidi was taking a walk in the fan, an old neighborhood in the central part of the city. It's all row homes and big trees and shaded sidewalks. It's really idyllic. Some blocks still have the old turn of the century street lamps.

[Heidi Rugg]

It was fall. The leaves were really yellow that day, very color. Remembering the sky was really blue. But I was just walking down the street and I suddenly had the thought if I did puppet shows, it would combine together all these interests that I have that don't seem connected. But if I put them in this box called puppetry, they can all be happy and coexist here. Naturally, as a puppeteer you are really able to major in everything, so to speak. You have to do work two dimensionally, three dimensionally, create stories. You get to work with a whole bunch of different materials.

[Emily McCrary]

This is how to Be Anything. The podcast about people with unusual jobs. I'm Emily McCrary.

[Interviewer/Host]

Had you always wanted to be an artist?

[Heidi Rugg]

I'd always been doing art. I could even go way back when I was about 10 and I had built puppets for a whole bunch of book reports that I did that year. But working and I had drawn cartoon characters and my family was actually really supportive, which was nice. I had a great aunt who was a painter in northwestern Ohio and so in the summers I would sometimes go hang out with her and she would let me play with her oil paints. Later I had requested from my family to have art classes because the school I was in didn't have the best arts program. So I was doing private lessons in a studio. But I just like working with all the materials.

[Emily McCrary]

Heidi made her first puppet in the fifth grade. Students were required to give book reports in front of the class. And for hers, on the Diary of a Young Girl, she made a marionette of Anne Frank. When she realized her classmates were looking at the puppet and not at her, Heidi finally felt comfortable in front of an audience.

[Heidi Rugg]

But, you know, not everyone is necessarily supportive of a young person's decision to journey into arts. When I was in high school, my high school guidance counselor, I went to their office and I said. And they said, you know, what are you thinking about doing for the future? And I was like, I really like art. They said, well, you have really good grades, and you should make a different choice. And it's such a pivotal time period when you're in that, like, 17, and you're kind of like grownups in your life are supposed to be these trusted people who know things. I feel like we don't realize until much later that the grownups around us are just people who are bumbling around. We're all just kind of bumbling around, doing our best.

[Emily McCrary]

That's why when Heidi arrived at vcu, she planned to study something like sociology. But after just one semester, she ditched the humanities program for the arts school.

[Heidi Rugg]

So being at VCU and being surrounded by so many people who were also trying to, like, find their thing, and there was such an arts vibe at vcu, I think that's really what made me feel like, oh, look at all these other people, like, finding my people, Right? Cause in my high school, the fact that I was doing art stuff was kind of weird. And so it was nice to be around other weirdness. And that normalized my weirdness and allowed me to go down pathways.

[Emily McCrary]

Four years after her decision to pursue puppetry, Heidi was producing her own shows. The first was called Little Red and the Gingerbread Man. It's one she still performs today. It's a solo show. She manipulates all the puppets, does all the voices, and manages the audience. There's suspense. There's a chase through the woods. There's a lot of dramatic irony. I've seen it. Kids go nuts for this show.

[Heidi Rugg]

It's a mishmash of Little Red Riding Hood and the Gingerbread Man. It was a lot of fun to develop, and I was able to sort of work out some, we'll call them, puppetry tricks that you can do especially with younger audiences, sort of peek a boo puppetry technique that's very interactive. So I started doing my first live performances in December of 1997. Prior to that, I had been doing building for quite a long time. But I was really wanting to get into the performing side of things, which is odd because if you look at my background, you will see that I have no performing arts background. But. But puppetry is very accessible. Some people come in through, like, the side door. I like to build puppets, or I like to build sets and stages, or I have these stories I want to share, and then you have to figure out how to make that work.

[Emily McCrary]

In the 28 years since Little Red, Heidi's developed 10 different shows and performed thousands of times. Every year, she books about 100 performances, though Covid slowed her down a bit. She's played all over the country, at the Smithsonian Discovery theater in Washington, D.C. the Detroit Institute of Art and the center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, theaters and libraries and schools. She's performed for kids at the Children's Hospital in Richmond, where she once told me, seeing her show might be the last thing these kids ever do with their families. Mostly her audiences are young, like preschoolers or elementary school kids, though she does occasionally put on short shows for adults at Puppet Slams. Heidi also facilitates puppet workshops for teenagers from time to time. For Heidi, there's no such thing as a typical workday. One day she's loading up a van at 4am to make the drive to Northern Virginia for a morning performance, and the next she's building puppets in her studio at home or drafting the next show. She can spend days at a time on the road, half remembering where she is at any given moment. And that's the thing. Heidi does it all, the whole process, from start to finish. She writes her shows, builds the sets and puppets, and performs them.

[Heidi Rugg]

The complicated days are like the studio build days. It's complicated because you're doing so many different things. I feel like a lot of puppetry artists. It tends to be, we'll call it, I'll say, a kind of neurodivergent bunch. I think you really need that too, because there's so much happening. So there's a lot of shifting between different work modes. You know, you're writing, you're building, you're designing, you're throwing your hands up in frustration, and you just need to go walk the dog, you know, and finding those rhythms. It really took me a long time to figure out, hey, I used to get so frustrated with things taking so much time, but as I've gotten older, I just kind of don't care. I'm like, it's just. It takes time. The reality is that whenever you start doing something new, you're going to have a period when you're bad at it. And I feel like that's a big problem right now. For a lot of more creative career paths, there's not necessarily an opportunity for people to fail with grace and fail.

[Interviewer/Host]

Safely because it's so public. Because art now is more of a. Because of social media, it's more public.

[Heidi Rugg]

I think that's part of it. And I also think our way of analyzing visual things, we're so sophisticated now. We have such sophisticated sensibilities from being in the heavy media environment that there's this point at which, when you're trying to make things where you recognize that your work sucks. Like it is not living up to your aesthetic, personal expectations. Like, you picture one thing in your head, but it is not the thing that you are making. And it really takes a while to reach an equilibrium between those two points where suddenly the things you're making actually look more like the things that you were imagining in your head. I worry sometimes about people sometimes stepping out of certain creative pathways because they're like, oh, I suck. I can't do this thing when they're just not pushing through that. It's okay to be bad. Everyone has to go through that hard space before they can do their work. And when I was starting out with this, honestly, you just needed to have something you wanted to share and like a business card, and you were good.

[Emily McCrary]

As a child, Heidi loved the World Book encyclopedias, those big 22 volume hardback sets that basically occupied an entire bookshelf.

[Heidi Rugg]

So the World Book Encyclopedia said, if you open up a and you find the animal section, it'll show you pictures of all these ecosystems. And when I was young, I would draw them like this is what I wanted to draw and sketch.

[Emily McCrary]

One of Heidi's favorite stories was about Lonesome George, the last living Pita island giant tortoise. The giant tortoises on the island in the Galapagos were thought to be extinct due to human activity until 1971, when a scientist spotted George. In 1998, Heidi happened upon the same World Book entry she had read as a child. This sad little story about a turtle who was the last of his kind.

[Heidi Rugg]

When I got the idea to do that, it was a really, really strong, you know, kind of like when I was walking through the fan and sky was blue and there were leaves and I was like, puppets. Let's just say Google wasn't really doing their Google thing yet, and people didn't have smartphones. I mean, I had to go to the Library of Congress to do research. I was like, I really want to do a show about this. But then, you know, you do that internal argument with yourself that you do where part of you is like, who's going to want to book a show about, like, a tortoise who's the last of his species. That just sounds depressing and sad. But, like, sometimes you have an idea and it just. It will not leave you alone. You know, it, like, keeps pulling on your shirt and waking you up.

[Emily McCrary]

Heidi started performing her show galapagos George in 2001. Her George grows up among lizards, goats, sea lions and birds. And, like, the real one is taken to nearby Santa Cruz island to live in safety among other tortoises. It's bittersweet. But in the end, George isn't so lonely anymore.

[Heidi Rugg]

I really needed to build up the repertoire and the body of work and a better understanding of, like, the stories I wanted to tell. Galapagos George was sort of this entryway into doing work that has these really deep environmental themes. It wasn't something I was being really intentional about. When you kind of more fully understand yourself and the kind of work you want to be doing and the kind of work that best connects with your own personal values, you really can more fully step into that sort of, like, identity as an artist. Like, it's not like I, you know, just do, like, puppet shows. You could take any fairy tale and go do puppet shows, and that would be fine. But if you're trying to create your own work, it's a bigger lift to try and come up with your own stories. They're like these folk art traditions that I feel like a lot more accessible. And puppetry sort of has this weird relationship with being. There's a folk art component, especially for the people who are doing live shows that are their own work, that kind of thing. But then you have the Sesame street and these more commercialized puppetry enterprises. And I think that sometimes people get caught up in that more commercialized aspect of puppetry arts.

[Interviewer/Host]

Are children today familiar with puppets?

[Emily McCrary]

Are you their first exposure to puppets?

[Heidi Rugg]

Often, it's hard to say also because sometimes I'll survey an audience, especially if it's a smaller crowd. And you, you know, you want to kind of, who's here? Who showed up at the library today, you know, and you're like, who here has seen a puppet show? Before, and you have them raise their hand and you're like, who here? This is their first time. Raise your hand. Sing a puppet show. And everyone will raise their hand. And then I make a joke, and I'm like, you know, who likes to raise their hands? You know? So, yeah, it's. This is not scientific data. This is highly anecdotal.

[Interviewer/Host]

You're not running Gallup polls on no puppet consumption.

[Heidi Rugg]

I wish I could gather that granular level of data because that would be fun to have. I know for many, in many communities, I will be the first exposure to live puppetry. They'll have seen puppets on tv. Perhaps they might not know they were seeing puppets on tv. I think there's a little bit of confusion now because of animation, right? The kids know that they're seeing things that aren't, like real animals or whatever, but they haven't maybe put together that they're puppets because they don't see the people manipulating the puppets. They're just like, it's Elmo. They don't go, it's a puppet.

[Emily McCrary]

Many people like me may not realize they see puppets, like, all the time.

[Heidi Rugg]

And I ask people, I'm like, where have you seen puppets? Before they start to raise their hands, they're like Sesame street or the Muppets. And they'll start naming lots of television things. And it takes, like, a really long time to. It feels to me to get to Star wars, man. There's a lot of puppets in Star Wars. And then I have to explain where the puppets are in some of these things, because they don't understand that BB8, the little robot, is a puppet. They're like, it's a robot. I'm like, well, it's a puppet of a robot. Yeah, but it's a puppet.

[Interviewer/Host]

A puppet means that someone. So the definition would be that there's a person manipulating something and the audience.

[Heidi Rugg]

Doesn'T see that person. Right. You know, there's some interesting sort of technological advances that have happened. So in Lord of the Rings, the Gollum character. Oh, why am I blanking on the man's name? They take little input, electrode thingies. I don't know what they're called. And they put them all over this person, this amazing actor whose name I am blanking on.

[Emily McCrary]

The actor she's thinking of is named Andy Serkis. I didn't know either. I had to look it up.

[Heidi Rugg]

And when you see the behind the scenes for that, you could have debates all day long, like, is this puppetry? And I would be like, yeah, it's like digital puppetry. So it's weird, but technically puppets, because if it's done really well, like especially the stuff that you see in television and movies, you don't know that it's puppets. It's just there. But. But when you see them live, especially live in performances where you see the performers, things like Lion King, War Horse, Avenue Hue, you always see the people. The people are there, they're present. And then it's more easier to be aware. Like, yes, these are puppets. They are being controlled by people. We see what is happening. Which I, as a process junkie, I find that exciting. Like I like to see. I totally want to go peek behind the curtain and see behind what's the machine that's making all this work. Can I pull this lever? You know.

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[Emily McCrary]

One weekend last fall, I visited Heidi while she exhibited puppets at a local craft show. The event was on a high school, and a group of kids from the robotics team zeroed in on Heidi's table. And one of them, a boy of about 17, picked up a hand puppet and immediately staged his own sketch comedy. Apparently, one of the puppets looked just like his dad. This group of teenage boys, they were all about those hand puppets.

[Heidi Rugg]

I finished my test.

[Teenage Boy]

Hold up. Doing sat. Skip. I opened it. Or you know, you're like, my dad's on the couch right now. Sit down. We need to talk. Thinking about 100 things like, oh, what did he figure out this time? You know, he figured something out, but what was it? You took SAT today.

[Heidi Rugg]

I did take.

[Teenage Boy]

The SAT today, dad. How did you do? No, I did okay. I don't think I did bad. You know, your cousin all the way in India never took the sat, but he did better than you. What do you bring to my cousin? We didn't even take the sat. Don't talk back to me. I know more than you. When you were in kindergarten, I had two businesses. My right foot was starting another business.

[Interviewer/Host]

Do people know what to do with a puppet?

[Heidi Rugg]

Sometimes? Some types of puppets, I mean, hand puppets especially, people tend to be. They're like, oh, I put my hand in it, you know? But they might not know the nuances or realize that they have to think about, you know, moving their lower hand, the lower part, your thumb, to move the lower jaw of the puppet, rather than making the whole puppet mouth flap open. Children are always way more enthusiastic and much bolder about coming up to you. They see this stuff out, and when it's out, like when you have puppets just out, kids really see that as an invitation. They're like, oh, it's out. It's like a toy. I can play with it. Right now, I really am a process junkie, right? And so I just really enjoy sharing about the process of the art form. I feel like it's not really well understood the more of us out there who can be talking about how things are actually made. So oftentimes I have to explain to kids, where'd you get the puppets? And I'm like, I made them. And they can't comprehend. They're like, you made it. Like, you didn't go to, like, you know, target and pick up a puppet. Like, no, no, I made this. I think people have a disconnect about where things come, and that disconnect is continuing to get bigger and bigger. So I just. I just. I don't know. I feel like it's really, really important. People understand where things come from, and they understand the time involved in art making. And for. For multiple reasons. You know, I also think that there's, like, an entry point. Like, puppetry is super accessible, except that you have to maybe have way more space than you think you need and way more materials than you think you need and way more time than you think you need to actually get anything done.

[Interviewer/Host]

You've made the distinction between being a puppeteer versus being a puppetry artist. What's the difference for you?

[Heidi Rugg]

For many years, I did use the term puppeteer. People are like, what do you do? And I'm like, I'm a puppeteer. And people have assumptions about what that means. And so I started using the term puppetry artist. For me, it means, sure, I'm a puppeteer, but I also do all the other things. You know, I write and I develop stories. I create worlds and take them into spaces and have stories that I feel are important to me and I feel like are perhaps timely and sort of part of some zeitgeisty thing with the communities that you're interacting with.

[Emily McCrary]

Heidi's developing two shows right now. One of them is the Girl who Cried Dragon, which is about a little girl whose sheep are being carried away by a fiery beast, but they're really, really is a dragon, only no one believes her. This new show, as you could probably imagine, is about our changing climate.

[Interviewer/Host]

Is it a shrinking field, a growing field?

[Heidi Rugg]

I get that question. Sometimes people will say different things. Some people will be like, oh, puppetry, it's really too bad it's a dying art form. I hear that a lot, you know, and it's disheartening when you hear things like, West Virginia University used to have a puppetry art school kind of degree program, and they've cut it. So there are limited opportunities for that kind of learning, like within an institutional setting. But there, there are many opportunities for learning in less traditional ways for people who are a little bold and willing to sort of go off roading a bit. If you are persistent, sometimes you can find somebody who is willing to, to work with you or take you on or let you sleep in your guest bedroom for six months while you, like, work on something together. The puppetry community as a whole got better connected in 2020 because we were all sitting around going, what do we do? And so then we were all on zoom and suddenly we were having these conversations and suddenly the guild, which is the national capital puppetry guild that I'm part of, went from having about 40 to 50 members to having 250 members on five continents. It was amazing and tremendous. Being forced to stop was really explosive for specifically the puppetry arts community. And I think a lot of communities in general figured out ways of coming together and supporting one another. I've definitely benefited from the generosity of so many puppeteers. Puppeteers love to share how their stuff works. It's very much not at all like the magic community, which is all happy to share with other people, but you have to already belong to their group and then they will share with you. Whereas puppeteers are more like, yes, come, come and see behind you want to see backstage. Like, just wait for enough people to clear out from the space. And yes, I'll bring you backstage and you can see. But it's certainly persistent. It's been around forever. It's probably one of the first ways people did theater. Somebody picked up something and they were like, pretended it was something for a moment that was like this thing. They'll pick up a stick that's oddly shaped and they pretended it was a horse that was. I don't know whenever that happens. Like, that was a moment in human evolution that other animals, to my knowledge, have not done. I don't see, like, I've seen gorillas holding baby dolls, but I haven't seen evidence of other creatures picking up objects and looking at them and imagining they were something that they were not. So this is a really human thing, you know, this puppet thing that we do.

[Emily McCrary]

How to Be Anything is created and written by me, Emily McCreary. Lily I. Johnson is our producer and Kaden Boffman is our editor. Visual design by Nika Simovich Fisher. At Labud, you can see pictures of Heidi and her puppets and learn more about our other guests on our substack howtobeanything.com follow us on Instagram at How to Be Anything. And if there's a job you want us to feature, let us [e-mail].

[Heidi Rugg]

Is.

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