Ventriloquists flock to Vegas in the name of entertainment, religion and Charlie McCarthyism

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, May 30, 1997 | 11:44 a.m.

You undoubtedly have certain expectations from a story about a ventriloquist convention. Some, unfortunately, cannot be met: You won't be pelted nonstop with thrown voices. No conversations will be held through glasses of water. No evil dummies will cackle maniacally from the arms of schizophrenic puppeteers.

But perhaps you're interested in some phone shtick or godly puppetry; it goes without saying that you're curious about the man stitching his lizard. You want to see something ... astounding.

"You want to see something astounding?" puppetmeister Dan Ritchard asks.

Of course! Why else come to the first-ever Vegas Ventriloquist Convention?

First, Ritchard needs a prop. As he'd pointed out just minutes before, only amateurs carry their dummies around gatherings like this, and, as he's nothing if not a seasoned pro, he doesn't have his figure -- Conrad Burdee, Free-lance Parrot -- on hand. No matter, a phone will do. Let's tag along as Ritchard exits the convention in the Imperial Palace ballroom in search of a place to vent.

He finds what he's looking for in a bar down the hall. He convinces the skeptical bartender to let him pick up the phone. Without dialing, Ritchard engages in a lively conversation with himself.

"What do you do?" asked a tiny voice that sounded, convincingly, as if it were at the other end of the line.

"I'm a ventriloquist."

"You're a ventriloquist?"

"Yes, I am."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, do you see my lips moving?"

"Well, no ..."

"Then I'm a ventriloquist."

"But I'm on a telephone!"

"That's not my problem."

"Oh, wise guy, eh?"

"Could be."

"Goodbye!" Ritchard even mimics a realistic hang-up click.

Astounding, all right. It's a gag he's used to great comic effect on, for instance, phone repairmen. And regardless of your feelings about ventriloquism, now matter how much you might like to see Lamb Chop meet the fate implied in its name, it's hard not to get caught up in Ritchard's infectious good mood.

"This," he says, heading back to the convention, "is like homecoming for people who talk to themselves."

It's early Wednesday, and ventriloquist Pete Michaels is lecturing on "Vent Basics" to maybe a third of the 350 registered conventioneers. Blame the sparse crowd on Jeff Dunham's house-packing opening show last night, which was followed by the usual post-show backslapping and boozing, a long night of shop talk and grapevine...

There's a lot of whispered chat action around the edges of the dim room. Valentine Vox, a noted ventriloquist and president of the new International Ventriloquists Association (the convention's sponsor), is working the outer chairs, shaking hands, exchanging hugs.

Sammy King -- performing now at the Aladdin! -- is nearby, remembering how, jazzed on Edgar Bergen, he'd prop his little brother on his knee as a flesh-and-blood Charlie McCarthy. He's been a ventriloquist ever since. "I wouldn't know what else to do."

"We've got everyone from the top pros to amateurs to people just starting in the business," Jeff White is saying, taking a quick break from his duties at the entrance table. The secretary-treasurer of the association, he works under Vox at the Magic and Movie Hall of Fame in O'Shea's casino.

The mild hubbub in the ballroom is the result of a year's worth of preparation, and, although it's only the second day of the five-day gathering, he says it's going splendidly.

"When you have 350 people talking to themselves, some of them getting paid for it, well, it's terrific fun."

The convention features lectures on practically every facet of ventriloquism, plus performances by such mainstays as Willie Tyler and Lester and Bob Rumba.

"The BBC is here from London," White says. "We've got people here from Japan, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Mexico..."

New Jersey! "I've made close to 300 figures (since 1966)," guesses dummy-maker Alan Semok, here to lecture on "Maintaining and Repainting Your Hard-Face Figure." He's a part-time vent who also acts and does voiceover work ("I'm the voice of the Three Stooges in some upcoming projects").

Dummies, he explains, "run the gamut from really simple to very intricate. Charlie McCarthy basically had a moving mouth. But you have them with their tongues sticking out, their eyes crossing, their eyebrows going, everything moving but the bowels."

You might figure ventriloquism to be a dying art, what with the demise of the TV variety show. Semok certainly didn't think it was growing...

"Until I put up a website two years ago. I was quite surprised by the number of responses. And the number of people who contacted me and had me build dummies. It floored me! There's ventriloquists out there."

Say you're in Edmonton, Alberta, and, feeling the need for a little spiritual sustenance, you drop by Highland Baptist Church one Sunday. A few hymns, a sermon ... time for some routine church announcements. Why are they being delivered by that felt dog?

Oh, that's just Digger. "I use my ventriloquism in church quite often," says the church's associate pastor, Sheila Loosley, who happens to be the sister of Valentine Vox. "We have wonderful news to tell people. Why shouldn't it be told in a fun, creative, innovative way?"

Baptists aren't exactly considered one of the looser, more freewheeling, puppet-embracing churches around; how does Digger go over? "Very well," Loosley says. The kids love it, of course, and "I have adults coming up all the time asking, 'When's Digger coming back?'"

Don't look for him at the convention; although she's been puppeteering since 1954, Loosley knows she's no match for the talent in the room. "(Vox) asked me to bring Digger, and I said, 'Noooooo...'"

For much of Michaels' presentation, this guy named Roger has been sitting in the audience, sewing a flap to the head of a distinctly Kermit-like puppet, his attention focused on his needlework no matter how interesting Michaels' insight into cordless mikes and dummy-wear may have been.

"This is Leonard the Lizard," says Roger the CPA. "He's a frilled lizard from down in Australia, one of those lizards that run on water." Leonard, disappointingly, doesn't speak for himself.

Roger is up from Rio Linda, Calif., where he's bored stiff by his accounting job. He does puppetry on the side, kids functions and so on. "I'm here because I want to phase out accounting and phase in ventriloquism."

What? Give up the columnar kicks and steady paycheck of accounting for the chancier existence of talking to a large green sock on your fist?

In a heartbeat, Roger says. "Ventriloquism is unreal. It lets your imagination free." Words seem to fail him at that point, and still Leonard doesn't say anything.

People are always asking Stevo Schuling why he doesn't go professional with his dummy, Theo.

"It's because I don't want to make my hobby my work," says the orthopedic surgeon from Germany. "And that's when my dummy says, 'That's why he's not a gynecologist.'" He didn't mimic a rim shot, but he probably could have.

On his vest Schuling wears an East German military medal of some sort, picked up cheap after the Berlin Wall came down. In light of the ballroom full of people behind him who want nothing more than than to make their livings by carrying on both halves of a conversation with inanimate objects, the medal's inscription has a sort of screwball irony.

"To live a socialist life," it reads, "requires a socialist way of working." If only Karl Marx had met Leonard the Lizard...

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