As part of its 2025 Spring Puppet Forum Series, the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry is pleased to host Funny Boy: The Life of Richard Hunt, a Puppet Forum with Jessica Max Stein, on Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at 7 p.m. at the Ballard Institute Theater, located at 1 Royce Circle in Downtown Storrs. This forum will also be broadcast via Ballard Institute Facebook Live (facebook.com/BallardInstitute).
Join us on Wednesday, March 5 with author Jessica Max Stein to look at the life of Richard Hunt, the dynamic, irreverent, and spirited puppeteer who played an essential role in the success of the Muppets. Hunt joined the Muppets in 1970 at the age of 18, and developed such essential puppet characters as Scooter, Janice, Beaker, and Sweetums, appearing on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and in multiple Muppet movies. Equally important, Stein’s book explains in a fascinating manner how this gay American artist thrived as a performer and human being in the late-twentieth-century age of AIDS.
Jessica Max Stein writes vivid, novelistic history that brings the past to life. Most recently, she is the author of Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography (Rutgers University Press, 2024). She writes frequently for New York newspaper The Indypendent, and her writing has received awards from Poets and Writers Magazine, the Independent Press Association, and the Biographers International Organization, as well as being published widely. She teaches writing and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Admission to this event is free (donations greatly appreciated!), and refreshments will be served. For more information or if you require accommodation to attend a forum, please contact Ballard Institute staff at 860.486.8580 or bimp@uconn.edu.