Whatever happened to ... the Wappadoodles?

VIRGINIA BEACH

The Wappadoodles, and the woman who for 30 years has made the puppets come alive, are still gigging.

It's just harder to find them now that Alma Beisel has moved into her retirement apartment.

When Beisel arrived at the Westminster-Canterbury complex this spring, she brought many of her fanciful puppets, such as Chipper the Chimpanzee, Felecia de Lard and Percival the Dragon.

One thing that didn't happen was the promised forward on her telephone listing. So when Wappadoodle fans tried to book a birthday party, they got a simple "This number has been disconnected."

They figured the 72-year-old had moved away, or maybe moved on.

"They started calling my friends, asking, 'Did she pass away?' " Beisel said. The friends would reassure them and dole out her new number (757-496-1269).

Beisel figures she's done 5,500 shows - including Harborfests, First Night celebrations, backyard parties and school assemblies.

She took up her puppetry career at 42, after a children's theater teacher in California suggested she try the art. It's been a solo act for years.

"Everybody quit me," she said, laughing.

Turns out puppeteering is physically challenging work.

"We did over 1,000 shows on our knees," she said.

Holding scripts and puppets high in the air took its toll. She began getting vertigo and a doctor ordered her to save her spine by sitting on a stool behind her vintage stage.

These days, she works without a script and has a remote-control foot pedal to keep things going while she changes characters behind the curtain.

Beisel created some new puppets for the senior crowd at her new home: "Dot Com" is a hard-of-hearing old lady, she said, who met her boyfriend, WWW, at Westminster.

There's much less space in the new apartment for her puppets, so Beisel has boxed up some special shows and put them into storage. Percival the large dragon may be downsized into one of the several smaller versions she made for a different skit. She said she'll sell or donate many of her nearly 300 puppets and hopes to get down to just over a dozen of the essential shows to keep at the ready in her apartment.

Beisel is living in a retirement community, but she isn't getting out of show business. Children still give her so much joy, she said. And she wants to teach her craft to the blind and call the group "The Seeing Hands."

"Blind people can do puppets," she said. "They know where their hands are. They can act with their hands and their voices."

The Wappadoodles' next public gig, she said, is 10:30 a.m. July 24 at the Van Wyck branch library in Norfolk. The following month she'll be at a library in Virginia Beach. There are a slew of private parties in between.

"Puppeteers don't retire," she said, quoting a trade joke. "They just hire someone to hold their arms up."

Tony Germanotta, (757) 222-5113, tony.germanotta@pilotonline.com