It’s gotta be tough being a pro-Halloween parent these days. There’s no (good) trick-or-treating anymore. The Zombie Pub Crawl isn’t exactly family-friendly. The Haunted Basement looks too darn scary—or, as the case may be, not scary enough. And it’s not like you could have taken the kiddos to that big Marilyn Manson/Rob Zombie show in Mankato last week.
Jayme Halbritter
So what’s a spook-centric Mummy and Daddy to do? Go see Frankenweinie again?
Please.
You’re gonna take the kids to Hidden Falls Regional Park this weekend for BareBones Productions’s 19th Annual Halloween Outdoor Puppet Extravaganza. It’s like a Tim Burton circus. Your rugrats get to don costumes and go marvel at giant puppets, stiltwalkers, aerialists, fire-breathers, and a 20-piece live orchestra. You get to pat yourself on the back for exposing your kids to culture via a community-driven, feel-good arts organization. (BareBones, in a charming bit of nonprofit-speek, considers itself “a kaleidoscope of feeling, creating flashes of incoherent joy, beauty, and recollection.” How can you not support that?)
Plus, this year’s pageant features an additional educational component: it promises to tell the story of the Big Bang—that ol’ bromide of theoretical physics positing that all of existence exploded from a grapefruit-sized concentration of gas. Entitled “Chicka-BOOM!,” this year’s BareBones production tackles the mystery of reality itself: energy and time. Matter and space. Stardust and fire. All filtered, of course, through a vaguely pagan menagerie of skeletons, friendly worms, and jugglers.
If you at all dig the Mayday Parade, you will love this.
“Chica-BOOM!”
Saturdays and Sundays in October, starting October 20
7 p.m. | Pay-as-you-can
Hidden Falls Regional Park, Magoffin Avenue entrance,
1305 Mississippi River Blvd. S., St. Paul
barebonespuppets.org
