Punk Rock Pajama Party
Campbell Hotel Event Center
October 1, 2026
Outside of being obsessed with The Muppet Show and the subsequent movies as a kid and young adult, puppets didn’t factor into my grown-up life at all until I found myself (long story) at the 2023 New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival, an international extravaganza that brought the best of the best, and in some cases the best of the worst.
Just like at most punk/DIY shows, you go to something like that hoping that you’ll see something good enough to validate the years you’ve dedicated to showing up to cramped basements, shitty bars, filthy living rooms, unheated/un-air-conditioned warehouses, park shelters, and mosquito-filled backyards. Most of the time what you get is okay, not even terrible enough to be exceptional. But when you find something inspiring, it makes all the mediocrity and disappointment disappear and restores your faith in the power of underground art.
Puppet folk are different. They’re like theatre kids, only dirtier and hornier. I’ve wanted to bring some of that weird-ass puppet people energy to Tulsa, because quite frankly, we need more people who don’t give any fucks. Tulsa has the habit of taking itself too seriously. So earlier this year, when I saw that the indie musician Quintron and the puppeteer Miss Pussycat—who’ve been performing for more than 30 years—were booking a tour together, I decided to reach out to them and ask if Tulsa could be a possible tour stop.
We made contact, tentative plans were made for their first-ever stop here, pay rates and venue options were discussed, and then I became completely consumed by my non-profit program, Girls Rock Camp Tulsa, and sort of forgot about it. Lucky for us, Rita D’LaVane of Ghoul Friends Cabaret picked up the task, and the Punk Rock Pajama Party was a go, complete with opening act Kater-Tot, a Kansas City-based burlesque performer with a filthy and intentionally non-sexy Mary Poppins act that recently had an audience at Theatre Tulsa Studios not knowing what to do with themselves.
On the night of the show, I dressed up in my finest “Eve Babitz lounging kimono and silky pajamas” drag and met up with my friends at the door of the Campbell Hotel Event Center. The amount of sensory overload around us indicated that we were in the presence of organized chaos. Balloons in primary colors floated above the chairs they were tied to. Local vendors sold giant ant earrings, candles and soaps, and other homemade crafts. We found ourselves some seats, on each of which was a colorful gift bag containing hand-puppet-making supplies, a teensy multi-color pen, and a pink bubble wand.
Unfortunately, we missed seeing Little Miss MG perform, which is a tragedy, because she always delivers. But we got there in time for Kater-Tot’s Mary Poppins act, which felt as fresh as the first time I’d seen it. I wondered if the Gen Z folks in the crowd had any idea why it was so funny that this lady in an Edwardian dress with an umbrella was drinking, drugging, and shaking her pastie-covered tits at the audience. For me, freed from the shock of newness, I could better appreciate details I’d missed before. I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll just say there’s a well-placed British flag where I’ve never seen a British flag before. In Kater-Tot’s second act, “Roommates,” she was both Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street, which, needless to say, was very funny and very gay.
The night’s next performer, working under the moniker What the Felt, brought a more traditional puppet show act that utilized the “wall” version of a puppet stage as opposed to the mini theater type we’d see later with Quintron and Miss Pussycat. What the Felt did some political satire, a froggy dance number (by that I mean a frog puppet sang and danced), and an inchworm tightrope-walking act for the grand finale. Everything except for the political satire could have been performed at a kid’s birthday party without any side eye from a wary parent.
While trying to put away his puppets, What the Felt accidentally knocked over his wall, creating a loud BOOM in the quiet space. In true Tulsa punk show tradition, I started a round of applause to break the awkward silence and also to celebrate that we are flawed humans and things falling apart is the nature of live performances. Nothing is worse than awkwardly having to recover from a mistake as an audience silently stares you into a dissociative state.
After a short intermission and a lot of anticipation about the glitter-covered puppet theater and mad scientist equipment set up around Quintron’s keyboard, he and Miss Pussycat requested the bright lights be lowered and began to play. Quintron sat behind his keyboard, which had a slide guitar attached to the top and a spinning tin can device sitting on a green-lit monitor that looked straight out of WarGames. The spinning tin can, I later discovered, is his own musical innovation; the “drum buddy” has been purchased by the likes of Nels Cline and Fred Armisen. It’s produced using a century-old cypress wood called “Louisiana Gold,” with a special local version created from wood collected from Miss Pussycat’s family’s property in Oklahoma.
Quintron, Miss Pussycat, and friends | photos by Kris Rose
Their sound is part ‘90s indie/punk, part New Orleans zydeco dance music. Miss Pussycat shakes her maracas while yell-singing along to Quintron’s Phantom of the Paradise-style organ playing. The music is fun and energetic, the kind of thing you’d hope to find at a divey New Orleans bar circa one in the morning.1 Eventually Quintron asked the audience to please stand up and come closer for the last few songs. (I’d tried to do my punk due diligence earlier by moving closer to the stage in the hope that others would follow; a few tentative folks joined in solidarity, but most remained seated.) A friend and I danced like a couple of Tracy Turnblads to their poppy, ’60s-inspired, organ-driven closer.
With the musical interlude complete, it was finally time for the puppet show. Miss Pussycat introduced the first piece as "Party Planning for Animals,” which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Quintron and Miss Pussycat disappeared behind the stage, which sat on a table, and two paper bag animal puppets (a cat and an owl?) appeared, speaking in Mr. Rogers-esque cadences as they planned a variety show in the forest. In between decorating the space and procuring refreshments, with questionable results, they encouraged their friend Krystal to overcome her shyness and participate.
Krystal, my personal favorite, was a giant tiger-striped bag-style puppet with two ears that also acted as handles for the puppeteer to use to move her around the stage. Unfortunately, like most artists, Krystal was ahead of her time and ahead of the trends, so when she arrived onstage with an original song, the puppet audience failed to pick up what she was throwing down, which sent her into an existential crisis that was very entertaining to watch. Some (puppet) attendees may or may not have ended up unalived during her unravelling, but the party must go on!
The forest variety show continued with a puppet who needed a lot of help with the audiovisual component of his act: it required helpers to lug in all the heavy equipment, not to mention technical assistance, but he was on his own. With nobody volunteering to help, he was forced to compromise by “plugging this piece of yarn into the wall.” The audience literally gasped as an authentic old-school “TV” started “scrolling,” creating the illusion that something was playing on the “screen”—a type of puppet technology that I remember making back in grade school and loved seeing utilized again. The show within a show ended on a high note: Krystal was allowed to perform again, with better results, and everyone was happy, except perhaps for the puppets killed during her first performance.
It was delightful to see so many adults, each with their own supercomputers in their pockets, so amazed by the fact that paper, a cardboard box, and two wooden dowels could create such magic. As far as I could tell, almost everyone was paying attention to the show—whose themes were niche and quintessential DIY hipster in the best way—instead of scrolling on their phones. During intermissions, people were friendly and talkative with one another. The crowd was on board for whatever, clearly excited to see something a little out of the ordinary for Tulsa: weird puppet shit, analog as hell, presented with love by humans who care.
