A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand
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At one of Arts and Culture’s meetings—held adjacent to 60 Wall Street, at a quieter public-private indoor park that’s also the atrium of Deutsche Bank—it dawned on Joe: “I have to build as many giant puppets as I can to help this thing out—people love puppets!” And so Occupy Wall Street’s Puppet Guild, one of about a dozen guilds under the Arts and Culture working group, was born.
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When I ask Joe if he thinks Occupy Wall Street should make repealing budget cuts like the ones that struck New York’s public schools a priority, he replies that the thought hadn’t really crossed his mind. “I hope there are groups of people who are working on that specific issue,” he says, but for the moment he’s “prioritizing what I’m most passionate about.” Which, he explains, is “figuring out how to make theater that’s going to help open people up to this new cultural consciousness. It’s what I’m driven to do right now, so I’m following that impulse to see where it leads.”