Folksinger turned novelist Wesley Stace is looking to solidify his literary reputation later this month with his second book, By George—which is in part the memoirs of a ventriloquist’s dummy, based on one that was owned by Stace’s grandfather. As is becoming increasingly common for fictional characters, George has his own MySpace page, with several ventriloquists and dummies counting themselves among his friends, especially after he provided an excerpt from the novel and a freshly created FAQ (called, naturally enough, “Ventriloquism for Dummies”). Over at his real MySpace blog, Stace laments the lost art: “Ventriloquism looks dead and buried and the creepy dummy is the reason,” he writes; when a guy with a wooden doll in his lap stopped being cute, “we were left watching a performer who was, basically, a schizophrenic, arguing with, doing violence upon, himself.”
Well, that got the ventriloquists talking, as you can imagine. And I have to say, the death notice does seem a bit premature, considering that the ventriloquist on America’s Got Talent is pretty much the best act in the competition—as Piers pointed out the other night, Terry Fator sings better with his mouth closed than most of the “actual” singers do with theirs open.