Angela Martin

Angela Martin as an All-Star Kid, with Angel and Tiny. Photo: BigFrench, via Find A Grave.

Most everybody in this archive picked ventriloquism and stayed with it a lifetime. Angela Martin picked it, rode it further and faster than kids twice her age, and then spent the rest of her career walking toward a different spotlight. She was born Angel Mignanelli in Astoria, Queens, on February 5, 1942, and she was working a figure on national television before most of her classmates had a driver's license.^[1][2] Pull up a chair. Hers is a short story, and a genuinely odd one: the girl who started as a ventriloquist and ended up remembered, more than anything, as a singer.

A city kid who got there first

She was still a tween when she landed a spot on Startime Talent Scouts, the same children's variety show that put a young Connie Francis in front of the country.^[1] Whatever she did on that stage worked. By the time a 1968 New York Daily News item circled back around to her, the paper mentioned in passing that she'd already "played the Palace as a headliner" years before, at an age when most acts are still opening for somebody else.^[1] Ventriloquism was the way in. She used the whole door.

Angel and Tiny

In the photograph up top, captioned simply "Angela Martin as an All-Star Kid," she's working both partners at once: a boy in striped overalls on one arm, a girl in a bow on the other.^[2] She billed them as Angel and Tiny, and they stayed her partners into adulthood.^[1] Ventriloquist Central's own tribute page keeps the same two names on record and adds one plain line about how it started: she "got her start on television in its earliest days."^[3]

A "Ventriloquist" credit on Broadway

That same year, 1968, she was in the original Broadway cast of George M!, the Cohan biographical musical that opened at the Palace itself, which is likely what put a reporter on her trail in the first place.^[1] Her billing there is a nice piece of trivia. She played a supporting part, Ma Templeton, understudied another, Mme. Grimaldi, and carried a third line in the program that wasn't a character name at all. She was listed flatly as Ventriloquist.^[6] Broadway had already worked out what she was.

From a real dummy to a fake one

In between, she made the rounds of the era's biggest variety stages: The Arthur Murray Party, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Milton Berle Show, and repeat spots on New York's own Clay Cole Show in 1965.^[1] She is also said to have opened for Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, singing rather than working a partner.^[1][2] Then, in 1982, the business handed her one more turn with a dummy. This time it was fiction: she played Freda McKracky, a ventriloquist with a wisecracking partner named Wacky, in the film version of Annie.^[4][5] A woman who'd spent her childhood actually doing the thing got cast, as an adult, to play someone doing it for the cameras. Somebody in casting had a sense of humor, or a very good memory.

Home the whole time

For all the marquee names she brushed up against, Angela Martin never left home. She lived her whole life in Queens and taught piano on the side, in the same borough that raised her.^[1][2] She died on April 3, 2004, at sixty-two, of a heart attack at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens.^[2]

She played the Palace with Angel and Tiny before she could drive, then spent Broadway billing her literal job description like the rest of us wear a tuxedo. I call that a demotion in reverse.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy