Grace "Madame Pinxy" Larsen

A Pinxy shop figure, fully dressed for the stage: George's carving, Grace's paint, wig and wardrobe. No photograph of Grace Larsen herself is known to survive. Her own handiwork is what's left to speak for her. Ventriloquist Central Blog, "TBT" collection feature.

Start under the sideshow tent, because that's where this one actually begins. A man covered in tattoos worked one end of the lot. A young woman worked the other, billed plainly as the one-armed woman: she had use of only one arm, and she used it to play piano, paint signs, and sew costumes for the whole outfit.^[1] That's how George Larsen met Grace. Folks, I've heard a lot of origin stories in this trade. I don't have a better one than that. Pull up a chair. This is Grace's story, not George's, though the two never did come apart clean.

The tent before the workshop

Nobody wrote down the year George and Grace met, and I'm not going to invent one. What's on the record is the job each of them held before either one ever picked up a wood-carving tool: George was the tattoo man. Grace was billed as the one-armed woman, and the same account that gives her that stage name is explicit that she overcame the disability admirably, playing piano, painting, and sewing with one working arm in a business that did not go easy on anybody.^[1] Read that again. Before Grace ever touched a ventriloquist figure, she was already a trained painter and seamstress, earning a living at both trades under a circus tent. She didn't learn to paint faces and sew clothes for the shop. She brought those two trades into the shop, fully formed.

And the stage never let go of either one of them. The same record that names the shop names the act too: Grace and George touring puppet shows together, ventriloquism, Punch and Judy, marionettes, right alongside all that bench work.^[1] She wasn't the woman standing behind the man on stage. She was up there working the show.

Two hands at the same bench

Here's how the Larsen workshop actually split the labor, stated plainly by the people who watched it happen: George carved and mechanized the figures. Grace painted them, wigged them, sewed for them, and clothed them.^[1] Every wink, every spitting mouth, every set of real dentist teeth George built into a Pinxy head, the figure had to leave that shop with a face and a wardrobe on it regardless. That part was Grace's, every time, for thirty-two years running, 1916 to 1948.^[6]

The trade itself has quietly known this longer than you'd think. When the Larsen shop's own stock went to auction in 2015, the catalog opened two separate lots with the same sentence: "Madame & George Pinxy Larsen were builders of figures in the heyday of figure making. Many professional ventriloquists used their unique style of figures."^[5] Look at the order of that sentence. Madame first, George second. Not an accident, and not the way this trade usually tells it.

The gathering at Battle Creek

June 16, 1939. Grace was in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the International Brotherhood of Magicians convention, not even there for ventriloquism business. Two performers she knew, Ralph DeShong and Claude Burke, got to talking with her about doing something the art had never had: an actual gathering, just for vents. Magician Jay Marshall, who did some ventriloquism himself, helped spread the word around the hotel.^[2] Fifty-seven people showed up. Twenty-nine signed up as members before the day was over.^[2] That meeting is the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists. Every roster, every convention, every newsletter this trade has produced since traces back to a woman deciding, at a magicians' convention she was already attending, that ventriloquists deserved one of their own.

She and George didn't just organize the room. They funded it. The Pinxys donated one of their own figures to be raffled off, to help the brand new organization get on its feet.^[1] Founder and donor, same afternoon.

Secretary, editor, and the bulletin that outlived her name

Once the IBV existed, Grace ran it. She served as the organization's first Secretary, a fact the Oracle itself confirmed in black and white in 1957, naming George as the man "who with our late friend Madam Pinxy (organizer and first secretary of I.B.V.) created wonderful ventriloquial figures and marionettes."^[4] And starting in 1940, she published the club's own magazine, Grape Vine News, editing and putting it out herself for four straight years.^[1] That bulletin is the direct ancestor of the club magazine that ran for decades after under a new name. She built the paper trail this whole trade's history now leans on, and she ran it until 1944, when her health finally gave out.^[1]

Chicago to Babson Park

Grace Larsen died January 15, 1948, in Babson Park, Florida, at sixty-one. The IBV's own necrology recorded it flatly: "Larsen, Mrs. Grace (Madam Pinxy) age 61, died January 15, 1948, Babson Park, Florida."^[3] George kept the shop and the name going another dozen years after that. Somewhere along the way, in 1942, a photographer named Bob Munstedt caught the two of them together at their studio, in a print that later entered a museum collection.^[4] It's likely the only image of Grace herself the trade ever took. Everything else she left behind, she left with her hands, not her face: the paint, the wigs, the stitching, the bulletin, and the room full of vents she talked into existence at a magicians' convention in Michigan.

Every shop in this trade that lasted more than a season or two, it turns out, ran on two sets of hands, not one. History wrote down the one who held the knife. Grace Larsen painted every face her husband ever carved, sewed every stitch of clothing those figures wore, ran the organization this art has traced its actual beginning to ever since, and got filed, for decades, under her husband's nickname. That 2015 auction catalog had the sense to put her name first. I figure the rest of us are overdue to catch up.

One working arm, and she still out-produced most two-handed men in this trade at the paint bench. History's ledger just forgot to carry the numbers over to her name.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy