Pete Michaels

Pete Michaels with Milo, Papa and Krelmin. Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

In the summer of 1980, a twenty-two-year-old ventriloquist from Staten Island climbed into an un-air-conditioned Chevy van with his friends Alan Semok and Todd Stockman and pointed it toward Kentucky. On his lap: a brand new figure named Gitch, carved for him that same year by Semok. Wedged in beside it: his father's VHS camera and VCR. At his first ConVENTion, Pete Michaels set that rig up in his hotel room and recorded thirteen working vents talking into the lens, Mark Wade and Johnny Main among them, one of them a direct line back to the Great Lester.^[1] He was twenty-two years old and already thinking like an archivist. A year later he turned that instinct outward: VIDEO VENTRILOQUISM, the first video home study course this art had ever produced.^[2] Everything else that filled out his forty years in the business, the Apollo dates, the MTV nomination, the Staten Island workshops, the whole partnership with Woody D, traces back to a kid who could not stop pointing a camera at what he loved. Pull up a chair. Here's the rest of it.

The kid with the records

He started the way plenty of vents start: watching giants and copying what he saw. At five years old he studied Jimmy Nelson's Instant Ventriloquism records with a Juro Danny O'Day figure in his hands, taking in Bergen, Winchell and Nelson himself.^[2] He kept at it through high school, usually cast in the musical comedy leads, and then did something almost nobody in this trade does. He trained for it properly: an alumnus of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, further study at Weist-Barron, voice lessons with Robert Marks.^[3] Most vents backed into this business by mail order or a school assembly. Pete Michaels walked in through a conservatory door.

In 1979, Alan Semok carved him his first professional figure, Gitch. Pete turned pro in 1980.^[2]

The man who put it on tape

That 1981 course was not a one-off. He followed it with a second volume and a routine-specific one, WHAT TO DO IF THE STRING BREAKS, teaching the improvised recovery every working vent eventually needs.^[4] The trade noticed. He chaired the 1996 ConVENTion, won the W.S. Berger Distinguished Service Award twice, and later made the Top 20 on America's Got Talent.^[2] A kid who once could not stop recording other people's acts ended up building part of the reference library the next generation trained on.

Woody D and the world famous Apollo

Onstage, Pete Michaels built his career on comedy clubs and cruise ships, then became a regular at the world famous Apollo Theater with his figure Woody D, an African American character with a gift for verbal jousting.^[3] The pair performed dozens of television shows, concerts and special events at that landmark venue, plus dates at the Uptown Comedy Club, Showtime at the Apollo, Comedy Central, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and Let's Laugh with Sherman Hemsley.^[3] He turned up in the feature film Dummy, alongside Adrien Brody, and starred with Woody D in Soul in a Suitcase, a short film directed by Adam Stehle and produced by Hayes Clement that won the National Board of Review of Motion Picture Award at the 2004 Columbia University Film Festival.^[5] In 2010, a music video featuring Pete Michaels picked up a nomination for Best Rock Video at the MTV Video Music Awards, and for the rest of that year he billed himself, accurately, as "celebrity ventriloquist, as seen on the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards."^[6][7]

What he taught

Woody D had a moving mouth and side to side eyes, two functions, nothing fancy. Pete Michaels made audiences swear the figure was breathing.^[8] He credited the skill to two friends, Johnny Main and Alan Semok, one a performer and one a maker, and he never let the trade's own pricing logic (more moving parts, higher the price) talk him out of what he'd learned on stage: manipulation beats mechanism, every time.^[8]

He taught the parts of the craft nobody puts in the brochure. Singing as a vent, for instance: his Pavarotti bit took a full year, six months of vocal training with his lips moving and six months more with the lip held still, and he counted it a win the night a reviewer in Atlantic City accused him of lip-synching.^[9] He warned against realistic blinking (it spooks some audience members, he said) and taught winkers for effect instead, the way Jerry Mahoney used one to say get outta here.^[10] He matched manipulation to character: Woody D moved fast, like a kid, and his other figure, Mr. Johnson, moved slow, like an old man.^[11] And when a student loaded up a figure with every mechanism it owned, he had one line ready: keep it simple, or the figure ends up looking like a McElroy falling down a flight of steps.^[12]

None of it stayed theoretical. In 1993, at a ConVENTion class, a friend named Bob Fisher stood off to the side with a beard he'd grown for a Civil War film. Pete's figure caught him in its peripheral vision and turned: hey Charles Manson, when did you get out?^[13] Fourteen years earlier, watching Cecil Carpenter work a routine called Cecil and Alex at the 1979 ConVENTion, Pete had turned to Alan Semok and asked the only honest question there was: is this for real?^[13] That's the whole trick of the craft in six words: make it real enough that the pro standing next to you has to ask.

He ran his own workshops for decades, out of Staten Island. May 2009: an all-day session covering voices, lip control, manipulation of both soft puppets and hard figures, bookings, material and singing, advertised with the line "I've been at this for 30 years, pick my brain," and, in his own joke, "easily accessible by car, bus or horseback."^[14] That September: a six hour clinic for $100, syllabus running from lip control and enunciation through comedy writing and publicity.^[15] By late 2010 the going rate for a four hour Saturday with him was $100, capped at ten students, and he billed himself with the MTV credit right on the flyer.^[6]

Malden, and the family in the room

In 2003, at his very first Vent Haven ConVENTion, collector Dan Willinger sat down on a hotel lobby bench beside Helen. Pete Michaels asked where he was from. When Willinger said Malden, Massachusetts, Pete lit up: he had lived there with his grandmother as a boy, attended Daniels Elementary School, and had the same second grade teacher, Mrs. Nutter, that Willinger had had about ten years earlier.^[16] Willinger's own verdict on him, written years afterward: "Pete has become one of the working vents that you don't hear a lot about in the major news media, but I think you should, because he is a consummate ventriloquist and performer. He seems to stay in his little corner of the world."^[16]

That corner was Staten Island, and the Northeast comedy club and cruise ship circuit around it, for a couple of decades running. He first attended a ConVENTion in 1980, and by 1981 he was photographed among a roster of eleven attendees that included Bill DeMar, Alan Semok, Johnny Main, Jeff Dunham and Mark Wade.^[17] He kicked off the workshops at the 2005 Kentucky ConVENTion with Entry Level Ventriloquism, a session Distant Voices called "a great learning workshop for beginners."^[18] He was still on the bill for the 40th ConVENTion in 2016, thirty-six years after his first.^[19]

He raised the next generation right there in the family business. One convention letter home, undated but vivid, lists a lecture he gave, "What Comes First, the Puppet or the Voice?," and the six figures he hauled up for it: Gitch, Woody D, Mr. Johnson, Papa, Krelmin, and Milo Deville. Lee Cornell taped the whole thing.^[20] In the same letter he mentions his son, Peter Jr., performing that year with his partner Tommy, closing with the Four Seasons hit "Rag Doll" to Tommy's new little rag doll friend, and a bout of food poisoning (bad convention sirloin, shared with half the room) that nearly ended his own set before it started. Whoever coined the phrase "the show must go on," Pete wrote, "needs a slap."^[20] In 2014 he brought that same son, Pete Jr., to visit the Willinger collection in Malden, on a stop between gigs while booked at the Kowloon Comedy Club a few miles away.^[21]

None of that "little corner of the world" was small onstage. A thirty year friend, Nick Carpenter, caught a full headline set at the Treehouse Comedy Club in Stratford, Connecticut, and could not stop describing it: thirty five minutes of stand-up comedy, including a tribute to Jerry Lewis doing "The Typewriter," before Woody D ever came out. "His energy level was set at 250% and never wavered," Carpenter wrote, closing with a duet song between Pete and the figure.^[22] Half the act was over before the dummy showed up, and the crowd was already his.

The last workshop

Pete Michaels went into the hospital in the spring of 2020 with breathing difficulties and died of a heart attack. The notice that went out the same day made a point of saying what it wasn't: not the coronavirus, this was the pandemic's first weeks and everybody needed to hear that part clearly.^[23] Mark Wade wrote the announcement, the way he wrote so many of the trade's obituaries, and Ventriloquist Central Blog carried it the same day: Stacey and the rest of Pete's family were asking not to receive phone calls, "due to the circumstances."^[23] Cybervent marked the date as March 31, 2020, and marked it the only way this community knows how: by sharing an uncut interview Daniel Jay Robison had filmed with him less than a year earlier, at the 2019 Vent Haven ConVENTion.^[24] His own site, petemichaels.com, outlived him for a while. As of this writing it only answers through the Wayback Machine.^[25]

He came up through a conservatory, not a craft shop, and his first professional figure was somebody else's handiwork before it was his. That never slowed him down. He put a video course in the mail before almost anyone else in this trade thought to, kept a two function figure believable enough that people argued about whether it was breathing, and worked a Staten Island Saturday workshop with the same seriousness he brought to the Apollo. The record he built and the record he taught from turned out to be the same record.

He filmed thirteen vents on his father's VHS rig at his very first ConVENTion, which means Pete Michaels was archiving this trade before this trade even agreed it was worth archiving. And bless him for that course title, WHAT TO DO IF THE STRING BREAKS, because every figure in this business has been silently praying someone would finally write that manual.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy