Origami Menagerie

When I left Utah last summer to go spend the summer with the Ohio Light Opera, I packed pretty much everything I owned in my car because I knew that at the end of the summer I would be headed straight up here to Michigan to start school. As I was packing, I found a lot of random boxes of my old stuff down in my parents' basement. I just crammed the boxes in the car without really examining the contents, but after a couple of weeks in Ohio, I started to rummage through those boxes, where I discovered all of my old origami books and paper. I hadn't touched any of that stuff in about fifteen years.

Long story short, I got back into origami. Big time. I found origami to be the perfect activity for my downtime backstage because I could do it while socializing, I could pick it up and put it down at any time (like when I had to go on stage), and I could brighten up the dull green room by displaying my completed models on the wall. After a few weeks, I had a pretty substantial collection up on the wall and the display had earned the nickname "The Menagerie." By the end of the summer, the Menagerie had grown to about 80 pieces, which is pretty ambitious when you consider than many of the more complicated models can take an hour or more to fold. I gave each piece a unique name, which I print on one side, and on the other side I initialed my work 'BET' (my initials are actually BDT, but I somehow acquired the nickname 'BET' in Ohio last summer).

I certainly don't pump out origami at such a ridiculous rate now, but I still love to make something new every week or so. If I'm at home just hanging out and relaxing with an episode or two of Buffy, I might as well have a little origami wild boar or T-Rex to show for it, eh?

Here are some of my favorite pieces I've made:

Marcelo the elephant, one of the founding members of the Menagerie

Xavier the stegosaurus, Julius II the deer, and Reggie the Triceratops
chillin' on my balcony in Ann Arbor

Derek the pterodactyl, Bert the robin, and Ernesto the Brontosaurus
in my dressing room during Postcard from Morocco

At the end of the summer at Ohio Light Opera I put all the members of the Menagerie up for adoption, and all the great friends I made over the summer took a little origami souvenir home with them. If a few years from now the only thing that those friends can remember about me is that I was that one guy who sat in the green room cranking out all that origami to make the often-dreary green room a more colorful and fun place, I'll be more than happy with that.