Judith Klausner, known to many as “the blue-haired girl,” stopped by the Argus to discuss puppets, costumes and that infamous hair. Her costume work will appear the play “WASP,” which will be performed this weekend.

D.B.: So, tell me about the puppets.

J.K.: I made the puppet for “Woyeck,” the student play, last year. Woyeck is the title character and they thought it would be interesting to make him a life-size puppet because the character is this man who’s thoroughly manipulated by everyone around him. Basically it was a bunraku style of operation, which means that there were three people dressed in black behind it operating the puppet at a time. The head I made by casting a friend of mine from home’s head in plaster, and using that as the armature (skeleton).

D.B.: How did your friend feel about that?

J.K.: He was very good-natured about it, especially because the plaster got stuck to his ears. This project actually involved a lot of my friends being very good natured because I dipped the plaster head in ten pounds of melted beeswax which came in a giant slab—which occurred to me, I wasn’t strong enough to break apart. So, I had a lot of help from my friends who were wonderful and stayed up with me until one in the morning standing over a boiling pot of wax. That’s good friendship right there.

D.B.: How did you get into puppetry?

J.K.: Actually, Woyeck was the first puppet I ever made, other than sock-puppets when I was little.

D.B.: How did you know you could do this?

J.K.: Well I have a background in sculpture, not in puppetry. So, I kind of went about it the way you would make a sculpture rather than how you would a puppet so that led to some of the problems with the construction. I wasn’t used to having to worry about weight issues, which was a really big problem given that one person had to basically hold up the entire weight of the body with one hand for 45 minutes. So I had to gut it and redo the skeleton of the puppet three times. There were a lot of disasters with making it, actually, including the head of it getting smashed in by belligerent drunks who were friends of people who lived on my hall. One side of the head had collapsed. This was before it was covered in wax. Fortunately, I was able to fix it.

D.B.: How did the show go?

J.K.: I think it went really well. I thought it looked pretty cool. The actors all did a really good job. It’s a bizarre show.

D.B.: Have you done puppets since then?

J.K.: Well, inspired by how interesting it was to make, and how many problems I had with it, I decided to do an independent study in puppet making to try and learn the proper techniques of puppet making.

D.B.: Who’s your instructor?

J.K.: Leslie Weinberg. She’s the head of costume design. She’s also the reason I ended up making the puppet for Woyzeck.

D.B.: And, you do costume making too, right?

J.K.: It started as a work-study job last year. I work in the costume shop for the theatre department. I’ve always loved costumes and I’ve always really liked to sew. I guess it came up in conversation with Greg Malen [’07] who was also working on Woyzeck, and when he decided to direct his own show this year (“WASP”), he asked me to do costumes for it. Basically, for “WASP”, most of it was finding costumes. But, my one big project was to make an alien costume.

D.B.: What does it look like?

J.K.: Come see the play! I’ll give you a hint. It’s green! Now, don’t you want to come see it?

D.B.: Do you want to do this kind of thing after college?

J.K.: AHH! After college. That’s scary. Maybe. Theatre is a good way to be involved in the arts, especially doing more technical things like costumes and prop. I’m going to be working doing some prop work for the theatre again this year, which I enjoy a lot. In a perfect world, I’d like to be a sculptor, but I see this as a way to apply those skills in a more practical way.

D.B.: Now, the blue hair. People know you as blue-haired girl. When did this start?

J.K.: I dyed my hair blue the same week I got into Wesleyan…I actually dyed my hair before I got the acceptance letter, which almost gave my mom a heart attack. She said, “Can’t you wait another week just in case you have to do a bunch more college interviews?” But, I said any college that would turn me down because I had blue hair I didn’t really want to go to anyway. She couldn’t really argue with that. I had uncut hair past my waist until I was 16, when there was an unfortunate incident with an obnoxious boy in my school and a pair of scissors. And then it was short. I figured since I hadn’t done anything with it for 16 years, it was time to make up for it. Besides which, I had been identified by my hair for so long, that I kind of felt I needed to make it identifiable again.

D.B.: So what’s next for Judith?

J.K.: Dinner, hopefully.