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Eagles soared through the air and butterflies fluttered their wings Dec. 4, ready to gather with forest animals for a meeting inside the University Park Church of the Brethren.

Fixated on the wing span of each creature, the pint-sized crowd failed to notice the poles used to flap the animals' wings as Hyattsville resident Dotti Seitz slid her hand into the plush head of a deer puppet.

The performance, "The Christmas Give-Away," was Seitz's holiday take on a Native American tradition of making gifts to give away to loved ones where the animals gave gifts to mankind.

"They have lost their way," Seitz said as she moved the deer mouth. "There is no pattern to their journey. I will give them my skin to cover them and my flesh to sustain them. They will know that our provider will care for their every need."

Seitz, 67, is one of a few county residents who found power in puppetry. She uses the puppets as a method of storytelling and has performed shows on bullying and school safety for the Kids On The Block Inc. puppet program with state grant money given to the Mental Health Association for Prince George's County.

She has performed at churches and public and private schools throughout Prince George's and Montgomery counties.

"I started as an older person, so it's kind of an encouragement for people 60 and older that you can actually start an acting career," Seitz said.

Seitz, who is of Cheyenne ancestry, based the Dec. 4 puppet show on the 1999 children's book "The Give-Away: A Christmas Story in the Native American Tradition" by Ray Buckley. A "Give-Away" is a Native American tradition, Seitz said.

"The family that hosts the Give-Away, they save up all year and make stuff," Seitz said. "They invite everyone in the community to come. The animals are going to give away to mankind their most precious parts of themselves."

Seitz said puppet shows can engage adults even though adults don't want people to think they would, and that it's "so much neater" to tell a story using puppets.

"In our country right now, most people think puppetry is just for kids despite the things like ‘Avenue Q,' which are obviously very adult," Seitz said in reference to the Tony-award winning show. "For the most part people think puppetry is just for children and for preschoolers. It's a craft and an art form that's been developed for all ages, and this little piece we're doing, it's family oriented. All ages can appreciate it."

Hyattsville resident Cynthia Mitchel, who brought her son Tristan Fuhrer, 5, to Seitz's show, said it was a nice story about giving that wasn't just "silly and goofy" and had a good message.

"It was just really sweet and well done," Mitchel said. "I've been to puppet shows at Glen Echo Park [in Glen Echo] that were not that good."

Part of Seitz's inspiration to get into puppetry was when her daughter, Elissa Royal, appeared on the children's show "Sesame Street" in the late 1970s when she lived in New York City. Seitz said she was a "happy stage mom" but never thought at the time to ask if she could get an internship working with puppets.

"It was a wonderful experience to see [show founder] Jim Henson working with my kid and other kids," Seitz said. "It was really grand. I'm a great fan of the Muppets. I still watch ‘Sesame Street' with my grandchildren."

Seitz said she's been grateful to receive training on the job and looks to resources such as the Puppeteers of America and the National Capital Area Puppetry Guild, which meets monthly in Glen Echo Park, Seitz said. Seitz buys her puppets instead of building them.

"I can relate to people who are my age and have been in the business for 20 to 55 years," Seitz said. "Now I'm practicing ventriloquism."

Puppets have gotten Seitz through tougher times. In 2006, as she dealt with her husband Steve's heart attack inside Washington Adventist Hospital, she noticed a little girl who needed cheering up after an emotionally draining day spent with her mother on an unrelated emergency.

From her purse, Seitz pulled out her "peepers" plastic eyes that can be placed on fingers, and turned her hand into a puppet to talk with the girl, who she said began to feel at ease and even smiled.

"You can turn anything into a puppet," said Seitz, who also worked in hospitals and assisted-living facilities. "If you need something to get people's attention or they're having a really rough time, just grab something and start an act. ... It draws their attention and it can help calm people down."

While Seitz uses her puppets to connect with people and assuage fears, Michael Cotter uses his to rile up crowds of hundreds of elementary school children across the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area.

Cotter, 63, of University Park, founded the Blue Sky Puppet Theatre in 1974. Cotter initially started doing political satire puppet shows in Washington, D.C., but the former Montgomery County Public Schools arts integration teacher was inspired to cater to kids watching folk singer Bruce Hutton of Mount Rainier entertain children.

"It's full time," said Cotter, who said the shows have been his sole source of income during the past 25 years. "It's great. Children's audiences are more fun than a barrel of monkeys."

Cotter and five Blue Sky puppeteers travel to 650 schools in one year. There are 2,000 elementary schools within a two-hour radius of his University Park home, Cotter said.

His favorite shows are "Building Bridges," which was developed with help from the Prince George's County Health Department to tackle school bullying, and "The Three Not So Little Pigs," a show about sibling rivalry written for his 26-year-old son on his 4th birthday.

"We don't do fairy tales or anything traditional," Cotter said. "We like to do what kids are like in elementary school and base the play around it."

Before any puppet is made, Cotter and his staff will work up a plot for a story line and start developing music before creating cardboard cutouts of puppets. Cotter uses rod puppets, where the mouth is controlled with a pole beneath the puppet, and can make multiple puppets talk by attaching the poles to a "prop bar."

"You don't want to build a puppet that you're not going to use," Cotter said. "It's expensive and time-consuming."

Cotter said a good puppet will take 40 hours to build. To start, a model is sculpted in clay and covered in a paper mache finish. Cotter creates a wooden platform with a spring mechanism for the mouth to mount on the paper mache. Attaching fur or sewn clothing and then a pole beneath are the final touches, he said.

Cotter said having a good story that is "well acted" is essential before layering the performance with aesthetics. He said a script can go through 75 rewrites in one year. During the past 35 years, Cotter and his staff have written 75 45-minute plays.

"We very seldom just build a puppet when we build a show," Cotter said. "It's the entire package."

Cotter said he loves performing and figures he has about seven years left of performing in him.

"I'm so lucky and so blessed that people actually pay me to go into a school and make 400 children roar with laughter," Cotter said.

Inside the First Baptist Church of Glenarden, puppet shows are geared toward both children and adults.

The church's puppet ministry began in 1989, according to the Rev. Belynda Gentry, an associate pastor who oversees the communications ministry that includes the puppet ministry. Gentry said Helen Taylor, a former deaconess at Glenarden, started the ministry to enhance Sunday school lessons. There are eight performers and about seven more that assist with show set-ups for 10- to 15-minute-long plays, Gentry said.

"We normally get the scripts through the [Colorado-based] One Way Street, which is a Christian puppet resource, but we do write some from time to time because we have people in the ministry who have actually gone to school for the arts and are able to write scripts for the ministry," Gentry said.

Popular performances are shows on the resurrection of Jesus Christ and "Bob the Bruiser," a story about a bully who makes fun of Christians but later learns to embrace Christianity, Gentry said. Adult themes are letting go of bitterness, finding hope and forgiveness. In the past 20 years it has grown to feature outreach in assisted living facilities such as Largo's ManorCare Health Services and domestic mission trips such as to the Nanjemoy Community Center in Charles County.

The ministry has also garnered acclaim. Against 18 churches at a May One Way Street Inc. regional puppet festival in Richmond, Glenarden received a "Gold Award" in the festival's "Song Competition" for performing Gospel recording artist Kierra Sheard's song "Invisible," a "Silver Award" for the "Creative Ministry Competition" and first place in the "Lip Synching Competition." They will travel to Bourbonnais, Ill., next year to compete against 24 churches in the International Festival of Christian Puppetry and Ventriloquism.

While Seitz said puppetry is geared more toward children, Gentry said there is a demand for the puppet shows they perform for adults, such as on their domestic mission trips to places like Nanjemoy where there was a mostly adult crowd, and especially during Christmas time at ManorCare, when people tend to feel lonelier if family is not around.

"The people in the nursing homes, some of them have just been left there [and] no one's come to see them," said Gentry, who said love is another adult theme the ministry explores. "There's still love no matter where they are, especially when the audience is people who feel forgotten and unloved."

nmcgill@gazette.net