I am here today to speak of Rodents of an Unusual Size. No, not the ones that the hero battles in the Swamp in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, but rather the far more adorable ones that came in recently to Green Man, the Folkmanis’s Mouse with Vest.
There are two new additions to the household here, Portsmouth and Kittery. They are in fact two very large grey mice that are among the latest releases from the fine folks at Folkmanis. They are named after the two towns that lie on either side of the New Hampshire (Portsmouth) and Maine (Kittery) borders. Portsmouth now wears a lovely Portsmouth First Night button to distinguish him from Kittery.
Now let’s back up a minute … It helps for you to know that this household has two humans, nine cats, and, just to be silly, the following list of strange artifacts: one flying pig, several mermaids, lots of elephants, hedgehogs, an Ent who lives in the Conservatory, more dragons than one can possibly count, a sleeping Pinocchio, Frances (a naked dowager sitting on a stool holding a begging bowl), The Grinch, Things One and Two, The Fish in the Tea Pot, one sleeping pig, a butler and waiter sharing a drink, more than a dozen Buddhas from at least as many countries, an Indonesian Mother of Buddha, gargoyles small and big, Sendakian Wild Things, Bugs Bunny, teddy bears, a fiddler, llamas, camels, Kermit the Frog, a fortune teller, a pirate, Freud, rabbits, more hedgehogs, Enzo and Megabyte from the Reboot series, Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets, the Martian Manhunter, Batman, Green Lantern, Jerry Garcia, Jesters, a group of coyotes playing music in a bar, Hagrid, a troll and his hedgehog, lots of turtles … Did I mention Hellboy? Or the naked Jerry Garcia as an angel with wings? Or the bats in the belfry? Or the voodoo deities sitting in the office?
(It’s not as crowded here as that list might suggest as we have three whole floors of which the third is just the library. It only seems crowded when all the cats are in the Great Hall at the same time, or the books that haven’t been put away start to overwhelm every surface.)
But there’s not been a lot of mice here – no jokes please about the incompatibility of cats and mice! – until Folkmanis sent along these two. Oh, there’s The Mouse in the Shoe here from Folkmanis which Maria Nutick said is ‘completely adorable. Five inches long, this very cute finger puppet is perfect for children. The little white mouse disappears entirely inside the shoe; the puppet is operated through a finger hole in the sole of the shoe.’ That mouse is quite cute – He’s adoring Tatar’s The Annotated Fairy Tales. But these are indeed Rodents of an Unusual Size.
They stand, or rather sit, an impressive eighteen inches or so from the tips of their tails to their nicely made ears. They have rather expressive brown eyes, which give them quite a bit of character, and each mouse has a sparkling tweed vest with a teal blue lining closed with a cheese wedge button (!) and a pocket watch sewn on the vest. (The latter is why Portsmouth is now wearing a Portsmouth First Night button.) Even their tails are cute. Certainly from a storyteller’s perspective, they’d be great as part of, say, a telling of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’. And I must say that they’d make lovely mice to, errr, guard the cheese in the kitchen.
But the best aspect of them is that they don’t have the typically stiff ‘wire brush’ whiskers so many of their ilk have. I was impressed enough by this innovation that I asked Elaine Kollias of Folkmanis why this was so. Here’s her answer:
Those whiskers are ‘paper whiskers’ and were done on purpose. I think the idea is that the normal mono-filament whiskers are too plastic and hard and that the whimsy in this design would be better enhanced by the whimsical whiskers. You can get them to style and stay if you use your fingernails to straighten them and then curl them by using your nails like you would in curling ribbon.
Indeed that was just what I did do after getting this message from her – the result was that they really are natural looking whiskers!
You can see the Mouse with Vest here. Of course, you can also order this lovely puppet there too. What are you waiting for? Surely your household needs a mouse of such character!
(Folkmanis, 2004)
