Center For Puppetry Arts

This guide to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta begins in a Washington basement in 1955, where a young Jim Henson cuts up his mother's discarded coat and a ping-pong ball to build a puppet with nothing but a hand inside its head. It follows how that empty-headed design let a single finger become an eyebrow, a smirk, a wince, and how the little green puppet he named Kermit first appeared on a show almost no one outside Washington saw. Decades later, the guide turns to a Tuesday night in May 1990, when the man behind that hand walked into a New York hospital feeling unwell. Stand in the wing built in his name, surrounded by the puppets his workshop kept building afterward.