By Zoë Peterson, Emerging Artist and Guest Blogger for LCT
My father had decided that, above all other things, I would be funny.
I was raised on movies and TV shows full of wit and humor, quickness and running gags that paid off because my dad truly loves a good bit. This meant that I was watching some of his favorite movies at a young age, and it has, rightfully, alienated me from my peers—no one knows I’m referencing Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when I refer to something I don’t want to do as my “snakes in a pet store.”
The Language of Media
I went as Wednesday Addams for Halloween when I was eight, way before the Netflix series, INSISTING my stuffed cat Henrietta be dressed as roadkill. I could quote The Addams Family Values and knew the joy of the original black-and-white Addams Family series, as well as The Munsters.
These 1960s “outsider” comedies captivated me. There was something so fun about Marilyn, the gorgeous blonde of movie magazines, being the “weird” one in a family of classic Universal-style monsters. Why should we be afraid of Morticia and Gomez when they had a far more functional relationship than most shows featured on Nick at Nite?
As I grew, my taste for horror changed. Days of watching Morticia and Wednesday traversed into a fascination with the history of Vampira and Elvira, their connection with the audiencenand obvious sex appeal. Vampira had the sleek mysticism of Theda Bara, while Elvira was like a drag queen.
When I was a child, I wore black shirts with pink skulls. In my high school yearbook, I described my style as “David Bowie meets Elvira.” To me, l’appel du vide (the call of the void) was dressed in a mink stole and, well, looked like Mink Stole from John Waters films.
It was during my freshman year of college that I seriously started considering the idea of creating my own horror hostess.
Sally Salem Takes Shape
The idea for Sally Salem began in my senior year of high school. Then, as a college freshman, I sketched out a YouTube/web series where, in each episode, a new character or conundrum would pop by to visit Sally. It was, as the original Fringe elevator pitch stated, “Pee Wee’s Playhouse but with demons.”
In 2020, life changed. Watching every single episode of Bar Rescue in existence in a three-person household will really have you examining your life, and over the next year, I began to examine a life I wanted.
An only child, I had longed for a sibling. So my horror hostess would have a large family that filled the halls with laughter: a sister she was at odds with but loved nonetheless, a niece and nephew who served as Sally’s protégés, a best friend in the form of a talking skull, and many other puppets and characters slowly added to a world that existed, lovingly, in my head and notes app.
The initial Sally Salem had a litany of possible names and a living room set designed to look like a classic horror-hostess parlor, with a few haunted kitchen concepts as well. Her house looked like the Munsters if they dealt with the 2010 housing crisis: scaled down and cluttered but filled with love and plenty of graveyard dirt.
When I told my dad about it being a spooky Pee Wee’s Playhouse, he suggested I truly follow in Mr. Herman’s footsteps and create a stage show.
So, I did.
Sally Salem Launches: We All Start Somewhere, Right?
Sally Salem and the Spooktacular Birthday Extravaganza was written in tandem with a yet-to-be-produced coming-of-age drama about a summer camp, because I contain multitudes.
The original show featured Sally attempting to pull together the tenth birthday party for her niece and nephew. While her conservative sister gathered esteemed guests like a doctor and the mayor, Sally and her roommates brought cakes to life and gave the Devil fashion advice.
While there are things I would change, it proved to be a test run for the future of Sally: when the series goes wrong, it’s at its best. Sound cues misfiring allow for more audience interaction, missed lines create camaraderie amongst the ensemble, and the spirit of the show thrives. Chosen family, even those made of felt, places us in the heart of Sally’s world.
The first show wasn’t without its challenges. A role was difficult to cast, COVID-19 knocked us out of our opening weekend, and one of our makeup performances at Falcon Theatre fell on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned.
And I had written a puppet show…despite never making puppets.
Diving Into the World of Puppetry
My first puppet was a demon cake, designed to be pulled out of an “oven” and brought to life with the Necro-Nom-Nom-Icon. I looked up a tutorial from the late “A Puppet Nerd” YouTube channel, using car sponges, got angry halfway through, and started crafting a monstrosity out of the sponges, a pie tin and trash.
As Sally developed as a series, so did my puppet-making skills. I continued to learn how to build with what I had, or rather, found.
Our next show was for Serials in 2024, and it didn’t require too many new puppets. Aaron Hoppe, our regular voice of Yorick, took my design and horribly attempted puppet and brought our beloved skull to life, while I remodeled an existing puppet into “Nosfeltratu the Handpire.”
The following Serials required much more work in the puppet department. During the snowstorm in January 2025, I decided to really make a functional puppet. I followed a pattern for once and taught myself how to use contact cement and build shapes out of foam. Being broke, sustainability wasn’t just a goal for ingenuity’s sake, but necessity. Old couch parts became a hat, curtain pieces a velvet suit, and old T-shirts and cotton balls formed to fit a face. I finally felt like I was getting somewhere.
The Learning Continues
Yes, I am usually overambitious. I have a million designs and ideas drawn on napkins or written down in random notebook pages, and rarely do my puppets turn out the way I plan. But that makes sense when you end up shoving a Diet Coke can into the mouth of an opossum to prop it up correctly.
As I have continued to create the world I thought could only live in my head, I am surrounded by piles of scrap fabric, cardboard and failed puppet-head attempts.
From my humble beginnings as a completely inept puppeteer to continuing to develop my craft and now teaching classes on puppetry and performance at Know Theatre, as well as pop-up workshops, I continue to mess up, learn and create.
What Makes Sally Sally
Yet, as the Sally Salem series has developed, one thing is never absent: grief.
Sally Salem as a world exists because it is a chosen family brought together by inexplicable tragedies. The kind that have nothing to do with haints or things that go bump in the night. The daisies we push are the results of car crashes, terminal illnesses and all the things we wish we could escape.
Sally doesn’t escape. She lays beside the bed, lifts the skirt and shines the light into the eyes of the monsters that live there. Grief is welcome in her house because she knows that once it moves in, there’s no evicting it.
She lost her parents at a young age, the death of her sister’s husband and father of the twins remains a constant fixture in the plot, and Richard Mortis, the mortician, grapples with a fear of death while trying to bring closure to everyone else.
Did I mention I write children’s shows? We’re a riot.
Sally Can Be a Teacher, Too
Grief is something we can all relate to, whether we want to or not. We premiered Horror in the Holler, our first all-ages children’s show featuring stories of Kentucky legends, at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville’s Storytelling Revolution Festival in 2026.
The final legend is about Mary Evelyn Ford, a five-year-old girl who died and has a legend of cursing people from her witch’s grave. The day we were filming, a small child cried out:
SALLY SALEM: It’s more complicated than that…Mary Evelyn Ford wasn’t REALLY a witch.
CHILD: Hip, hip, hooray!
SALLY SALEM: She…she had an abdominal disease called peritonitis. And she…she died.
Naturally, everyone laughed. While I normally delivered my following line to the general audience, explaining that the town made up the legend of the witch’s curse to cope, I went to the child who had shouted and spoke directly to them, adding more of an explanation.
At that moment, I was back to being a teacher.
This is what makes Sally Salem different from Vampira or Elvira. There is a fun, playful and at times sexy quality, but the softness of Sally never leaves.
Sally works because of the ensemble and the place the audience takes within the world itself. She asks you to believe and trust in a bit that falls apart, just as much as she asks you to believe that the world will bloom again after someone you love has passed.
See Sally Salem October 25 at Know Theatre
I have a few Sally projects I’m working on, and we are always looking to participate in puppet slams, cabarets and events like BLINK. My regular ensemble features collaborators who help make Sally what it is. Their kindness and willingness to jump in and participate in the world and all our weird little projects makes it possible.
Our next project is an all-ages show at Know Theatre as part of their OctKNOWber Nights, called Trick or Treat, Sally Salem! This time, Sally is sick on Halloween. The cast includes myself, Rachel Baker, Sawyer Pardo, Imani Derden and Aaron Hoppe.
We hope to see you there because, trust me, we take Halloween very seriously. There is one show only–on October 25 at 2 p.m. Get tickets HERE
Sally Salem has grown considerably from the character I first imagined in high school. She has become a world of puppets, performers, grief, laughter and a whole lot of graveyard dirt. I’m still learning how to build it, but that’s part of the fun.
LCT welcomes other local professional early career theatre artists and craftspeople to submit guest blogging articles. Contact: Lizeichler5@gmail.com, Editor
