Hey, it's Kelly McEvers, co-host of the show.

Today is the second stop in our weekend road trip series, where we bring you stories of the strange, incredible, and wondrous places right here in the United States that you can see from the road.

Last week, we started in Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks and heard the story of a stump that helped

prove to the world that sequoias are real. If you miss that one, be sure to go back and check it out.

And today, for the next stop on our road trip, we are heading south to Los Angeles. We're going to

check out one of the longest running puppetry theaters in the United States. But first, I have a

quick request. We want to hear from you. Tell us about your favorite local place that should be a stop

on everybody's road trip. Maybe it's a funky old restaurant or a piece of full card or a natural

wonder. Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 315992-9227902 or record a voice memo

and send it to hello at atlasobscura.com. Okay, here's today's episode.

There was this really cool act at the Coachella Music Festival recently. It wasn't a pop star or a comeback band.

It was puppets. Like more than a hundred puppets. And they're puppeteers, dancing to popular songs.

Big squid, cactuses, clowns, aliens. All from the beloved Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles,

a place that almost had to close after its founder died in 2014,

but has managed to survive, even thrive.

Bob Baker saw his first puppet show at a department store when he was six years old.

He loved the Jack Spratt puppet, of course, the character from nursery rhymes. The puppeteer in that show would blow up a big

balloon inside the puppet's body. And the puppeteer would blow him up through a magic spell,

and his body got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and the whole plot of the show

was for the kids to say the magic word and he would get small again well the first time bob saw the

show everything worked perfectly the second time he saw the show he said they blew up the balloon and it

popped inside and so didn't work that well and then he saw it again the third time and the balloon and it popped inside. And so it didn't work that well. And then he saw it

...