Glenview’s hottest show is in somebody's front yard

“What’s the difference between broccoli and boogers?” Augusta Ghost asks. Her job is to keep the audience entertained while the crew and puppeteers set up and change the set, and she does it with crowd work and terrible jokes. “Does anyone know? The difference between broccoli and boogers?” she asks. “Give up? Kids will actually eat their boogers!” 

It’s October 30th, a few minutes after dusk, on a residential street in Glenview. Augusta is a hand puppet, as well as the MC of Driveway Follies, and her jaw flaps wildly as she guffaws at her own gross-out gag. The punchline goes over particularly well with audience members whose age is in the single digits. 

Driveway Follies is a free Halloween-themed all-ages puppet show that’s been staged in someone’s front yard for nearly two decades. That’s all I knew going into it. But everything about the experience is bigger and more elaborate than I anticipated. For one thing, the temporary structure erected to mount the puppet show isn’t some rinky-dink little Punch and Judy box—it’s a huge wooden stage with curtains, a booming sound system, and a sophisticated lighting rig. And the crowd is enormous, spilling out of the driveway at 3854 Greenwood Avenue and blocking the street and the sidewalks of several neighboring houses. As I learned from Augusta Ghost’s crowd work, attendees have come not just from Glenview and other parts of Oakland, but from all over the Bay Area, and as far away as Wisconsin.

(If you’re wondering how a puppet does crowd work, it went like this: She asked a series of questions to the entire crowd, and they answered by clapping and shouting: “Who here is from the neighborhood?” “Who's from Oakland?” “Who's from the Bay Area?” and “Who's from outside the Bay Area?” When there were a few claps from people who lived outside of the Bay Area, she pointed at specific people who had clapped and asked where they were from.)

The curtains part and the show proper begins. There’s a brightly lit fairground set, complete with a merry-go-round and a thrill ride called the Ghost Train. A marionette ghost is turning a crank to make the merry-go-round spin, and he seems sad and dejected because the various marionette customers are lining up to ride the train and are ignoring his attraction. 

Then things get phantasmagoric. The bright stage lights cut out, and the ghost glows bright fluorescent white under blacklight. The exotic animals on the merry-go-round transform into luminous skeletons, escape the ride, and fly around the liminal nightmare space of the darkened stage.

A dissonant music track by a 1960s psych-rock band called The Idle Race begins to play. And you can hear more from that obscure group, and explore the short-lived “freakbeat” scene, on the Rhino compilation Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969. But the important thing, on this night, is the sound of the crowd gasping over the music, at the increasingly hallucinatory display. (You can see a version of this segment of the Driveway Follies show from 14 years ago on YouTube here.)

The program is spooky-not-scary, about a half-hour long, and it repeats from sunset to 10 p.m. On my first viewing, I’m so far back in the throng that I have to hold my phone up over my head to get some photos of the stage. The crowd around me is full of parents with their becostumed little ones on their shoulders, but there are also clutches of hipsters chatting about cult nature documentaries, the succession process for the Dalai Lama, and what an amazing experience it is to watch the Golden State Valkyries play at Chase Center. (This was the night before they clinched their first WNBA title.) No one seems to mind that they can’t really see the stage from this far back—they’re happy to merely be within earshot.

There are several more segments, featuring a witch and her bat sidekick, a skeleton that collapses into a pile of bones and magically reassembles, and more terrible jokes from Augusta Ghost (“What kind of car does a ghost drive? A Boo-ick!”), and when the show wraps up, the crowd is asked to take several big steps back so that attendees who have had their fill are able to file out. 

While the puppeteers reset and prepare for the next performance, I wander over to the gift shop set up on a sidewalk across the street. There are T-shirts and postcards and stickers and enamel pins, all sold to help fund this labor of love. I Googled around a bit and discovered that Driveway Follies was founded by Bay Area artist and puppeteer Larry Schmidt in 2007, and friends and collaborators have kept it going since his death in 2019. It received grants from City of Oakland and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and was the beneficiary of New Parkway's Karma Cinema program.

How is it possible that I had never heard about this until a few weeks ago? I am also chagrined to discover that I recently missed a fundraising performance at Shapeshifters Cinema in Jack London Square and a bingo night benefit at Lovely’s Burgers that sound like they were almost as much fun as the show itself.

I get a slightly better vantage point for the second performance of the evening. I can see the stage this time if I stand on my tiptoes.

Driveway Follies takes place every October 30 and 31, from dusk to 10 p.m. Arrive well before sunset for a good view; organizers encourage adults without children to attend later in the evening so younger audience members can see the stage. Admission is free, but you can support the 501(c)(3) nonprofit directly here, or follow them on Facebook and Instagram for news about merchandise and fundraising events ahead of next Halloween.