The archive

Forty years, mostly in gymnasiums.

Not a highlight reel. This is what a working life in ventriloquism actually looks like — a homemade trunk, a brochure printed in 1984, a library in Ohio, and several thousand rooms full of children.

A young Mark Wade in a tuxedo with a dog figure and two children, leaning on a trunk lettered The Mark Wade Ventriloquist Show

Mark has kept almost everything. What follows is a small part of it, in roughly the order it happened.

1970s – 1980s

Starting out.

Young Mark Wade in a tuxedo with a dog figure, two children, and a lettered show trunk — **The show trunk.** A tuxedo, a shaggy dog, two volunteers, and a trunk hand-lettered *The Mark Wade Ventriloquist Show*. He was an elementary school teacher when this began; the weekend work eventually outgrew the classroom.

Mark Wade's 1984 promotional brochure headed For VENTertainment at its Best — **The 1984 brochure.** *"For VENTertainment at its Best!"* — printed, folded and mailed to buyers a decade before anybody had a website. Copyright line reads *Mark Wade / Mark Wade VENTerprises, 1984*.

Black and white publicity photo of Mark Wade surrounded by schoolchildren, holding a bird figure — **The school publicity still.** Printed with *MARK WADE Ventriloquist* along the bottom and mailed out by the hundred. Note who the photograph is actually about — he put the children in the shot, not the puppet.

The working years

Schools, libraries, and a very long drive.

A room of school children laughing during a Mark Wade performance — **The actual job.** This is the photograph that explains the career. Everything else — the books, the convention, the awards — is downstream of being able to do this to a room, repeatedly, for forty years.

Mark Wade in a red polo with a monkey figure and a pink-haired bird figure — **The publicity shot.** The one that went out to schools and libraries for years.

Mark Wade performing at a library — **The library circuit.** A meeting room, a turtle, and the road case doing duty as a sign. Summer reading programs were a mainstay — and are the reason so much of *Kidshow Ventriloquism* is about rooms that were never built for a show.

Newspaper clipping headed Throwing Voices at the Genoa Branch Library — **“Throwing Voices at the Genoa Branch Library.”** John Stevens, 7, plays an undercover preschooler in the *Super Snooper Mystery Show*. Mark supplied the voice. Photo: Dave Zapotosky / *The Blade*

2000 – 2023

The other side of the curtain.

Twenty-three years running the Vent Haven International Ventriloquists' ConVENTion, and the better part of a decade before that at Maher Studios.

Mark Wade lecturing from the Vent Haven ConVENTion stage in 2017, holding a figure — **Teaching from the ConVENTion stage, 2017.** This is the part he says he misses — not running the event, but the workshops.

Mark Wade interviewing Candice Bergen on the ConVENTion stage — **Interviewing Candice Bergen.** Edgar Bergen's daughter, on the ConVENTion stage. Edgar was one of the three ventriloquists Mark names as his own teachers — at a distance.

Cover of Newsy Vents magazine, 1981, featuring Mark Wade with a figure — **On the cover, 1981.** *Newsy Vents* — the journal of the North American Association of Ventriloquists, which Clinton Detweiler ran out of Maher Studios as effectively Maher's membership arm. Thirty-two years later Mark would reopen Maher himself and relaunch Detweiler's NAAV as the International Ventriloquist Society. He was on its cover long before he was running it.

Mark Wade with ventriloquist Dick Bruno — **With Dick Bruno.** One of many. Forty years in a small art means knowing nearly everyone in it.

Mark Wade in a Vent Haven Museum cap holding a rabbit figure — **Still on the board.** Mark has served on the Board of Advisors of the Vent Haven Museum — the world's only museum of ventriloquism — since 2000.

Forty years of it

All of that is teachable.

Everything above is the long way round. Coaching is the short way — Mark tells you what he learned so you don't have to spend a decade finding it out in gymnasiums.

Work with Mark → Watch the tributes