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Norman Ober's touching tale of love and triumph over grief, "Anita's Heaven" is now available. The release date for the trade paperback was December 1st. For more information, contact info@bloomingtwigbooks.com

Before he met the love of his life, Norman Ober traveled America with touring marionette shows, popular with kindergartners who wet their seats to high scholars who sat in because their classrooms were more boring. Unsuspecting audiences never knew when they witnessed a backstage accident instead of the intended scene. Some examples:

In “The Count of Monte Cristo,” adapted by Norman Ober, vengeance called for Edmond, the hero, to plunge a dagger into the chest of Fernand, who had betrayed him. It was unthinkable for him to use a firearm in front of children. The dagger called for special stringing that worked only halfway one memorable performance. The puppeteer, Norman, got the dagger up out of out of Edmond’s sash and poised above for the plunge. But strings tangled and the dagger was stuck on high. After futile efforts to dislodge it for the coup de grace, Norman, to allow the curtain to come down ending the act, gasped in the voice of Fernand, doubled over, “My heart! My heart!” and then he collapsed of a heart attack..

 

In “Buffalo Billy,” the Indian boy Yellow Hand saves Billy from a snake and they become blood brothers. The assault on the snake, as written, called for Yellow Hand to throw himself on the snake and crush it with his body. The scene looked contrived and got laughs from the older children – until one day, by sheer accident, Yellow Hand’s strings caught on the fence prop that stretched across the stage. Frantic yanking got a single section of fence free and Norman, controlling the puppet, threw Yellow Hand AND the section of fence at the snake. The children gasped and cheered. From then on, the scene was rigged to play that way.

 

In, “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates,” played with all characters on skates, the rotund figure of the Burgomeister, a comic figure, came skating onstage looking for his son Voostenwalbert, which looked splendid, except just one time. Until needed, marionettes were “strung” on hooks just out of sight of the audience on whichever side they entered. One show, to his horror and the shocked reaction of the audience, Norman swept the old gentleman onstage with his head missing. Lamely ad libbing a line for the Burgomeister, “Och! I’m zo forgetful. I forgot my head!” Ober swept the character back offstage where another puppeteer quickly reattached the head to the body for another grand entrance. That disaster was never repeated.

 

Then this: a student, helping us set up our portable theatre, dropped King Henry the Eighth.

 (“The Prince and the Pauper”) and shattered his face shortly before curtain time. The show

went on without the monarch. His lines were spoken by the Prince’s trusted Uncle, the Earl

of Hartford. Every night for weeks, another part of the king’s face was repaired on the road between shows until, weeks later, Henry was more or less himself. By that time, we were so used to the new

ad libbed lines that we had to send home for the manuscript and relearn the original lines.

Love wasn’t blind when Norman Ober fell in love with Anita at first sight and told her so.

First she fled from him, but he stood his ground and won the fair lady. Their romance and  marriage made in heaven are described in “Anita’s Heaven,” a new book by Norman Ober, based on their 3000 channeled letters that began three years after her death and continue changing his life to this day. Among Anita’s astonishing, at times controversial, descriptions of God’s miracles and His goals for humankinds, are lighter recollections of their three years together and apart during World War II:

 

  • For six months they shared a loving paradise of their own at a Naval Training Station in upper New York State, when he wrote radio dramas for the Navy and they had  “Happy Hours” in which he performed outlandish skits for his shipmates; where they roamed farmlands taken over by the Navy, picked ripe fruit and vegetables and lived as honeymooners in their enchanted cottage until

  • Uncle Sam shipped them to Tongue Point, Oregon for seven months, where Anita opened a pre-school for tots and toddlers, where Norman learned to be a Navy weatherman and edited the base’s newsmagazine, where a tame deer named Jenny wandered into and out of the cottages, fat and overfed, where Anita learned to broil Chinook Salmon from the Columbia River, “put up” jam made from huge blackberries and confronted Norman with her first chicken bought from a butcher in Astoria who left it to her (actually him) to pluck and prepare. Then

  • they followed his orders to San Pedro, where they escaped a collision between a “Toonerville Trolley” and a large gasoline truck, walked on what Ripley called the shortest, most dangerous street in the world, Beacon Street with its guns for sale, prostitutes, pimps and conmen, en route to Terminal Island – where he eventually boarded “The USS Carlisle” as its weatherman and newspaper editor

  • and Anita eventually moved to Hollywoodland to live with cousins for the duration of their separation, notable for a Santa Ana wind that tore Anita’s drying laundry from the roof of her temporary residence, for Norman’s complaining letters about their separation and her eight page handwritten notes to him about

  • measuring Mexican workers for alterations to their jeans, being lonesome, encounters with eager sailors hard to convince she was a Navy wife, being turned away from The Top of the Mark because they didn’t believe she was old enough to drink, and hundreds of small adventures while waiting for her gob to appear. Meantime, he

  • was held up as  as an example by the ship’s doctor of the dissolution Pacific islands would wreak if they lived as he allegedly did; persuaded the ship’s captain to change course from the path of a hurricane, offering to pay the captain’s bet with another skipper as to which ship reached the West Coast first; slept on the roof of the shack of his one-man weather station on tropical nights at sea - and missed Anita.