(upbeat music) ♪ Yeah the simple things in life ♪ - Scientists get to do the coolest stuff.

I want to be an astronaut billionaire one day.

- Seems like pretty much everyone has to worry about the pandemic and if they're not, they have bigger problems.

Astronomically bigger, am I right?

(audience laughing) - My guest is Ibba Armancas She is the creator, the producer, and the talent on "Pandemic Playhouse".

Welcome to Lifestyles.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- So this is really interesting.

It's an educational show that covers a variety of topics in a fun way.

Share some of the details about "Pandemic Playhouse" and its purpose.

- Yeah, it was during the pandemic.

I was working actually with your station and I just saw as we were doing a lot of outreach to schools and realizing that kids really didn't have a lot of access during the pandemic to educational materials and the most things they had tend to be geared towards either really young kids, like "Curious George" and that sort of stuff, or was geared a little older, which seemed like the high school, an older crowd.

And so it seemed like there was this gap of educational material that wasn't quite being covered for kids in that late elementary school, early middle school stage.

And I had some friends that were teachers and they were saying, middle school is when people can really get lost and really get left behind.

And it seemed to me that that was just, because middle school is when I felt like certain subjects, perhaps math and science maybe escaped me a little.

And I just thought an opportunity to create something that would be cheeky and weird and appeal to kids that we didn't want to get left behind.

So the goal of the show was to not only educate these kids that didn't have access to maybe as much education or at least modern and timely material about the pandemic and about their safety.

As well as it's just social studies and language arts and civics and science and even yes, math.

- So where did you come up with the concepts?

Was it working with your teacher friends that helped you come up with the subject matters and the concepts and putting it together?

- Yeah, I worked extensively with several teachers.

The show is now part of curriculums in a variety of schools, both here in California, in Washington state and on the east coast, which is exciting.

But yeah, so we worked pretty extensively on what was the core curriculum for kids that age.

We wanted to be able to make this accessible to kids regardless of state.

It's broadcast all over the Midwest right now, courtesy of WTIU.

And yeah, so we did it with that, but then the characters were so fun because it was the beginning of the pandemic.

None of us knew what was gonna happen or how long we were gonna be in it.

So-- - Let me ask you about the characters.

I was wondering if the characters were maybe brewing in your head for a long time, maybe when you were in college and you were always going to do something.

So let's talk about your main characters, Noah and Nelly.

And of course you're the host of the show and keep them moving.

But tell me about Noah and Nelly.

- Well, Nelly, nervous Nelly here, ah.

It's reversed.

Anyway, this is Nelly, she's a little Gorgon.

She's very shy.

She kind of represents the younger kids in the class.

She is a little Medusa or a Gorgon as they're called.

So she's scary.

I always liked Gorgons and I thought what a cute idea to have a little girl who might scare other people, but is herself scared.

So Nelly was a little monster girl and her parents were in Greece because that's where Gorgons are from.

- Oh, I wondered why they were from Greece.

Why her parents were in Greece, okay.

- Yeah.

I was always a big mythology kid growing up.

And so for me, Nelly was the character we could build emotional stories around and the character that we could really talk about mental health and just taking care of yourself.

And maybe she's a little younger and a little sweeter than some of those early middle school kids.

But ideally she would evoke like a younger sister or a sibling that you can be like, "Okay, well she's cute.

She's cute, she's allowed to stay."

- Okay, and now let's talk about her brother, Noah.

- Yes.

Noah, Noah is big.

Noah is quite big, ah.

(Ibba laughing) Noah is a troll boy and his full name is Noah Tall because he knows it all.

- [Lillian] Cute.

- And, thank you.

He was speaking to the class clown.

So we wanted a character that could be funny and silly and irreverent and question me the host.

The thing I was going for as a host was I don't think I have the gravitas of Mr. Rogers or any of that.

So I thought I'd be like an older sister or like a babysitter, someone that wasn't always right.

And so Noah was there for kids to be able to say, "Hey, the adults in my life aren't always right."

And I was there to kind of be, "Okay, well we aren't always, but that doesn't mean you still don't have things to learn."

- When you started putting the show together.

Did you have a background in building puppets?

Did you have an idea - No.

- Of what they were going to look like?

How did that go?

I guess the biggest thing is how did you create this during a pandemic?

- Yeah, I mean, it was really bizarre.

I had never worked with puppets before, but it was really important to me that whatever we did to try and help with the pandemic, we weren't putting people in danger.

And so looking at CDC guidelines, you really weren't supposed to have people in the same room.

There was no way I was gonna be able to get a lot of actors together.

So I thought, well, if I have puppets, all I need is one puppeteer and me, and we can make this work.

So I reached out, I just did a post on Facebook, honestly.

And I reached out to a couple of friends that did cosplay and other stuff like that.

Just people that were builders and makers.

And we got one of my very good friends, actually two good friends helped design Nelly.

I said, "Hey, I want nervous Nelly.

She's a cute Gorgon."

And then one of my friends who'd never made a puppet made Noah and he's very big and very unwieldy, but that's, I think, some of his charm, I think that's how you feel when you're in middle school sometimes, especially after a growth spurt.

And yeah, and then we got really lucky, this woman who, cause we have the two children puppets and then the other puppets are educators.

So Facty and Fakey, teaching kids about fact-checking.

Our laptop and our, this is Fakey.

He doesn't always believe in the right articles, but he cares about people.

And his sister Facty.

And they were built by a woman that's worked on a lot of major shows and we reached out and we were like, "Hey, we just want to do something to help kids."

And she was like, "I'm not doing anything."

So a lot of how we were able to get the puppets made were we just brought, it's the middle of a pandemic.

We're all going out of our heads crazy.

And we don't feel like we have anything we can do.

So it became something that a bunch of people in my life and even not in my life, just came into it to help feel like we could do something.

- And did you have a budget to do this entire project?

- No.

- No.

So you did it with the will, with your sheer will of course, that's your tenacity and the personality that you have, but you also were able to get others to buy into it with you.

- Yeah, we were incredibly lucky.

Some of our voice talent is really amazing.

The woman that does Nelly is an actress here in LA and she's been for the video gamers out there.

She's been in "Fire Emblem", she's been in "Street Fighter".

She's been in all these big games.

She's been in, I think the "Star Trek" series.

And she was a good friend.

And then the guy that plays Fakey he's another video game legend.

He plays Colonel Shepard in "Mass Effect", which is a fairly big video game.

And then the rest of them were just people that got forwarded to us.

So to me it was magical because we just went and we said, "Look, we have a goal and we're trying to help some kids.

And we have an amazing crew of writers."

We got something like seven or eight writers that came on and helped us write the episodes and it was very stone soup.

Everyone brought their one little nugget, in the end we had a soup.

- Wow.

So what are some of the subject matters that you discuss?

- We always have a science and a history thing.

I think one of my favorite episodes was we discussed the Capitol Crawl, which is a lesser known piece of activism.

It was for the disability rights movement.

- Yes.

- Up until the passage of the ADA in 1990 disabled people did not have access to many buildings or buses.

And that was so bizarre for me to find because ramps, when I was growing up, ramps were everywhere.

And so discovering that that wasn't long ago, and this one thing, the Capitol Crawl, we were actually able to work with the disability rights group that had been part of it.

They're called Adapt.

And they shot this incredible footage of these people coming to the steps and to protest the fact that they did not have access to the governmental buildings where people made laws, they got out of their wheelchairs and they crawled up.

And we were able to highlight a young girl named Jennifer Keelan, who was very young, six or seven, who was crawling up the steps and had this incredible will, just screaming, "I'm gonna take all night if I have to."

And to me that was one of the core things that our show was trying to teach was things that seem real, things that affect kids' lives and maybe stories that you wouldn't get in a different moment.

And so that was one that we did that I was really happy with.

And because we tell stories, we did a history lesson on the Mexican American war, specifically, a man called Joaquin Murrieta who was the man that inspired "The Legend of Zorro".

And we were able to work with an incredible group.

They're Pro Wrestling Revolution.

They are a authentic Luchador school.

And when we credited all of them, we had to credit them as their character names because you can't reveal who the men behind the masks are.

And the women.

And so we were able to tell the story of Joaquin Murrieta in a very gritty grind house flavor with Luchador wrestlers.

- How has the show been perceived or how has it been received?

And who's the audience that's checking it out?

- Yeah, well the show so far, we've been very fortunate.

We've gotten some fan mail, that's been really lovely.

So far, we've had quite a few kids in the demographic we're going for.

We have a couple kids that are younger.

I think we've gotten most our fan mail from kids in the eight to nine age group.

And it's really fun who people connect with.

A lot of people really like how cute Nelly is.

And her arc is really going from being scared all the time to learning that she can stand up for herself.

We have a musical episode in which she learns about journaling in order to help her get her thoughts down and understand how she's feeling.

So a lot of kids it seemed really connected with her.

I think her quietness, I was really surprised a lot of kids connected with one of our characters, Augie, who is a set of augmented reality glasses with ADD and he teaches our science segments.

And so his quirk is that he knows everything, but he can't focus on anything.

So you always have to-- - Always got to stay on that.

So how can it be seen?

Not just in the Midwest, but in general, how can it be viewed?

- Yes, if you go onto the PBS Passport app, you can look up "The Friday Zone", which is a really fun variety show.

They've won some Emmy's.

We are eligible this year for a regional for being on the show, and they were incredible.

So if you find "The Friday Zone" on PBS Passport, you can go and check it out.

They have a little opener, you can tend to see us in the little teaser opener, and then we tend to be two or three segments in.

- And is that the only way people can see it at this time?

- No, you can also check out our episodes on our YouTube page.

Right now we are talking with a couple stations about getting a second season to deal with the fallout.

And we've got, I'm really excited because we have a finale that we worked hand-in-hand with NASA for, and we were able to shoot it as a capstone for the project.

And that will be airing in late August.

And yeah, we were able to get NASA footage, color it, integrate puppets.

And the song, we have a huge musical number.

And the song was created by one of our NASA colleagues who took the microphone that went up to Mars and he turned those sounds of Mars and the Rover into synthesizers.

And so he built the entire final song out of the sounds of Mars.

- Nice, well, how long are the segments?

Are they long segments?

Is it a half hour, is it five minutes?

How long are the segments?

- No, each segment is about five to six minutes sometimes a little shorter - Oh good.

- Sometimes a little longer.

So it was originally conceived as a half hour show.

So some of the episodes were shot altogether, but they had segments within them.

So then when we got approached by "The Friday Zone", we were able to take those and chunk them out.

And so, yeah, all the episodes are four to six.

- And correct me if I'm wrong, Ibba.

You shot this or some of these in your home?

- Yes.

- During the pandemic, right?

- Yes.

- You converted a bedroom or what did you convert?

- Well my roommates were incredibly kind in that they let me paint our living room.

So we had a fireplace against the wall and I reached out and I was able to get, went to Home Depot, got a bunch of colors, painted the living room in teals and pinks and yellows and more pinks.

- You're right, those are some nice roommates.

- They were very, very kind, shout out to all of them.

- So that's how it all started.

Now, it has the name "Pandemic Playhouse".

Where do you go from here?

We're hoping this pandemic is over, is coming to a halt.

We don't know, things keep changing.

So will it have a new name or what will you do from here?

- We've been talking about that with various folks.

The thing that I keep coming back to is "Pandemic Playhouse" is the name as it stands.

And I think that even when we are past the pandemic, this is something that is going to shape the lives of everyone that went through it.

And especially the children that went through it.

I think about growing up with 9/11 and it's a very different situation, but everything in the world changed.

And the only thing you notice when you're a kid is the airports.

But there was so much that shifted.

And I think this generation of kids is gonna come out of this and maybe not be fully aware of how the world is changing around them and maybe be aware, but the goal of the show, I think even in a post pandemic playhouse world, which we've considered just adding a little post pandemic.

- Yeah, exactly, uh huh.

- But I think we're probably gonna end up keeping the name just because I think the things that we still need to talk about and what's happened, we got through it, but have we processed it?

- Right.

So there's still more to talk about.

- [Ibba] Yeah.

- Ibba Armancas is our guest, thank you so much for sharing this "Playhouse Pandemic" your characters Noah and Nelly, and some of the others.

We look forward to seeing it coming to a theater near you.

I don't know what to say, coming to a television or a streaming near you.

- Check us out on YouTube at "Pandemic Playhouse" on YouTube, or check us out on the PBS app at "The Friday Zone" and be sure to look for our special episode with NASA, starring perseverance and ingenuity coming out in the end of the summer.

- Congratulations Ibba.

- Thank you so much.

- Take care.

- You too.

- My guest now is John Tribelhorn.

He is the president of the Arts Council in Menifee.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- You're welcome, glad to be here.

- So first things first, I want to talk about the city of Menifee obviously has an Arts Council.

And one of the projects that you have is kind of framed after "America's Got Talent", which you appropriately named, not you specifically, your council named "Menifee's Got Talent".

Tell me how the talent show has worked in the past.

- Well, in the past, we would have live auditions at a location and we would normally have since it had grown because we've been doing it for many years.

We would have 50 or 60 people that would audition, but we would only have time to present maybe 22 or 25 people.

So although we're not really buzzing people off and telling them how terrible they are, we are picking and choosing the best acts that are available and that's how it was done in the past.

And then we would have a location where we would present it to a live audience and we would normally have about three to 400 people that would attend and listen to what we had to present.

- Okay.

So let me just stop you there and talk about, we're just gonna talk about the past for right now, before we talk about the present.

Do they win something or is it just the honor to perform in "Menifee's Got Talent"?

- It's just, I don't know if it's an honor, but it certainly is just, we usually can get a business to provide the artists with some little goodie bags, but there's no cash prize or anything like that - Okay, so it's really just the opportunity to perform and to support Menifee and to show off Menifee?

- Exactly.

And the show, all the different, I mean, we have people from under the age of 10 up to the age of 90 that have performed and it's quite a enjoyable event for people.

- Okay.

So that is what you have done in the past.

What did you do during COVID?

- Well, the first year we canceled, like everybody else, for 2020, and then at the beginning of 2021, in fact at our February trustees meeting, we were talking about, well, what can we do?

Cause we haven't really done anything for a year.

Is there something we could do?

And I believe it was Mary Carnes who was very involved, brought up the idea.

Well, could we do a virtual "Menifee's Got Talent"?

And we all liked the idea.

So Linda Denver, who I think you know put out a call for, we needed a studio or someplace to do this and be able to record it.

And people that had talent to do the recording so that we could put it on the internet.

And immediately she got a response from Joe Williams of the Parish Unified School District, high school district who volunteered to be a complete liaison and run us through the whole process to allow us to film at Heritage High School.

- Did each act go into Heritage High School one after another, after another.

So they were just there by themselves, no audience and no one else or how did that work?

- That's exactly correct.

We scheduled them about every 30 minutes, I believe, even though most acts were only about five to 10 minutes.

We scheduled them every 30 minutes.

We had a waiting area outside and we were also constricted by the school district's requirements for COVID.

They were very strict as well.

So the only people inside were myself and people doing the recording, a teacher, Nick Galanter from Heritage High School that teaches kids how to do filming and things.

Somebody in the booth to do the lighting and the person on stage.

Oh, and we had an emcee that was on the corner of the stage completely social distanced that announced everybody.

And it's the same emcee we used for the live performances.

And he got all dressed up, like it was a live performance and did a nice introduction of each act.

- Okay so let me just ask when you're doing it this way, did you have more or less participants doing it this way?

- We had 17 acts this year, so a little bit less.

We certainly didn't have 50 auditions.

And in fact, although we had a few people that had never done it before, because we did post on social media that we were interested in acts.

A lot of the acts were people we called up and said, "Hey, we're gonna do this, do you want to participate?"

- Okay.

So now everybody's come in, the 17 acts, you've recorded that, somebody edited that.

And then it was for YouTube?

- It's actually on our website, artscouncilmenifee.org, .org and if you scroll down on the homepage, you'll see more info on "Menifee's Got Talent".

I should note that Mr. Galanter and his students are the ones that did all the editing and putting it all together to make it a complete, pretty seamless thing.

Although since we'd never done it that way, there were a few challenges, but not very many.

We thought it came out pretty well.

- [Lillian] Okay so if someone wants to see it, they could go to arts?

- [John] Yes, artscouncilmenifee.org.

- So if people wanted to see it, that's where they could go and see it.

Now, what are your plans for the future?

- Well, our plans for "Menifee's Got Talent" for the future is hopefully in 2022 to be able to do it the way we've done it for many, many years, knock on wood.

We're still trying to do things.

One of the things we actually started this last year, we have a art boutique here in Sun City, a community of Menifee where the local artists can display and sell their work.

- Oh, nice.

So is that the room that you're in now is showing off some of that artwork?

- That is the room I am in now.

- All right, let me just ask who participates in "Menifee's Got Talent"?

You said it's a variety of acts, it ranged from seven to 90 or something to that.

What types of acts would we see or did we see in the 17 that did participate?

- Okay pretty much the same kind of thing that we have even in the past participated this year.

So we have individual singers that are singing with a backing track because we don't have a full orchestra to provide them.

We have people playing musical instruments.

We had guitarists who sang.

We had a trumpet player playing trumpet.

We had a bass player just playing the bass.

We had a pianist, we had two dance troupes, one from the high school district and one ballet folklorico which is a very well-known local one for kids in the area.

- Very good.

And why did the council decide to do something like this?

What was its original purpose?

- Just to put on a talent show locally and to show people and give them an enjoyable evening.

It's very inexpensive too, when we do charge for admission, it's like $5 and that's just to cover our costs for renting space and things like that.

Just to provide some entertainment.

I mean, we had a kid this year and he participated last year.

He dressed up as Alexander Hamilton and did a song from Hamilton, it's such great family entertainment.

We really enjoy doing it.

- Okay.

- So now 2022, fingers are crossed that you'll be able to do it next year.

When will the additions typically, not holding you to it but when are the additions typically held?

- Usually early spring, around March or April.

And then we usually, somewhere late April or May do the performance.

- So it is a good possibility.

Maybe it will take place in 2022.

John, thank you so much for your time.

And for sharing more about "Menifee's Got Talent" and I'm sure they do.

- Yes thank you for having us.

(upbeat music) ♪ Yeah the simple things in life ♪