Ping Pong’s Pint Size Puppet Museum

This is a wonderful place. The hospitality of Steve and Marty make you feel right at home as soon as you open the door. Their love of puppets is evident in the displays and how they talk about all of the puppets they have meticulously made themselves. You know there is a lot of passion in what they do, and you can appreciate all of the work they have done.
Steve spent a lot of time showing us the puppets, telling the history of many of the puppets, and showing the projects they have worked on, particularly the Wee Sing Under the Sea production. The starfish was obviously Steve’s favorite, and we could appreciate all of the work he put into it.
We intend to come back and bring friends. This is one of Portland’s «hidden» treasures waiting to be discovered! People like Steve and Marty definitely contribute to making Portland the place it is.

A must for a keep Portland Weird itinerary. Awesome in an obsessive but innocent kind of way, unless you’re prone to Chucky-​style nightmares.
Based out of an early 20^th-​century building that was once the neighborhood corner store (back in the days when there was a Sellwood Ferry-​crossing rather than a Sellwood Bridge), this little building gets completely reconfigured for new displays/​shows every quarter or so. From Czech fairy tails told by dragons, with small porcelain-​based puppets in hand-​stitched costumes, to larger (3-​ft tall) puppets with which (with whom?) the two puppeteers have made a straight-​to-​DVD movie, the rotation is intriguing.
The two gentlemen (and they strike me as genuinely gentle men) who present these puppets do so with loving obsession. They will talk to you about the process of making each, they will tell you about stitching the clothes for some of them, they will tell you about making puppets for Disney and the Children’s Television Workshop back in the day. And they will then disappear behind their sets and tell you stories with their puppets.
It’s odd and genuine and fun. Not to be missed.