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The office of Dr. Silly is a very good place to be a kid.Dr. Silly, known to adults as Anthony J. Palumbo, PhD, children's therapist, sees his patients in a nice sunny room with a good supply of toys, action figures and other stuff to play with. There is a table soccer game wedged behind the desk, and board games are stacked to the ceiling. Most important of all, there are dozens and dozens of puppets, all kinds of puppets in virtually every costume imaginable, lined up on the bookshelves, waiting -- heads cocked, legs dangling -- for someone to invent a story.
Parents in search of academic credentials will find thick texts and piles of journals comforting, but it is the puppets who testify to the power of Dr. Silly's most important therapeutic tool. Here, they silently remind everyone who enters, is a man who meets children as a traveling companion -- older, smarter, a lot more certain about the way out of their troubles and into a happier future, but still enough like them to know how they feel.
"Silly was more like a friend than a shrink," Jonathan Nickerson, 17, says of the year he spent in weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Silly after his parents divorced. "We made films together. It was fun."
When they first talked, Jonathan was reeling from the breakup of his family, from abandonment by his father, who moved to the Midwest and rarely contacted him, and the feelings of inadequacy and rejection that inevitably followed. Dr. Silly penetrated Jonathan's wounded silence by staging weekly "shoots" of a long-running video with action figures standing in for real events and genuine feelings. In the process, Dr. Silly slowly eased Jonathan's desolation into the light of a miniature video sound stage and, in the process, set him free.
"Many hurt children are silent," Dr. Silly explained. "I use play and puppets and video to get them to express what gives them such pain."
Seven years later, Jonathan has gained enough distance to dismiss that period as "the worst year of my life," and to know when it's time to see Dr. Silly again.
"Ah, yes, Jonathan has a girlfriend," Dr. Silly says in a thick Viennese accent. "He must have zee tune-up."
Gales of laughter, the most common sound of a session with Dr. Silly, bounce around the room.
Hundreds of children from the water-fringed communities along Buzzards Bay in southeastern Massachusetts have had their lives similarly transformed by Dr. Silly. They come, chauffeured by worried parents, to Silly's office at the rear of a small house in the old seaside neighborhood of Wareham -- a block from the beach, half an inlet from Cape Cod and an entire world away from the emotional pain that brought them there.
After 10 years as a university teacher and author of books on play therapy, Dr. Silly has the typical therapist's pastiche of analytical techniques and insights -- Freud, Jung, Skinner, their followers and debunkers. But he also commands hundreds of characters, accents, slapstick routines, stories and allegories -- the legacy of 20 years as a puppeteer, including studies at the Institut International de la Marionette in France and Institut für Therapeutisches Puppenspiels in Switzerland. Drawing on puppetry's almost limitless repertoire of clowns and sages, Dr. Silly cloaks therapeutic insights in laughter and, in the process, reminds children burdened with sadness of the sheer fun of doing something...well, silly.
Dr. Silly's therapeutic playground is a little bit mad, a little bit manic. One minute he narrates "Little Red Riding Hood" as Don Corleone would have told it to his grandchildren if he hadn't had a heart attack in the middle of the tomato plants ("There was this old lady. They called her Grandma..."). The next minute he imitates a nun demanding to see math homework, with all the moral might of the Vatican focused on the sin of unfinished fractions. Sometimes he crafts his approach in advance. Other times, he simply wings it.
"I had this one boy I absolutely could not get to talk," Dr. Silly recalled. "I went through my whole bag of tricks, and he still wouldn't talk." Finally, Dr. Silly remembered an Italian puppeteer he'd seen perform in France and launched into an operatic falsetto: "Talk, talk, talk, who needs talk? I will sing to you until your head is completely shrunk..." The kid began to sing as well: "No, no, no, you will never shrink my brain." The two brought most of the youngster's problems into the open during an hour-long session of therapy as opera buffa.
In short, no child can resist him, which is a good thing considering how many children need help in times of crisis. They are referred to Dr. Silly by pediatricians, school counselors and, for a heart-breaking few, by the staff of hospitals for patients with acute mental illness. Some come to him because they are drowning in the dislocations of divorce. Others contend with bullying and ostracism because they are different -- physically or intellectually limited, disabled or, strangest of all to kids on American school buses, they simply don't like to play sports. Most of his patients are boys between the ages of 8 and 15 who are estranged from their fathers. A few have already been suicidal or self-destructive.
"They seem to send me the hard cases," Dr. Silly muses as he casts his mind over the parade of children he has treated. "I call them the stoop-shouldered kids. They're bent under the burdens of their problems and their pain. I try to make them laugh to release them from all that. God knows, they need something to lighten their lives."
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