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54
FRIDAY MARCH 18 1988
Puppeteer
Continued from preceding page
tured storyteller at Sefer
Safari at the Jewish Corn-
munity Center, an event in
which youngsters heard
Schiffman's interpretation of
Noah's Ark and got to assume
the guises of the biblical
animals who lined up "two by
two."
An East Indian medical
group contacts her annually
to perform at its parties,
and a Japanese group in Ann
Arbor counts itself among
her regular customers. She
has done benefits for Echo
Park School and Roeper City
and Country School, and per-
formed for the Lycee Interna-
tionale, a French school, in
Southfield.
Schiffman sings in Hebrew,
plays the piano, mandolin,
banjo, squeezebox, guitar,
autoharp and pianolyn and
performs all of her own songs
at the Wednesday enrich-
ment classes she provides
pre-schoolers at Temple
Emanu-El.
It comes as a surprise,
therefore, to learn that Schiff-
man never intended perform-
ing to be her career but
rather a beloved hobby. She
had fully prepared to become
an elementary school teacher.
It was only after a well-
received performance at
girlfriend Judy Schram's
son's party more than six
years ago that Schiffman
embarked on party per-
formances.
The Novi resident remem-
bers her Oak Park childhood
was filled with music and
entertainment. Both her par-
ents taught ballroom danc-
ing, and her father was a very
competent pianist. Schiffman
was introduced to tap, jazz
and ballroom dance from the
age of eight years old and
took piano lessons, too.
"I hated ballet!" she recalls
with a grimace. "That's the
one dance I wouldn't take."
Schiffman studied dance
with Barbara Fink, who now
operates Miss Barbara's
Dance Center in Farmington
Hills, at what was then the
Julie Adler School of Dance
in Oak Park. With several
classmates, Schiffman was a
frequent participant on the
Poopdeck Paul Show and also
appeared on Rita Bell's after-
school variety show for
talented local youngsters.
In college at the Universi-
ty of Michigan, Schiffman
starred in a sorority play. One
of her sorority sisters, Mari-
lyn Michaels, became an ac-
claimed singer and impres-
sionist. A cousin of hers has
performed with Tina Turner.
But Schiffman hadn't set
her sights on national fame.
She believed her creativity
would find an outlet in the
Schiffman appears for private birthday parties and community events.
classroom. She had an oppor-
tunity to try this out in her
student teaching assignment.
"My sixth-grade pupils in
Ann Arbor were unusually
bright and restless," Schiff-
man comments. "lb keep
them from getting bored, I
used to think up dance rou-
tines. The guys were really
turned off, and resisted the
idea, but I introduced a kind
of rumble sequence from
West Side Story. The girls
did a sketch from the Officer
Krupke scenario. Would you
believe, the guys did a great
job? When the girls per-
formed, they tittered and
giggled and acted like the
whole thing was embarrass-
ing and silly."
After job hunting in ear-
nest, Schiffman learned a sad
fact of the early 1970s: jobs
for aspiring elementary
school teachers were prac-
tically non-existent. She took
a position teaching math at a
Detroit area junior high
school. Although her imag-
ination was appreciated by
many of the students, the
principal was tough and
critical of her non-traditional
methods She tried subbing
for a while, to prove to herself
that it was the system that
was unbending and blocking
her progress, and not her own
abilities.
"But I felt like I was
babysitting. I wasn't getting
anything out of it."
Something positive had
happened during those years,
however. She was re-ac-
quainted with the man she
would marry.
"I had first met Leonard
when we were about 11 years
old and a friend of mine had
a crush on him. We met as
adults at a party, and found
we had a lot in common, es-
pecially music, and guitar."
The pair used to sing together
on the phone every night
before they were married
in the mid-1970s. Leonard
Schiffman currently teaches
severely mentally impaired
students in the Waterford
school system, and, according
to his wife, plays many in-
struments better than she
does.
In the earlier years of their
marriage, Maureen Schiff-
man took one more rather
traditional job, that as an ad-
ministrative assistant for an
international company, before
she decided that she was
going to work with young
children — regardless of the
sacrifices she had to make.
She volunteered as a lunch-
aide at Akiva Hebrew Day
School and managed to turn
what could have been another
babysitting job into a forum
for enjoyment. She enter-
tained the kids at lunchtime,
with puppets, sang, put on
skits, involved them in her
routines. Soon she was work-
ing every day and enjoying
herself. It was during this
time she gave her first birth-
day party performance. After
placing newspaper ads and
gaining a reputation through
word of mouth referrals, she