"Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you."
'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.
'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'
'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'
'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
the velveteen squirrel is an experiment in the puppetry of fresh animal skins. Using an adult squirrel and a baby squirrel, after skinning, the two are used as puppets 'acting out' the excerpt above from The Velveteen Rabbit.
Performed at Storage Art & Performance Space in Oberlin, OH, in April 2015.