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sighs Fator, who, after championing the TV competition, landed a 10-year contract with the Mirage. “He and I both know that and I have no delusions about it. Actually, when I was competing on the show, my sister kept badgering me to put dark glasses and a black wig on Winston and do Roy Orbison’s voice. I did it because I felt I had the potential to win – especially because I was doing Roy Orbison with my mouth closed. While the other contestants were at the beach, I’d be in my room practicing 8-10 hours a day. “Before America’s Got Talent, I had been performing at fairs, festivals and elementary schools,” he recalls. “I would do a duet between Kermit and Louis Armstrong singing ‘It’s a Wonderful World.’ I thought it could get me to the next level so I contacted the Muppets to ask if I could use a Kermit puppet and they told me no, nobody does Kermit; he is one puppet, one voice. So I thought, what if I had another amphibian that could do an impression of Kermit? I called the Muppets back and they said that I could do that as long as the puppet didn’t look too much like Kermit. And Winston was born.” In watching Fator’s hilarious show, which is entirely new – including a new puppet and side-splitting videos and still photos – and debuted on his second anniversary at the hotel in March, the thing about his puppet family is that you really begin to believe that they are real entities separate and apart from Fator. And that’s just the way he intends it to be. “I feel like they are real characters and I have spent hours manipulating them and putting them into real situations, such as Winston’s not making enough money in the show,” Fator explains. “I have to make them real to the audience by giving each puppet a reason to be there and having people envision each one doing something else outside of the show – I don’t want to be up there just telling jokes. When I can create a mental image of a puppet in people’s minds, it becomes a real character to them.” With it all, Fator is an anomaly. Although he fully expected after he won America’s Got Talent that other
ventriloquist/impressionists would pop up, none have shown up to date. And don’t expect to see one anytime soon. “My voice doctor, who handles the world’s top singers, says that what I do is physically impossible,” Fator reveals. “He admits that he doesn’t understand how I do it.” It all began when, as a child, Fator started imitating singers such as Michael Jackson, the Osmonds and Frankie Valli. On Valentine’s Day 1975, he was looking for a book in the school library so that he could write a Valentine’s Day report and accidentally overshot it, coming across a book on ventriloquism. That day changed his life – he began doing ventriloquism at the age of 10 and got his first puppet at 12, a lion puppet he named Jackal Michson that sang Michael Jackson songs. “When I was 12, I told my family that I was going to start carrying my puppet around and I brought it to the dinner table so that I could learn to relate to it,” Fator laughs. “I’d have the puppet say, ‘Please pass the potatoes.’ My brother and sister would roll their eyes but my mom related to it and actually made a plate of food for him. She also called him a figure and not a dummy. I spent a lot of time studying and watching people and noticed that when they turned their heads to the left or right, their eyes followed. So my second puppet had eyes that moved back and forth. “My mom saved for three years and then contacted one of the top ventriloquist puppet-makers in the country,” he continues. “He had an original figure just sitting in his office that had never been used by anyone and he offered to sell it to her for $1,000. When she told him that she only had $500, he sold it to her for that price. She gave it to me for my 18th birthday. That puppet became Walter T. Airedale, the cowboy country singer, and is in my show today. He has had to be refurbished a couple of times but he is well-oiled and up to date. He is my sentimental favorite puppet while Winston is my signature puppet and actual favorite.” Though he started performing professionally at about 19, joining a band and doing celebrity voices through ventriloquism and a heavy metal puppet, in reality, Fator had no childhood. His father was emotionally
Berry Fabulous
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