44: Who Was The Old Woman With The Marionette?

A viral star has passed at 92

At the end of 2014, I joined AARP’s new video production team, AARP Studios. On the surface, AARP may not seem like the most obvious place to make videos, but in fact it has presented many opportunities to tell great stories highlighting amazing people over the years.

One of the very first videos I made for AARP remains one of my favorites of all time, and it stars a woman who just passed away last Thursday at 92. So I thought I’d take a look back at Doris Diether. The name probably doesn’t ring a bell, but you may still know who she was.

In January 2015, I saw this viral photo by Nathalie Kalbach, captioned “85 year old woman and her identical marionette twin feed a squirrel in New York City’s Washington Square Park.”

Photo by Nathalie Kalbach

Maybe you’ve seen it. Sometimes the photo circulates around the internet with a caption claiming it’s a woman in some Eastern European country. And it was once the subject of a Reddit Photoshop Battle resulting in humorous variations like these:

I love quirky real-life characters and I knew there must be some story behind this woman. Ever since I saw Being John Malkovich, I had always wanted to do a project about a marionette puppeteer. So I did a little research. I learned that the marionette was the work of Ricky Syers, a street performer who met Doris because they both spent a lot of time in Washington Square Park.

I found Ricky’s contact information, and he helped me arrange a video shoot with himself and Doris. They were both incredible characters. The result was this video released a few months later:

The video got millions of views and YouTube and Facebook. It might seem at first that the little old lady was what made this good content for AARP. But Ricky had just turned 50 and found a new direction in his life as an artist. He became the core of the piece, and audiences related strongly to him.

To keep the story focused on one main character, I had to omit a lot of what made Doris special, which was her passion as an activist. She lived in the same Greenwich Village apartment for 60 years, and became a protector of the community. She lobbied against Robert Moses and his plans to end the free Shakespeare in the Park performances, and to redesign the park so Fifth Avenue ran through it.

She once went to Governor Rockefeller’s office with a pig “as a symbol of greed and avarice” to protest the demolition of old buildings to make way for luxury apartments.

She joined the Community Board in 1964, and remained active, even recently protesting plans to ban live music in Washington Square Park.

I set a Google News alert for “Doris Deither” to stay on top of her activities. In the last couple years, as she grew more frail, every time my Google News alert for “Doris Diether” went off, I braced myself in case the news was that she had died. But she kept on going, and they were aways stories about her activism for one neighborhood cause or another, or a small Greenwich Village celebration of her 90th birthday.

Then last week I got the alert that she had passed. She will be missed. But she’ll always live on as the little old lady with the marionette of herself.

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

David

P.S. Since I mentioned Doris’s activism, I should probably add as a matter of diligence that AARP is a nonpartisan organization and I don’t mean to imply that they would have any position at all on Robert Moses or Governor Rockefeller.