obviously not your typical puppet show, your typical
musical, your typical anything.

Set designer Anna Louizous has created a gritty and dynamic
set, reminiscent of the clean, bright, primary stoops and
storefronts of children’s television, but layered with the
grime of reality: dull paint, a dusty box fan, stained laundry
on the line. Think Sesame Street 10 years after the crayon
factory closes. Bay windows and awnings unfold into interior
sets like a Playskool farmhouse, and two TV screens hang above
the action, interrupting characters with hilarious animated
lessons about life and language. Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx,
who conceived the unusual production, cowrote the music and
lyrics. The score is deceptively simple, with catchy, sing-song
tunes whose complex harmonies are influenced by ragtime rhythms,
jazz harmonics, pop music, musical theater and the simple
strains of children’s television. The lyrics are honest, clever,
andknown as Barefoot Ken Bob. (It's a long story, but christened Kenneth Robert, he was called Bobby by his family and Ken at school. When he was 17, someone who heard both fused the two. "Barefoot" was added in the early 2000s, the practice of all the early barefooters).

Forget six degrees of separation. For many, as you'll see in the stories told throughout this book, it's one degree: search "barefoot running," get Ken Bob's website, and start running barefoot. All barefoot running roads, at least until Christopher McDougall's _Born To Run_ tsunami hit in mid-2009, seem to lead directly through Ken Bob.

McDougall's barefooting is, in fact, a second degree of separation, as he learned about it from one of the far-out characters who people his book, Barefoot Ted