"Avenue Q" puppeteer Sharon Wheatley shows reporter Corey Levitan how to work the character Trekkie Monster prior to his debut in the show, below. Photos by Craig L. Moran.

Kevin Noonchester is used to working with dummies. Still, he wasn't prepared for me.

"Stunt double!" the puppeteer yells.

We're in rehearsals for my debut in "Avenue Q" at the Wynn Las Vegas, and Noonchester is helping me work a character called Trekkie Monster. Most of this adult musical's puppets require only two human hands; Trekkie requires three (one for his head and one for each arm). This is unfortunate for Noonchester, owner of the human hand in Trekkie's right arm, since I have accidentally slammed a window on it.

The 33-year-old Los Angeles native shakes off what everyone onstage hopes is not a permanent injury.

"Do I get combat pay?" he asks stage manager Joel Rosen.

Puppeteering is good work if you can get it. It's fun, you get to trade shirt cuffs for dolls and, at least at "Avenue Q," you start at $1,600 a week. It's a job Noonchester -- a former voice-over announcer -- would have given his right arm for. And he may well have.

Before today, my puppeteering resume boasted only the operation of a toy Muppet, Bert, in the month following my seventh birthday in which I wasn't sick of him yet. (OK, so it was my ninth birthday. You got a problem with that?)

"Avenue Q" has a character who looks uncannily like Bert. His name is Nicky. He quibbles with a roommate who looks uncannily like Ernie. Nicky is gay yet claims to have a girlfriend in Canada. Her name, he announces after having to think about it, is Alberta.

My Bert puppet wasn't gay, as far as I knew, but he had issues. He liked saying insanely inappropriate things to my little sister as we rode in the back of our parents' 1981 Pontiac LeMans.

The producers of "Avenue Q" claim their show isn't based even slightly on "Sesame Street." According to them, mere coincidence explains why, for instance, Trekkie communicates in the same grammatically incorrect grunt-speak as Cookie Monster -- in addition to possessing the same furry texture, last name and voracious appetite. (His is for Internet porn. Trekkie's cookies are the computer kind.)

What is genuinely unique about the foam-faced creations of puppet-maker Rick Lyon -- other than their truck-stop mouths -- is that their operators do not hide themselves. Initially, audiences tend to be weirded out. But after the first song, the lip-flapping humans onstage start seeming more like accessories to their inanimate main characters -- not unlike Paris Hilton's latest boyfriend.

I'm one of the few operators "Avenue Q" is trying to hide, however. Noonchester and I are behind Trekkie, in a window at the top of the musical's New York tenement set. And scooching my face next to Trekkie's in that window isn't an option. The set is built to 80 percent human scale, and my head is built to 200 percent human scale.

"Trekkie's not centered!" Rosen corrects me.

Hmm. No one complained about how I operated Bert (other than my little sister).

If you've seen "Avenue Q" -- and you probably haven't because it's being forced to close on Sunday, after nine months -- you may be thinking that my scene is one of its most outrageous, the one where Trekkie does something in his window that cannot be described in a family newspaper.

I wish. Rosen wouldn't let me near that scene.

"You have to position yourself just so, or it looks like he's pulling his tongue out of his mouth," he said.

My scene consists entirely of making Trekkie open his window, stare down at a ground-level wedding, shout "mazel tov" and then slam his window (preferably not on anyone's arm). Not unlike the Vegas production itself, this part cannot be any more brief. (In January, "Avenue Q" was shortened from 2 hours to 90 minutes, to make it appeal more to attention-challenged tourists.)

"You're holding him wrong," Rosen corrects me. "Where is Trekkie looking?"

Trekkie is tricky because his eye line is high, which means his head must tilt extra-forward for his eyes just to stare straight ahead. To turn Trekkie's gaze downward, my hand needs to bend nearly through my forearm and pop out the other side.

"People think anyone can do this," said Sharon Wheatley, puppeteer for a character called Mrs. T, as she taught me the basics earlier today.

"But it is an art form."

Indeed, Wheatley showed me techniques I can't believe are basic. Before each sentence, for example, puppets need to pull back slightly, opening and closing their mouths half an inch. This simulates a breath.

"It keeps the puppet alive," Wheatley said.

My request to be a puppeteer in "Avenue Q" -- made when I started at the R-J last November -- was not OK'd until after its Feb. 14 closing announcement (referred to by the cast as "the Valentine's Day massacre"). This I understand. So many of my hosts agree to work with me only after things don't seem to matter much anymore.

But when Rosen called for six hours of rehearsal for my 30 seconds of stage time, that I didn't understand. The "mazel tov" isn't even mine. It's thrown by an actor onstage below me.

"Trekkie has to live high in the window," Rosen says after yet another next take.

At this point, I understand. I've opened more windows than Trekkie's favorite Web sites do, and I haven't gotten it right once.

"You can't open the window and then raise him up," Rosen explains. "He's got to be alive as the window opens!"

Wheatley says the cast was shocked by Steve Wynn's decision to place "Spamalot" in the Avenue Q Theater next January, after he gives the 1,200-seat venue a new name and 500 more seats. "Avenue Q" was never a hit in Las Vegas, but it never lost money, either.

"On Broadway, as long as you're not losing money, the show's gonna run," said Wheatley, who has appeared in "Cats," "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Miserables." "So we thought: 'They're not gonna close. They've already built a theater, they've put us up, there was a guarantee.' "

A touring "Avenue Q" has been announced, but probably won't begin until next spring. Most Las Vegas cast members hope to be employed by other productions by then.

"Mazel--!" screams actor David Benoit.

My moment in the spotlight, if you can call it that, is half gone before I see it coming. As a result, Trekkie's mouth lags behind his words by half a second. What I'm in seems more like a Space Shuttle broadcast than a Tony-winning musical.

I have miss-Q'ed.

Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it was the carpal-puppet syndrome I developed after holding a 3-pound head above my own 15-pound head all afternoon and evening.

"Just say that it was an acting choice you made," Noonchester tells me afterward.

Fortunately, Tony Awards are not rescinded for quality maintenance issues.

Fear and loafing appears every Monday in the Living section. If there's an adventure you can help set Levitan up with, e-mail clevitan@ reviewjournal.com. Levitan's previous adventures are posted at www.fearandloafing.com.