This time, Think TV talks with a young theater-master-in-the-making — a director-designer-puppeteer-clown.

As a daughter of  Hip Pocket Theatre founders, Johnny and Diane Simons, Lake Simons and her sister, actress Lorca Simons, were onstage in Hip Pocket shows practically from the day they could walk. They often come back to the Fort Worth compound to work with their father (Trio Molemo) or present their own work — as Lake recently did with her one-woman clown show, Etiquette Unraveled, and will again in August with Lowdown Wax, part of this year’s Cowtown Puppetry Festival at the Hip Pocket.

Since graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Lake has studied clowning with Jacques LeCoq’s International Theatre School in Paris, worked with master puppeteer Basil Twist and won grants from the Jim Henson Foundation. Her puppetry work has appeared with the Christopher Williams Dance Company and can currently be seen onstage in Central Park in The Winter’s Tale, presented by New York’s Shakespeare in the Park.

We talk with Lake about playing with dolls, puppetry vs. acting and why she hides her nose.

See the full-length video From the Top of the World by My Brightest Diamond featuring puppetry by Lake Simons:

Excerpts from Lake Simons’ White Elephant, which she created with composer Jon Dyer and performed at the Hip Pocket and New York’s  La Mama E.T.C. (Experimental Theatre Club):