A local puppeteer brings a new acting medium to Monterey County.

The puppets reveal themselves in Ricki Vincent’s dreams, names included. Then he wakes up, makes them and animates them.

“Puppetry’s a cross between Frankenstein and God,” he says. “You’re breathing life into something that was just lying there.”

Vincent, a 55-year-old transplant to the area, just founded a Monterey-based puppet troupe. On June 24, at the Old Monterey Farmers Market, he led Puppet Up’s first performance.

His bigger goal is to open Monterey’s first puppet theater. The vision was a half century in the making.

“I made my first puppet when I was 4,” he says. “I started doing shows in my mother’s basement and would charge the neighbor kids.”

Today he wears a scarf tied around his bald head, pirate style. His septum is pierced and his large frame is heavily tattooed. Some people might find his appearance a little scary.

His puppets can be scary, too – even for his troupe members. For Melanie Gonzalez, 21, a Marine stationed at Monterey’s Defense Language Institute, they’re scary in a good way.

“It’s shock therapy for me,” she says with a laugh. “Anything small and weird with eyes makes me uncomfortable, as well as the human-size puppets. I’m more OK with the squid and bird puppets.”

Gonzalez animates the parrot named Big Dill. She mimics people walking by at the market and pretends to eat their food, drawing inspiration from the evil parrot Iago in Disney’s Aladdin.

Gonzalez says her best friend at DLI wanted to join the troupe, but needed a buddy to leave the base. She didn’t want to let her fear of puppets stop her friend from becoming a puppeteer.

“I’m going to go at it until I’m not afraid of them anymore,” she says. “But I also have a fear of alligators.”

Vincent has had his own mixed emotions about puppetry. From his 4-year-old start, he made puppets through his teenage years. Then things changed.

“I WAS NO LONGER A COOL TATTOO SHOP OWNER, BUT A PUPPET GEEK.”

“In my 20s, I thought I was too cool,” he says.

He started doing stand-up comedy and DJing in a topless bar. Then he switched to body piercing in Venice Beach. In his 30s, he opened a tattoo shop in Denver. But as business slowed, he saw Jim Henson’s muppets on television and decided to revisit his passion.

From 1999-2000, he had a public-access show called Dante’s Place. The premise: If a person broke any of the 10 commandments in the Bible, they were sent to Dante’s Place, where they were forced to entertain for eternity.

“As long as there were assholes and celebrities dying,” Vincent says. “we had an endless stream of hosts and guests, like Hitler and John Lennon.”

The show had its fans, but his then-girlfriend wasn’t one of them. “[She] was watching me slip further into puppetry,” he says. “I was no longer the cool owner of a tattoo shop, but a puppet geek.”

He closed the shop in Denver and moved to California to pursue the puppet life. “My family and employees both thought I had lost my mind,” he says. “I’d had a very successful business.”

In Santa Ana, he joined an artist group and rented out old commercial spaces. After a few years, he moved back to Denver, where he met his wife. The best part: She was into his puppetry.

He moved to Dallas to be with her, but the puppet market wasn’t promising. “They thought puppet shows should only be for kids’ birthday parties,” he says. “I don’t do kids’ parties.”

His wife’s job on the Monterey Peninsula gave Vincent a reason to try a new market. Kids are welcome in his farmers market audiences, where the adult humor is limited to PG-rated wordplay (like a pirate puppet’s joke about nice booty). “The show at the market is like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons,” he says. “It’s all innuendo.”

Ray Headley, the Old Monterey Marketplace manager, says the shows add to the market’s cultural experience. “When I was kid, puppet shows stuck in my mind,” he says. “It was a shot in the dark, but [Vincent] spoke about it in a thoughtful and artistic way. He seems like a guy who would thrive there.”

But other shows are really for grown-ups. An upcoming performance at Monterey’s Paper Wing Theatre about late writer Hunter S. Thompson doesn’t hold back: Vincent delves into drugs, addiction and death.

He’s also looking for a theater space where he can offer workshops.

“My plan is to teach and expose it to as many people as possible,” he says. “I make the world a cooler place one puppet at a time.”

PUPPET UP performs 4-8pm Tuesdays at the Old Monterey Farmers Market. Paper Wing-Fremont debuts The Doctor is Out Sept. 7. www.facebook.com/ricki.vincent.puppetgeek.