The Lady & the Floofs: Scarsdale resident gets creative with farm-to-table story time

And The Lady and the Floofs (@ladyandfloofs on Instagram) is just getting started.

Kramer, a former advertising creative, grew up “a drama nerd” and had always been a “silly, theatrical” and creative person, she said. Now she’s taking it to a new level at this pivotal point in her life.

“It’s definitely given me a restored sense of self and creative satisfaction,” she said. “I definitely would never have called myself an artist; [now] I feel more secure in using words like that to describe who I think I am in the sandbox. I think that I’m an artist, I’m a writer and I’m creating a story and it’s growing and becoming what it will be as I write it. It’s six months in and it’s not just a baby class.”

In-person classes start out with Kramer handing out a caricature of a food that she draws on watercolor paper. Usually with their hands, the Floofs paint the picture with a pureed form of a “hero ingredient” or food. There are stories with lessons and discussions about the food.

What exactly is a Floof? That’s mainly a silly name The Lady calls the children, but in a way she believes “we’re all Floofs” as we all have “many needs.”

“I love seeing parents and caretakers playing with their food and playing with the children and their food in this context, and maybe at home they’re maybe trying not to make a mess,” Kramer said. “But there’s something really joyful and playful for both the parent and the child in this opportunity where they have that freedom to play.”

Each class ends with Kramer singing “What a Wonderful World.”

The Lady and Floofs began classes at The Little School in Scarsdale this week.

Kramer and her husband moved to Quaker Ridge in December 2019 with their 16-month-old son. Kramer’s goal was to “read the room” and see what might be missing within the community that she could offer, but little did anyone know what was about to unfold throughout the world and locally.

As terrible as the pandemic was — and it was worse for different groups of people — Kramer was able to take a bad situation and turn it into a positive for many families. She was holding workshops and clinics in her backyard for her son and other preschoolers, and it occurred to her she had the skill set to lead some type of programming of her own creation.

“What I can say about my preschool-aged mom brethren is that there’s a real appetite for enrichment here, especially during the pandemic,” Kramer said.

Kramer had been working for creative digital agencies — in advertising – for a decade. She left that work two years before having her first child in order to start her own business, but instead ended up consulting and working with her own clients, never really leaving that agency life. Until now.

The winter of 2021 into 2022 was pivotal for Kramer. While the rest of the world was getting back to normal, parents of young children were not, and that bad pandemic experience “became just a little less joyful.”

“I think a lot of parents of preschoolers were having kind of a traumatic winter because we were still experiencing these painful quarantines — my son was in a class that shut down like every other week,” Kramer said. “It was just a nonstop disaster. And so out of that winter I started feeling like I was ready to rediscover my own creative life.”

Every time her son’s class shut down, the entire family’s routine was thrown off. It was a domino effect of her son’s schedule getting out of whack, which impacted his mood and sleep, which trickled to the rest of the family.

“It was a high-pressure period for myself as well as my other community members … with really needy children who were suffering through this constant disruption in routine, which caused them to regress,” Kramer said. “Last winter it felt like most of our community had moved on because the quarantines in the middle school and the elementary schools were removed once they were vaccinated, [but] parents of preschoolers felt like we were forgotten. So that was a big part of why parents felt particularly isolated. We were still in that early pandemic frenzy.”

Kramer, who had a pandemic baby — her “rambunctious” boys are now 2 and 4 — was already living a creative lifestyle by painting and dancing and singing every single day … with and for her kids.

“So I gave myself a launch date where I was going to start a creative project where I was going to do one baby class and I was going to write one children’s book and I was going to put it online, on Instagram, where my audience lived primarily, and see where it went,” she said. “I cooked up the idea for the character that I would play, and I would use stories and food play experiments to try and conquer the pressures I observed in parents who were really having trouble feeding their kids.”

With sensory play a priority for parents, who at the same time don’t like dealing with messes, Kramer decided one of the aspects of her program could be food play, where the kids can get messy and use healthy food not only for consumption, but for art and play.

“I wanted to create a forum where people could try things,” Kramer said. “That’s kind of how The Lady and the Floofs got started.”

So with a quirky persona and a song book she wrote called, “It’s Hard to be a Baby,” which is about “how scary it can be to be a young kid just discovering the world and different textures and tastes and urging people to be bold,” Kramer was ready to go public.

“The Lady is not an expert and that’s something I really stress,” Kramer said. “She’s not a nutritionist, she’s not a food therapist — she is a caretaker just like every parent in the game. She’s suffering trying to figure it out, too, and as a parent she’s putting out the ways that have helped her in solving this everyday dilemma of feeding your kid. The character is funny and whimsical and joyful and I think that the food play and the food fun really targeted a ping point in their lives.”

One initial plan was a baby class with a puppet — the next Shari Lewis — and while Pistachio the frog puppet makes some appearances, it’s not the main part of the gig.

Kramer also initially thought she might want to have a physical space for her endeavor, but the pandemic changed that mindset. The ability to take her show on the road whether it was to her own backyard or throughout the tri-state area, which she has since done, was the perfect venue for her show.

“I definitely think flexibility is key,” she said. “I still wanted to bring communities together. I still think that the opportunity to connect is healing, and I think The Lady and Floofs is definitely a reaction to that. A lot of my classes are timed around lunch and dinner and bring children around a table, which at certain points in our pandemic lives was verboten, forbidden.”

Kramer met playwright Serena Norr, who encouraged her to start going to open mic nights and later cast her in a play called “Cut Out Fam,” which will play at The Tank in New York City as part of a showcase of 10-minute plays Feb. 9-11 (http://bit.ly/3Hex5Em).

“It’s the story of a mom who is struggling in her identity as a mother and she has developed a creative outlet of her own in the attic and the question is, Is she crazy or is she an artist? It’s very true to my current life,” Kramer said. “I had to say yes. I’m letting the experience lead me on this other creative journey that’s connected to the class in the spirit of boldness and trying things.”

Now a bona fide “performance artist,” Kramer sees the whole thing as constantly evolving.

“We’ll see where it goes, but it has some building blocks,” she said. “I don’t know where it’s going, but the more people discover it and the more joy it brings to people, the more I’ll keep doing it.”

And the whole multiple personalities thing? Not so bad after all.