There's a hobby store all the way out in Farragut (a posh town that got cocky and succeeded from Knoxville quite some time back) that usually specializes in models (model trains, model planes, etc), where I usually have gotten scaled-down items for my SST scale model, but the last time I was there, I saw they had a small aisle for musical items, including piano wires, and I thought something like this could possibly work fairly well as puppet rods, and would be a lot less of a hassle than undoing and straightening out coat hangers. I haven't tried them out yet, but I do plan to to see if it makes a difference or not.