Becker tells PEOPLE she picked up the hobby during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since made it her full-time job.
Sophie Becker spends her free time visiting museums, drawing, going to the movies and taking in all that New York City has to offer. Also on her list of loves? Ventriloquism, which has morphed from a fun side-gig to her full-time job in recent years.
Becker, 31, is one of the few young adults pursuing the fading art, which sees her sharing a stage with two dummies named Jerry and Ronnie.
She performs about four times per month in both public and private shows, sometimes twice in one week, which can be hard on her voice -- but Becker tells PEOPLE she's lucky to have found a job she loves.
Like many great recent artistic realizations, it all began during the COVID pandemic, when Becker was given her first dummy, Jerry, by a friend she met through line dancing. The two arranged a handoff in a New York City park and seeing how the dummy worked was "exciting," but once she got home, Becker was struck by the sense that Jerry had his own energy, which "definitely took me a while to understand."
That first morning, Becker was shocked to wake up to Jerry sitting upright in her room, but she slowly acclimated to the dummy's presence.
"People don't really realize this, but the dummies are actually quite big," she says. "They're like maybe the size of a 3-year-old or 4-year-old child."
Becker dedicated a small chair in her room for Jerry, which yes could be "terrifying," but she found storing him in his box was somehow worse.
With practice, she learned ventriloquism skills and found her rhythm with the dummy.
"I was just alone all the time and I was going on long walks, so it didn't really feel like I was like struggling to learn anything because I had no pressure," she says. "I kind of was just talking to myself and then maybe every couple days I would look at myself in the mirror and watch myself do it."
That was when Becker realized, "Oh, whoa, wait, now I can kind of do this thing."
She practiced at parties, where she showed off her "weird" skill to impressed guests -- and says "the universe just kept giving me opportunities."
While Becker began with Jerry -- a replica of Paul Winchell's dummy Jerry Mahoney -- she has since expanded her act to include Ronnie, a doll she commissioned and describes as her "id."
Jerry feels like her "teacher," Becker says, while Ronnie "really feels like my creation."
"She is just sort of like a self-centered New York girl who moves on from one job to the next," Becker explains. "And you know, of course thinks that she completely succeeds at every job and also she thinks that she's a total victim and she can do no wrong. She's totally delusional and I love that about her."
Austin Phillips was the one to build Ronnie. Becker says she enjoys visiting the dummy maker, who lives in Maine, "to just catch up and talk about ventriloquism," and says the two bonded over being younger members of the ventriloquism community -- but Becker insists Phillips "knows a lot more than me" and is "very important to the ventriloquism world," attending yearly conventions where everyone knows his name.
Becker has only been to one convention so far, flying to Kentucky in 2021 and staying for one night. She wishes she could have been there longer.
"I think I'm still finding my place and figuring out what that community is," she says.
Becker says her family has done nothing but support her.
"They just want me to be happy," she says, noting that her dad is also an artist. "Their mentality is kind of like, do whatever you want, but just do it. Go go all the way."
Her roommates, too, have been "so supportive," says Becker, who lives in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn and has shared her apartment with different renters since the beginning of her ventriloquism days.
Admittedly, a previous roommate -- who is also Becker's best friend -- "was super freaked out" by Jerry's presence at first, even asking Becker not to leave the dummy in the living room. She soon grew "more and more comfortable," though.
Still, Becker says there's one line she won't cross: she waits until her roommates leave to rehearse.
Becker jokes, "I think that at the end of the day, it’s like a very New York story that you’re living in an apartment with some weird ventriloquist."
Becker says her art continues to excite her -- and she hopes that energy catches on with her audience too.
"Sharing it -- because ventriloquism is so rare -- it feels like the audience also has that feeling of like, 'Oh my God, look at this thing I just found.' And they're watching me do it, but it's like the same energy," she adds. "It's so fun."