Sunny Day Sweepin’ the Clouds Away
Last week I attended an amazing Women in Children’s Media event celebrating the launch of the new book, Sesame Street: A Celebration of 40 Years of Life on the Street. On the panel were author Louise Gikow (also a Sesame scriptwriter and former editorial director and creative consultant at Jim Henson productions), photo researcher Susie Tofte, Sesame executive editor Betsy Loredo, and none other than Gordon himself, Roscoe Orman.
The panel talked about how the book came to be, and what sounds like a Herculean task to create it. The book is a visual love letter to the show, and every adult that’s come to my apartment has been compelled to thumb through every page, taking a wonderful nostalgic journey to the land of our childhood.
The book is loaded with never-before-seen images, including many photographs of the puppeteers working their magic, images that used to be verboten for the general public. Susie Tofte, the photo researcher talked about the absolute lack of archives for this material, and the hunt that ensued. “It felt like my birthday every day,” she said to describe her task of digging through boxes and binders, making remarkable discoveries for the book.
Best of all were the stories that Roscoe and Louise had to tell about working on the show. Roscoe said that it took him all of his first season to get used to working with the muppets, specifically looking at the muppet’s face and not the puppeteer’s. He marveled at the way the child actors could do it naturally. And he said of the celebrity guests that the heavy hitting dramatic actors had a really hard time with it, while it was a breeze for comedic actors like Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, and Tracy Ullman.
Louise interviewed tons of people who worked on the show throughout its forty year history, and talked about the sense of purpose people had. People don’t get into puppeteering for the money, but they sure flocked to Sesame Street to work with genius Jim Henson. I came across this video of Jim Henson in 1969 making puppets on Iowa public television (sorry, I forgot who to credit for turning me on to this), and you can see how he is 100% into his craft.
For a more recent story, Roscoe talked about the day that Michelle Obama was on the show. When she walked onto the set, she saw Roscoe and walked right over to give him a hug and said, “You have no idea what you have meant to all of us for so long.” If there was a dry eye in the house, it wasn’t one of mine. I think she summed up what most of us feel about the show from our childhood. I can’t imagine the show not being part of our culture, and part of my life experience.
Interestingly, it’s not really part of my daughter’s life experience. She knows every single character, sure, but she never really had patience for the show in its current form. (And mommy never had patience for Elmo.) The book comes with a DVD that has the very first episode of Sesame Street on it, and when you watch it, the differences are so apparent. It was so much freer in the early days, and in many ways more sophisticated (owing in part to the aging down of its audience over the years). It was also incredibly free-range, showing videos of kids exploring storm pipes and Gordon taking a new girl on Sesame Street to his house for cookies. No wonder it comes with the warning that it may not be suitable for today’s children – otherwise there would surely be lawsuits aplenty. In many ways I feel like Sesame Street has handed over the reins to the creative shows of today, like Yo Gabba Gabba, yet they all owe a great debt to this groundbreaking show.
