Street Gang (33 page)

In the parlance of the time, Davis had it
together
. “There’s a belief in the white community that the black community is chaotic and disorganized,” she once said. “That’s totally untrue. It’s probably more highly organized than any community you can think of. . . . There are all kinds of groups to go to to get information to them, which they will disseminate.”

It was important that Davis’s message was clear: “We had to help parents understand that their home is the first school and they’re the first teachers,” she said. Experience had taught Davis that “the way to get to people is to appeal to their self-interest. All parents are concerned about their children and want them to be educated, and I was out there telling them there were ways they could help. They know a lot. They’re not stupid and ignorant simply because they are black or poor.”

She arranged meetings at public school auditoriums, and made sure that child care was provided in classrooms. “[It’s a matter of recognizing that] you have to do it within the context of the realities of people’s lives, in context,” Davis said. “If they are poor, they can’t afford babysitters. So we provided them, and we packed the auditorium night after night after night.”

Davis’s bookmobile-style buses were donated by Con Edison, New York’s electric power provider. Inside, tape-replay equipment screened animated and filmed previews of
Sesame Street
in a continuous loop. Volunteers from the National Association of Jewish Women and the National Association of Negro Women welcomed families onto the buses, touted the benefits of the show, and sent family members home with flyers. Similar buses were used in other localities across America.

Davis tapped corporations to purchase or replace television sets for day-care centers, where so many of the children in the target audience spent the day. RCA was first to respond, donating 150 color sets to centers around the country. “Each RCA dealer would have an event and give sets to centers in their viewing area,” Davis said. In New York, WNET viewers were asked to donate color TVs, new or used. “A lot of them needed repair, so we made arrangements with TV repair schools to have their students repair them at no cost,” Davis said. “They had to be delivered to the centers, so we had to get other companies who would do that on a donor basis. We got involved with all kinds of organizations and associations, and that’s what makes a project like this work,” she said. “You have to link up and tie with people to help them achieve their objectives.”

 

Ed Palmer had good news and bad to report from the audience research conducted after the five one-hour dry-run shows were tested before small groups in Philadelphia and New York. The good news was that there was strong evidence to show children learned while they watched. Post-test analysis demonstrated that preschoolers had grasped material that was unfamiliar to them before the screening. Animated segments, the Muppets, and films about animals scored high during Palmer’s distracter tests. The brisk format, with its mélange of topics and techniques, was an overall success, but there were dead spots. Some scripted live-action segments fared poorly, including a spy spoof starring Gary Owens (the announcer on
Laugh-In
) as
The Man from Alphabet
.

“I’m sure we did all five of these shows with somewhere around twenty kids individually watching the program,” recalled Palmer. “We worked with fairly small numbers because we wanted to cover a lot of issues and we had to get just a suggestion. We also wanted to test for comprehension. Even kids with very little verbal ability were able to indicate that they were following, or they weren’t. We played around with testing methods, doll play, re-creating scenes. Sometimes we’d bring a kid into the room and say, ‘You just saw a story about such-and-such, and so-and-so didn’t have a chance to see that. Would you tell so-and-so what it was about?’ ”

The children also rejected the stiff, stumbling actor chosen at the last minute to play Gordon. He came off as a person in the neighborhood that children would run away from, not to. A change was necessary.

In recasting Gordon, Jon Stone knew precisely what he wanted—someone like Matt Robinson, the producer-coordinator of live-action films for
Sesame Street
. Robinson joined Stone on the studio floor during auditions, prepping actors with writers’ notes about Gordon’s motivation, attitude, voice, and demeanor. “Matt would quietly give them hints by saying, ‘No, that’s not the way to do it. Try it this way,’ ” said Dolores Robinson, Matt’s then wife. “He was by nature shy, and he knew that they were having a difficult time casting Gordon. And the people overseeing the taping up in the booth, peering at the monitors, kept saying, ‘Matt knows what to do.
He
should be Gordon.’ ”

The camera loved Robinson’s naturalness and affability. With his Walt Frazier-style muttonchop sideburns and soft, crowning Afro, he was a near-perfect blend of urban cool and downtown sophistication. “Ultimately the production staff decided, ‘He’s the one,’ ” Dolores Robinson said, “the only problem is Matt didn’t want to be ‘the one.’ He wanted to be a writer.”

Robinson’s genial exterior belied his politics. “The private Matt was militant,” Dolores said. “He grew up in a racially stirred household. His mother was very middle class and bourgeois, a schoolteacher. His father, who had been a writer for the
Philadelphia Tribune
, was a Martin Luther King before his time. He belonged to a group of poets and black renaissance people who were revolutionary in their thoughts. They had so much pride in their blackness. In Philadelphia, his father was involved in a network of Socialists, who believed as he believed.

“When Joseph Stalin died, he wrote, ‘Stalin is dead, peace be to his ashes.’ The
Tribune
sent him a telegram that said, RETRACT YOUR STATEMENT OR ELSE. He sent them back a telegram that said ELSE. That was the end of his job at the newspaper. Matt’s father went to work in the post office after that and was never a happy man. Matt was embittered by what happened to his father, and he, too, was never a happy man.”

A family tragedy may account for some of his torment. “Matt had a sister who basically died of racism,” Dolores said. “She caught scarlet fever when she was five or six, and her parents took her to several Philadelphia hospitals, where they were turned away because they were black. In all the traveling around to hospitals, she got pneumonia and died. If they had admitted her, she’d be alive today. And that affected Matt’s father for the rest of his life. His father was just furious with the hospitals, with the system, with racism in America. And it affected his life and it affected his children’s lives. Matt carried that stuff around with him.”

Stone prevailed upon Robinson to take on the role of Gordon, a science teacher who owned a brownstone with his wife, Susan. Robinson reluctantly accepted, originating the role in a manner that established Gordon as a dutiful husband and steady provider, a well-liked and respected figure in the neighborhood. In episode 1, scene 1, Gordon is the first character introduced.

“When Matt was on the set, I think he rather liked being Gordon,” Dolores Robinson said. “But when he left that studio, he never was comfortable with the attention. Some people love the recognition; he never did. I remember going in public with him and women and children running up to him. He just didn’t seem to know how to handle it.”

 

Caroll Spinney was drenched in flop sweat, a scorching beam of white light outlining his form at the edge of the stage. Squinting and shielding his eyes, Spinney asked, “Would you please turn off that big spot?”
⁷

Out of the darkness from the sound booth in the back of the theater came the unsteady response of a student volunteer. Like a lament echoing down a canyon, the voice admitted, “We don’t know how!”

This was to be Spinney’s big moment at the Puppeteers of America convention in Salt Lake City, the unveiling of a mechanically complex multimedia extravaganza. Using a rear-projection screen, filmed animation, and an array of switches and levers he would operate while on his knees, Spinney had fashioned a contraption Rube Goldberg not only would have admired but trademarked.

It called for a 16-millimeter film projector and a slide projector, a sound system, ladders, a seven-foot wide screen, black velour drapery. In an elaborately timed illusion for the finale, Spinney would roll an animation of birds in flight, only to incorporate handcrafted bird puppets into the scene. The birds would then seem to fly off the screen and into the three-dimensional world of the theater.

“Not only would the puppets have movement, but the backgrounds themselves would move in time with the action,” Spinney said. “I thought combining of the media of film and live puppetry could bring a new dimension to puppet theater.”
⁸

Instead, due to glaring technical difficulties, Spinney had been thrust into that area known to performers on the brink of bombing onstage as
The Twilight Zone
.
⁹

Jim Henson shifted slightly in his audience seat. As one who had designed and executed many an experimental routine, often on live television, he could relate on an almost visceral level with the struggling puppeteer onstage. Who more than Henson knew the perils of attempting something new and risky?

In the quiet hour before the show began, Spinney had checked and double-checked his equipment and the theater’s light and sound. He had made sure to train the spotlights in a way that would illuminate the puppets but not wash out the movie screen behind them. Everything was aces, and he went off to grab a quick dinner. How and why it came to pass that one intense spotlight blasted Spinney just after he hit the stage, throwing the movement, music, and animation completely out of sync, only the theater gods know.

Normally, puppeteers think with their hands. Now, Spinney landed on his feet. He began to improvise, using the cone of light to turn himself into a shadow puppet—pulling out his hair in mock frustration—while the student tech team struggled to turn off the spot. As Spinney, walking away from the spotlight, mimed his torment and exasperation, a voice cried “Stop!” from the wings. Mere footsteps away was a twenty-foot pit, a man-made cliff created after a section of the stage had inadvertently been lowered. Spinney nearly concluded his act with a Wile E. Coyote-style dive into oblivion.

Mercifully, the students eventually regained control of the lights, leaving Spinney just enough time for the flying-bird finale. The audience, made up almost exclusively of empathetic fellow puppeteers and their families, gave Spinney a big hand. He all but slunk off stage, so disappointed that puppet-palooza had crashed into a steaming heap.

It was then that he heard Jim Henson’s soft, reassuring voice say, “Hello.” Henson had loped backstage to catch up with Spinney, the chap who had made him laugh years before with that confounded puppet Goggle. “I saw your show . . . I liked what you were trying to do.”

In Massachusetts seven years earlier Spinney had misinterpreted what Henson had meant when he had said, “Why don’t you come down to New York to talk about the Muppets?” It didn’t sound like a job interview then, and it still didn’t when, amazingly, Henson uttered the exact same words. This time, however, Spinney asked for clarification, “What do you mean by ‘talk about the Muppets?’ ”

“I mean, would you like to come work for me?” Henson said. Henson had walked Spinney to a nearby couch, so at least Spinney was sitting down.

Unbeknownst to Spinney, Henson was on a recruiting mission, looking for someone to provide voice and movement to two new characters for
Sesame Street
. One would be a grouchy contrarian. The other would be a sunnier sort, a dimwit bird of man-size proportions.

The idea for the character had its genesis in the summer seminars, according to research director Ed Palmer. “I remember Harvard professor Sheldon White said, ‘You need a Mr. Bumbler on your program. Somebody who makes mistakes, who gets flustered and is like a four-year-old, but picks himself up and dusts himself off and keeps going. He provides other people with a whole lot of opportunities to be helpful because he needs a lot of help. Four-year-olds can identify with that.’ That idea got merged into Big Bird’s character.” The puppeteers agreed to meet in New York. Spinney arrived for his job interview both excited and apprehensive. Joining the ranks of the Muppets seemed almost too good to be true, but the prospects of working in New York—a city he found dirty, crowded, and overpriced—was of no small concern. He already held two mortgages on his property in New England and had an easy hour’s commute to Boston.

He drew in a deep breath when he arrived at 227 East Sixty-seventh Street, a former carriage house that housed the Henson Workshop, identified only by a small, hand-painted sign. To nearly every visitor who passed over the threshold, the place seemed magical.

Henson explained that the bird puppet and the trash grouch were created to add a fantasy element to the street scenes, which had tested so flat following the test shows. He added that the production team had overridden the objections of researchers who had advised against mixing the Muppets with humans on the street. The scientists preferred there be a line between fantasy and reality.
¹⁰

Spinney said Henson described the bird as a yokel, “just a big dumb guy who would bang his head on a door frame and say, ‘Stupid door!’ He imagined the grouch would live under a tall pile of litter.”

According to research director Ed Palmer, in some early sketches of street scenes laid across Jon Stone’s draftsman-style desk, all of the Muppets lived under the pavement in an environment separate and distinct from where the humans did, “like the Teenage [Mutant] Ninja Turtles. There was going to be a whole world of puppets that you could go into—and a world of humans—and there would only be occasional transactions between the two.” It may be that Henson filed away this notion for
Fraggle Rock
, the allegorical HBO series of the 1980s that many Henson admirers consider his finest and proudest achievement.