Street Gang (42 page)

“I came back and said they had to be on the show, and I started writing bits for the troupe. I thought if I’m going to become friends with them, I’ll need to communicate with them. My new husband, Charles, and I discovered that one of the members of the company was dean of students at a school for the deaf near us in White Plains. He agreed to teach us sign language, and we met with him every Wednesday night for a year, along with my colleague Sharon Lerner. Then Charles and I began volunteering at the school, running dances and basketball games. We donated a couple of pinball machines to them and got to know a bunch of the kids. And then we started thinking about having a family of our own, thinking,
Maybe we would have a kid and then if we wanted a second adopt a kid who was deaf.
We were already beginning to be politicized about disability issues. And in the middle of all this I get pregnant. The kids at the school were all hoping for a deaf baby.

“Jason was born late at night in June 1974. In the morning we got the news that we have this baby who, in the eyes of the doctors, was essentially garbage. Jason had Down syndrome, and they told us he’d never be able to sit or stand or walk or talk or read or write, never be able to distinguish us from any other adults, never have any concept of his own situation, never have a sense of humor, never have an imagination. They recommended that we institutionalize him immediately, before a bond was established. We should go home and tell our friends and family that he had died in childbirth. That’s what we were told. I remember being in my hospital bed when this hit me in a very visceral way: I didn’t exist anymore in that world of perfection that existed on television and on the pages of
McCall’s
magazine.

“I didn’t stop crying for three days because I had this vision of the world’s smartest, most endowed, most brilliant, most talented child. I had been saving things like a first edition of Lewis Carroll and I had all my Gilbert and Sullivan stuff and all the things that I was going to do with this child. I had been preparing for months. They pulled all the props out from under me, with nothing to replace them.

“But a social worker came in and said there was an experimental, controversial program of early intervention being offered. Would my husband and I consider giving it a try? It made sense that you don’t send your flesh and blood away without even trying. And if we tried it—and if it turned out to be as much of a heartbreaker and disappointment as they said—we could always send him away later. But at least we’d be able to sleep at night knowing that we gave it our best shot. So with trepidation, not having any idea what was in store, we took this baby home. But we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.

“When Jason was ten days old, we met with the head of the early intervention program. She held him up in her arms and he was like a noodle; those kids have no muscle tone. She said, ‘We are going to work with him and to teach you and he’s going to be wonderful.’ Charles and I looked at each other like,
Oh my God. This lady is crazy.

“She suggested we surround him with color, music, and movement. So we tore down the bland pale wallpaper we had put up in his room and put up these big, blinding red and purple flowers. We hung things from the ceiling on springs so there was stuff going up and down all the time. We put three mobiles over his crib instead of one. The intervention director advised us to keep talking to Jason. I said, ‘What do you talk to a two-week-old baby about?’ I had no idea what she was talking about. But when he was on the changing table I would point and say, ‘See this red thing? It’s a flower.’ Finally one day when he was four months old, as I was pumping his legs and moving his arms, he looked at me and pointed right in the middle of this red flower. It could’ve been stretching, or gas, or totally random. But it was as if he was saying to me ‘Okay, I’ve got it. Can we move on to something else, please, Mom? At that moment I kind of went nuts, saying, ‘Hey, there’s a brain in there. He can learn and make connections. He’s not a vegetable, he’s a person.’ For tactile stimulation, we dumped him into tubs of Styrofoam and boxes full of rice. I made this huge pan full of Jell-O and we dumped him into that, too. He got it all over himself, and it was absolutely fabulous.”

Kingsley had gone from skeptic to true believer by the time Jason started running around the house, fully engaged in the world.

“It became vitally important to me to let people know that kids like Jason had potential to learn, and that they need not be invisible,” she said. “We got a letter at the Workshop around the time Jason was three from a mom who had two kids, a five-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old with Down syndrome. She put them in front of the television assuming that the older one would be educated and the little one would be entertained. Imagine her surprise when she walked in one day and the little one with Down’s looked up and recited the alphabet.

“That letter was a starter’s pistol for me as an advocate. I became a real nuisance to a lot of people, a broken record on disabilities. Once, in the middle of a meeting at the Workshop, the publishing division proudly held up a new book called
We’re All the Same, We’re All Different.
I took a look at this book and burst into tears in front of 200 people. There were 492 people in this book and one teeny little wheelchair way on the next-to-the-last page. Here was this book about inclusiveness, about how we’re basically all the same even though we have individual differences, and they all but left out what I later found out was America’s largest minority.

“I wrote a six-page letter to the head of the book department, to Gerry Lesser, to Joan Cooney, to whoever the suits were at that time. I just let it all pour out, how this hurts and how unfair this is for the kids out there who need to see themselves, all the people who feel this sense of strangeness and separateness, who need to have that strangeness eradicated.”

“I got on the book lady’s shit list,” Kingsley said, years after
Sesame Street
wrote the book on how to portray the disabled on television. Just like
Sesame Street
itself, it all started with a preschooler. For in the early-to-mid- 1970s, Jason Kingsley blended with the other kids on the set, appearing in fifty-five episodes as his charming, exuberant self. He not only counted to ten on
Sesame,
he did it English
and
Spanish.

 

Linda Bove first came to Jon Stone’s attention in 1969, when she was just a year out of Gallaudet University. Instead of pursuing work with her library science degree, she auditioned for a spot with the Connecticut-based National Theater of the Deaf. Formed in 1967, the company of players mounted productions using American Sign Language. Stone had attended a performance by the five-actor touring group, The Little Theater of the Deaf, a group spun off from the main company that would do shows in schools.

After appearing sporadically on
Sesame Street
in the 1970s, as a recurring character who used ASL to communicate, she was added to the cast in 1979. In time, romance bloomed between bachelor Bob, the music teacher, and the saucy brunette who knew her way around the Dewey Decimal System. “I said to Jon, in my scenes I always look like a loner on
Sesame Street
,” Bove said, “even when there are other cast members around. They have relationships, families, and partners on the show. I think that planted the seed. It was like, ‘Who could we pair up with Linda?’ Bob seemed like the most comfortable fit.”

Writing for a deaf character came more easily to some writers. Bove tried to assist the more reluctant or unsure of them with a workshop she arranged. “I wanted to explain things to them about my language and culture,” she said. “It was sort of an everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask session. One by one, they began asking questions. And I used that opportunity to suggest some obstacles that might arise, some things that we could figure out in advance. Then, as I was learning who the writers were, and where they got their information for stories, I became aware of the research department and concluded that I’d have to approach
them
about language and culture. Sometimes I would think to myself,
I’m an actor. This is not my job.
But Jon would say, ‘Linda, we can’t help it.
You
are the one who is knowledgeable.
You
know best.’”

Stone encouraged the actress to be outspoken and demanding, through an interpreter on the set. “I wanted to make sure that I could put my two cents in about how best they could use me,” she said. “I came to see I had a function to show children all over America what my life looked like.”

Bove had a natural ally in writer Kingsley, who first imagined situations for the character and then later applied whatever adaptations were needed. “She wrote Linda as a person first,
then
she worried about the other stuff,” Bove said.

 

Toward the end of Richard Nixon’s first term, raven-haired folksingeractivist Buffy Sainte-Marie was touring European clubs and concert halls and Indian reservations in Canada, where her haunting ballads and protest anthems (“Universal Soldier” and “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”) had not fallen from favor. For reasons she did not understand at the time, concert dates in the United States had dried up and airplay of her catalogue was limited to low-watt college stations.

It was surprising, then, when a call came from Dulcy Singer, inviting her to appear on
Sesame Street
. “She wanted me to come on like other singers had and recite the alphabet stuff or count,” Sainte-Marie said. “By that point I had already founded the Nihewan Foundation for American Indian Education and was awarding scholarships. But I wanted to expand my outreach to little kids and their caregivers, to reach children before they ever ran into stereotyping or racism against Native America. Before I was a singer I was an elementary grades teacher, and I’d completed a double major in Oriental philosophy and education at the University of Massachusetts. As a teacher I saw right away that
Sesame Street
’s format, diversity, and caring about young children was revolutionary—and right on. So I was interested in doing something more significant than a onetime appearance.”

Sainte-Marie accordingly countered with a proposal to assist in developing a curriculum about modern-day Native American culture. That offer, tendered by a distinctive artist born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan and raised by adoptive parents in Maine and Massachusetts, proved to be gently groundbreaking over Saint-Marie’s five seasons on the
Street
.

“After doing my first few episodes I discovered that my husband, Sheldon Wolfchild, and I were expecting a baby,” Sainte-Marie said. “I let Dulcy know, figuring she would wish me well and say good-bye.” Instead, Singer and Jon Stone incorporated the pregnancy into the show, adding Wolfchild to the list of regularly occurring characters. Upon the birth of Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, known as Cody, the writers developed a story line for Big Bird, who acted out when the baby appeared on
Sesame Street.
“It was brilliant in portraying sibling rivalry the way it really is for a poor little kid who is supposed to be thrilled about a new baby. Before the arrival, I had been set up as Big Bird’s best friend. So Big Bird was clearly not thrilled at the fuss. In his opinion, Cody was no fun at all.
Sesame Street
really rose to the challenge of dealing with reality as experienced by Big Bird, the universal, all-races six-year-old.”

Later, Sainte-Marie approached Stone and Singer with a suggestion for a segment on breast feeding. “I expected that it might be too much for television, but they were keen to do it,” she said. The result was an understated scene using 150 words and lasting 56 seconds. With Sainte-Marie seated in the foreground nursing Cody in her arms, Big Bird watches with appropriate childlike interest over her shoulder.

 

“The scene was discreet and made sense to children,” Sainte-Marie said. “Most kids’ shows look wooden and phony. But
Sesame Street
was both magic and real. And I’m so proud to have been part of it. It not only presented characters that were all different shades of people-color, they also created characters whose diversity was of an emotional-behavioral nature. Sometimes in our family or circle of friends we have to deal with alcoholics, drug addicts, or emotional characters like Oscar,” she said, “and I spent
plenty
of time near the trash can with him. The show has always taught us that we can love and respect Oscar without becoming like him or letting his grouchiness control us or our own moods. Similarly we can love and respect the difficult people in our circle without giving them the keys to the car or the keys to our lives. For me it’s a huge metaphor and typical of the gestalt and wise synergies that permeated and underlay Jon Stone and Dulcy Singer’s work.

“The quality of the writing—and listening—was remarkable. They asked me for ideas, and they came up with quick, to-the-point vignettes that still mean a lot to Native American viewers because they reflected the reality of our communities. They appreciated, like I did, that as a cast member I wasn’t only written into ‘Indian’ parts. I got to sing and dance on the show to Joe Raposo tunes that had nothing to do with Native American life, even some Broadway-style numbers, which to someone who lived in New York was fantastic. Plus, I wrote a lot of songs for
Sesame Street
, some even for babies. It came naturally to me when Cody was an infant to sing to him and make up little play games and poems. These were songs I’ve never recorded and for which there’s never been any demand, but that’s what writers do. We write about what’s really happening. And they were perfect for
Sesame Street
.”