Street Gang (45 page)

Roosevelt, as ever in his yellow-and-pink-striped turtleneck, asks the class the meaning of that day’s spelling word: P-O-I-S-O-N.

“Baaaaaaad news!” they say in unison.

In another sassy segment, Roosevelt gives a geography lesson on Africa, referring to one of those window-shade-style display maps that always hung above classroom blackboards. With a jazzy beat provided by Danny Epstein brushing on the snare drum, Roosevelt disabuses the students’ preconceptions—borrowed from Tarzan movies—that the continent is just one big jungle.

“All this,” he says, pointing north, “is a desert.”

“All this,” he says, pointing to the southwestern coast, “is a whole bunch of beaches . . . and water . . . and fishin’ places.”

“All these,” he says, “are big cities with buildings . . . and lakes . . . and parks . . . and schools.”

Roosevelt says, “And up here there’s oil,” and the students, in call-and-response style, repeat “Oil!” “And down here, there’s diamonds.” (“Diamonds!”) “And down here is gold.” (“Gold!”)

He finally turns to the class and says, “Now do you know what Africa looks like?”

Classmate Hardhead Henry Harris, perpetually in sunglasses, volunteers. “I know what Africa look like, and I know what Smart Tina look like, too,” referring to the know-it-all who sits one desk ahead. “She look like a African queen, with diamonds and gold all around her. And dig it, she has a smile like the desert sun and eyes like the cool waters of a lake. And she tall like a building in the great city. And she got feet . . . like an African elephant!”

As the class erupts and another squadron of paper airplanes flies across the classroom, Roosevelt says, “I’m not going to sit around to hear what she says to him. I’m going to dismiss y’all.”

Along with the actress-singer Rosalind Cash, Matt Robinson recorded “My Name Is Roosevelt Franklin,” an LP of original material that included a black-pride confessional entitled “The Skin I’m In.”

“Matt loved Roosevelt Franklin and was extraordinarily proud of that character,” said Dolores Robinson, his wife at that time. “Roosevelt was who he really was, an alter ego. In private, Matt was never that shy. He loved to sing and imitate Ray Charles, and there is a little bit of Ray in Roosevelt.”

At the height of the character’s popularity, however, objections began to arise over the portrayal. “Matt’s pride in his race and his anger with racism all came out in Roosevelt,” Dolores Robinson said. “That’s what those people heard and objected to. He was too black for them.”

“There was often considerable conservative pressure with the Workshop,” Stone said. “Several African American executives, particularly Evelyn Davis, a CTW vice president, and Lutrelle Horne, an administrator in the International Department, decided these characters fostered a stereotype and insisted on terminating them.”

Joan Cooney was caught in the middle. “There was an argument about whether he should speak black English or not, whether children should be taught the King’s English,” she said. “I loved Roosevelt Franklin, but I understood the protests. I understood both sides. If Matt said it was okay, and the community said it was okay, and white people said it was okay, then it was okay with me. I wasn’t wholly comfortable, but I was amused. You couldn’t help but laugh at him. We knew that it was going to be a bit controversial, and it seemed to go away for a while, but then we heard from the Evelyn Davises, from the upper-middle-class of the black community.”

Though small in number, the naysayers ultimately carried the day, despite what Stone said was “vigorous opposition” from the show’s black performers. “The conservative faction prevailed, and Roosevelt Franklin bit the dust,” he said.

Dulcy Singer, Stone’s right hand, saw the decision for what it was: a cave-in that threatened the integrity and independence of the very creators who gave the show authenticity and a comedic sensibility in tune with the times. “At the beginning we could take so many more chances because nobody noticed us,” she said. “We were the new kid in town. Then once the show became successful and more and more people were watching it, we were getting more and more mail. Management began to veto things that they wouldn’t have the first season. And then more and more people were entering in and giving their opinions. It was always, ‘No, this isn’t good,’ not ‘Yes, let’s do more of it.’ ”

“I suppose that’s the way of the world,” she said. “You become more cautious as you become more successful, and it came just as we were in a position to take more chances.”

 

In 1970, unemployed actress Fran Brill was living in the Dixie Hotel on Forty-second Street, making the audition rounds without much success. “I had been in a Broadway show called
Red, White and Maddox
that closed after forty-one performances. The show, which originated in Atlanta and moved to New York, satirized segregationist Lester Maddox, then governor of Georgia.

“I used to watch the first season of
Sesame Street
to cheer myself up at the end of the day, followed by
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
. I used to think,
Y’ know, I’ve never played with a puppet in my life, but I could probably do all these voices and accents and whatever
. I had just broken into doing voice-overs and I saw an ad in
Backstage
that said Jim Henson was looking to train people for an Ed Sullivan Christmas special. So I called Jim Henson one day—and he picked up the phone—it was that small an organization at that time—and I said, ‘I’m an actress, I’ve just come to New York and I have never really played with puppets but can you use me as a voice person?’

“Jim said, ‘Well, we don’t do it that way. The puppeteers do their own voices. But, you know, why don’t you come on over?’ It was that incredibly casual and easy.”

Brill arrived at the Henson Workshop to find “Jim, Frank, a trunk full of puppets, and a big mirror and some scripts,” she said. “We just played around with the puppets for a while and something clicked. It was just one of those wacky things where somebody with absolutely no expertise in the area got a break. Maybe it was my sense of humor. Maybe they knew I was an actress and could do all these voices and sing. . . .”

Henson invited Brill to attend an upcoming two-week training program in puppetry. “There were lots and lots of people the first week, and we all learned the basics. After he let some people go the second week, the remaining group of newcomers performed the group of monsters called Frackles in
The Great Santa Claus Switch.
”
⁴

The two standouts from the training week were Brill and Richard Hunt. Both showed enough promise to prompt Henson to ask if they would be available to work on
Sesame Street
for season two.

Brill said, “Oh, I’m an actress . . . I don’t know.”

Henson responded, “Well, just see if you can give us a few weeks out of the year.”

She agreed, and that was the pivotal moment of her professional life. “The truth is I was doing whatever I could to pay the rent in those days, working industrial shows, doing lingerie modeling. But now, looking back on it, I was really just out of college and got a job with the Muppets!”

Brill began the mandatory period of Muppet servitude on
Sesame Street
, arriving on the scene at a time when people outside of Henson’s circle began to wonder if he would ever break up the all-boys’ club that was the Muppets. “They really didn’t need a woman because the guys who perform in falsetto were hilarious, but the pressure was on in the seventies,” Brill recalled. “Girls back then didn’t think about puppeteering. They thought about being an actress or a comedienne, but to be a puppeteer was not on anyone’s wavelength.”

Blending in with the corps of players “was the most challenging thing in my life,” she said. “You had to be one of the guys but you were not one of the guys, and there was a pecking order. You had to be mindful of what your place was. For a while there were some strong-minded women who came in, and they began to tell people what to do and how to do it.” Brill sliced her index finger across her throat. “It was like ‘Off with their heads!’ ”

Brill succeeded by embracing aspects of her femininity, and when her chance came to develop a character, during the heyday of women’s lib, she reached for “a little pink puppet” and named her Prairie Dawn. “They put her in a blond wig [and a] party dress and asked me to create a . . . very feminine girly-girl. I came up with this innocent, pretty sound.”
⁵

Given generous time to develop the character, Brill and the writers filled out Prairie Dawn’s levelheaded, patient personality. In most cases, Muppets season slowly before they mature.

“The whole Muppet thing works best when people are free and open and feel like nobody will criticize you. And Jim was incredible like that. He’d expect you to do the best you can, but he also knew where you came from. If you weren’t a born puppeteer he didn’t expect you to do incredible moves. Some people are incredible puppet manipulators, but they only have one voice that they end up using over and over and over. Some people aren’t fantastic at the manipulation but they can do all these different voices and characters. And then there are more than a couple who can do everything.”

 

From time to time when James Taylor is out on his annual summer swing of outdoor music pavilions, a voice from the audience will call out “Jellyman Kelly!” The shout-out inevitably ripples through the seats, triggering a memory for a part of the singer-songwriter’s fan base that had its first exposure to J.T. on
Sesame Street
in 1983. “Television
is powerful
,” Taylor said with a smile.

Accompanied by jazz virtuoso Howard Johnson on tuba, Taylor introduced a sing-along song about a man who loved his jelly most on toast. His gal, Jenny Mulhenny, was a fireman’s daughter who loved to boil water. A brigade of five preschoolers joined in for the chorus (“Oh! Can he come home, Jenny? / Can he come home, Jenny can he come?”) and some nonsense lyrics (“Yaka yaka yaka yaka huh-uh no!”).

Equally inspired was a 1983 rooftop duet with Oscar in which Taylor tweaked the lyrics to “Your Smiling Face.” Its good-natured, happy vibe heaped misery upon the misanthropic puppet.

 

Oscar peeks out of his can.

 

Oscar picks up the refrain:

 

Taylor described his three
Sesame Street
appearances—he sang his cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Up on the Roof” with his band in 1983—as “magical days. It was wonderful to get caught in the energy on that set. In television, the relationship with the audience is abstract, a cerebral thing. But because the creative team at
Sesame Street
somehow invented a world, the audience always seemed to be there. There was no barrier to break through between rehearsal and performance. It was like everything was happening all the time, and it was great to be part of that vitality, humor, and spontaneity. Elsewhere on television, there was a corporate Novocain that crept up and killed spontaneity. Television doesn’t trust spontaneity because it’s not reliable.

“The wonder of
Sesame Street
is that it has never tried to wrap children up in cellophane,” Taylor said. “It’s as if the show has been saying, ‘Come on and join the real world,’ helping children relate to that world. I mean, what other children’s show ever dared to have a character like Bert, whose job it is to be boring? It’s not the sort of thing you’d think would play to children. But it’s all part of an artistic endeavor; it suggests to its viewers other ways of seeing themselves, and in that way, it’s mythic. They created Cookie Monster, with his insatiable appetite, and wide-open Big Bird, characters that were accessible and that children could use.

“To me, art is a matter of people presenting usable models that people can adapt. Art blazes a trail through a territory that nobody else has walked on. But after the artist has walked on it, there’s a way to go through it. Kids particularly need to find a vision of themselves that works in the world, a way in which they can tell themselves, ‘Yeah, there’s a place for me. I can go through and make it.’ They need to know this daily, and in time it all comes together. And it’s not only about children, it’s about us as grown individuals and how we see ourselves, how we react and what kind of internal myths and self-images we construct for ourselves out of what’s available. It’s what our culture is. I find it amazing how much
Sesame Street
has offered of that essential process, and what a wide range of people it offered it to, a hugely inclusive group.

“Always,” he said, “in a joyous way.”

Chapter Sixteen

S
ometimes life is like the movies, a story in three acts.

It was just that way for the founders of
Sesame Street
, who found themselves dealing with a series of challenges in the 1970s, all the stuff that constitutes the middle stage of any drama.

Though it would be difficult to divine exactly when act 2 began, the one thing that distinguished it from act 1 was easy to spot: things got complicated.

 

Raposo was both a delight and a distraction to Joan Cooney. Her “bandleader,” as he referred to himself in correspondence to her, could alternately be a sweetheart or a pain in the ass, sometimes both within the same five-minute period.