Street Gang (51 page)

Big Bird says, “Right, right. You’re talking about Mrs. Williams and her baby named Leandro and that she’s coming here today. What are you going to talk about now?”

“Well, how about politics?” David asks.

“Hey,” Big Bird says. “Not even standing on one leg could make that interesting.”

“He’s got a point,” Maria says.

The segment establishes a truism of communal life: that sometimes kids can figure out what adults are saying, even when they seem uninterested.

After two brief inserts we return to the courtyard, where the adults are now discussing a female political candidate. David assures us that she is against “big spending, big business, and inflation. She says when she gets into office there will be enough money for government, social programs, and the space program.”

Bob says, “Hey, it sounds great. What’s her name?”

“Alice in Wonderland,” Gordon answers.

Big Bird arrives with surprises, and from here we need to examine every word:

 

“When we finished that scene there wasn’t one of us whose face wasn’t streaked with tears,” Caroll Spinney said. “Jon Stone said, ‘Let’s do another take, just in case,’ but there was nothing wrong with that take. It was perfect.”

Comically curmudgeon cameraman Frankie Biondo was left uncharacteristically speechless. “It was really, really sad, and really, really touching,” he said, for once not kidding.

The episode aired on Thanksgiving 1983, a year after Will Lee’s final appearance in the Macy’s parade. It was scheduled on that holiday to allow maximum exposure for families at home.

It was a landmark broadcast,
Sesame Street
’s most noble and affecting hour, and a bravura performance by Caroll Spinney, who arrived at the studio for the day of taping knowing his lines cold. Jon Stone, directing that day, could not have asked for more. Prompted by Singer, Stone had called Spinney the night before, just to make sure the puppeteer was preparing.

There had been a time, long before, that Spinney had failed to arrive at the studio with some illustrations Stone had expected. “I just got overwhelmed and busy,” Spinney said, “but Jon was furious, and he never forgave me. From that point forward, in his eyes I was unreliable.”

Spinney himself drew the caricatures that Big Bird handed out to the cast members during the segment on Mr. Hooper’s death. In a final scene, Big Bird has the drawing he did of Mr. Hooper, now framed, just above his nest on Sesame Street. The camera lingers on the drawing for a second before Luis comes knocking to ask Big Bird if he would like to see the Williams baby.

Big Bird gets the last line, closure, as it were. “You know, the one thing is about new babies, one day they’re not here and the next day, here they are!”

By the way:
Sesame Street
came to us that day sponsored by the letter
J,
as in Jeff, Jim, Joan, Joe, and Jon, and by the number
5.

 

In the minds of
Sesame Street
’s young viewers, puppets and people are interchangeable characters, coming and going as episodes pass like highway markers. As Mr. Hooper’s store faded into the distance, a new landmark came into view. It was Elmo, the twice-orphaned Muppet.

In 1985, Elmo was but a bit player among the Muppets, just one of the background characters the Henson puppeteers refer to as AMs, short for Anything Muppets. Essentially they are like naked mannequins waiting to be dressed for the department store window, or Mr. Potato Head before the eyes, nose, and assorted appendages are added. Whenever a need arises for a onetime-use character—or a gaggle of anonymous puppets for a crowd scene—Henson’s backstage “Muppet wranglers” reach into a trunk and grab AMs. They’re the Muppet equivalent of a chorus line. And just as it can happen in musical theater, when a director spots a pretty face, sometimes Anything Muppets are plucked from the pack. So it was with Elmo, who may have stood out simply for being an arresting shade of cherry lollipop red.

Lost in the mists of time is which production member said, “Let’s write something for it.” In fact, even how Elmo came to be named is no longer known.

But this much we do know: puppeteer Brian Muehl performed Elmo three or four times, using a sweet, whispery voice for the character. It did not stick.

Soon after, Muehl, a veteran of the Swiss pantomime group ensemble Mummenschanz, left the Muppets to pursue acting and writing. When he departed, his characters were divvied up. Marty Robinson got Telly; Barkley the dog went to a young gymnast; newcomer Kevin Clash got Dr. Nobel Price; and Richard Hunt inherited Elmo. Hunt, who gravitated to more flamboyant, theatrical characters and avoided cute ones, took an immediate dislike to Elmo.

“Richard loved opera and partying,” said Clash, “and he often came in with a hangover. With an aching head, he would give away parts to the young puppeteers, literally throwing them at us. Richard saved his energy for the hipper, more established characters, and he just hated doing Elmo. Norman Stiles, our head writer, would say in disgust, “What is Richard
doing
with that character?”

Legend has it that Hunt entered the Muppet greenroom one day, holding Elmo upside down by his rod, as if he were carrying a dead buzzard by its claw. “I was the only puppeteer there,” Clash recalled. “Richard said, ‘You know what? Have you got a voice for
this
?’ ” With that, Hunt sent Elmo flying across the room.

That flight, not unlike Lindbergh’s, proved life altering for Clash, who had wanted nothing more from the age of nine than to be a featured performer for Jim Henson’s Muppets.

 

While other children were playing ball on the streets of his boyhood home of Turner Station, Maryland, a historic African American community south of Baltimore that natives sometimes call Turner’s Station, Clash was making puppets from remnants out of his mother’s sewing basket. Like Henson, Clash fashioned one of his first characters from the lining of a discarded woman’s coat. That was just the first of many parallels in the lives of two men who learned the rudiments of television production through puppetry, while working as teenagers for local stations in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Both demonstrated sketching and cartooning talent at an early age and a fondness for Walt Disney animation. Both were collectors of scraps and found objects, discards and junk that were recycled and refashioned into small whimsical creations. In both cases, whatever aspects of their personality were hidden behind a veil of shyness and reserve exploded in performance, even as children.

Kevin was one of four children born to George and Gladys Clash. George, himself by nature a quiet man, was a welder for the Reynolds Metals Company and a neighborhood handyman. Gladys ran an in-home child-care center in their two-bedroom, one-bath house at 17 Pittsburgh Avenue. “There were always children around who weren’t my brothers and sisters,” Clash said with a laugh. “Kids just gravitated to my parents.”

Like his father, Kevin could draw and illustrate with uncommon flair. “I really didn’t get interested in reading until I discovered
TV Guide,
” he said. “Chapter books at school seemed so long to me, and I hated to get called on during reading, but I really was interested in reading about celebrities in
TV Guide,
and I really enjoyed TV as a child.”

His favorite program was the
CBS Children’s Film Festival,
the showcase of international films that was hosted by Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and written by Jon Stone and Tom Whedon. “I remember seeing
The Red Balloon
for the first time on that series, and loving it,” he said.
Sesame Street
did not debut until Clash was nine, but he watched it along with the day-care kids at home. Like many older boys who passed by the screen as their younger siblings watched, Clash found Maria “sexy and attractive. I liked her even more when she wasn’t around that David.”

Clash was twelve when he built a finger puppet named Mondey, who resembled Mickey Mouse. “I wanted, in some ways, to go into this fantasy world because of my shyness,” he said. “When my mother would send me to buy bread, and I saw a person walking toward me, I’d duck and find another way to get to the store.”

In early adolescence he built a wisecracking puppet inspired by a school friend named Tony Bartee. The puppet, who took on the name Bartee, had egg-shaped L’Eggs panty hose containers for eyes and a wig that had belonged to Clash’s grandmother. “The more he made, the better he got,” said Gladys, a loquacious and animated nurturer.

Gladys took plenty of criticism from neighbors who were forever questioning why her teenage boy was staying indoors by the Singer sewing machine while the other kids in the neighborhood were out playing. “My parents never put a negative twist on [my interest in puppets],” Clash said. “They never persuaded me to go out and play sports if I chose not to. Peers teased me, but when I got into high school and was doing variety shows and heckling them, it was completely different.”
⁵

George paid little heed to what anyone but his wife had to say, and she always had plenty. The day-care mother was only too happy to have Kevin entertain the kids, not that that was anyone’s business. Sometimes when a tot with soggy drawers had no other change of clothes, she’d slip the trousers off a puppet and onto the child.

George built Kevin’s first puppet stage and carted his son around to Baltimore-area performances. Kevin’s first paid gig, at thirteen, was at a neighborhood recreation hall. He earned $2.35. He gradually built a reputation as a capable performer, but sometimes he gave away candy to ensure a full house.

By age sixteen, when he was a sophomore at Dundalk High School, he was being paid twenty dollars for a half-hour performance at a church-hall social or at a private home for a birthday party, and thirty-five dollars for the full-hour show. Kevin invested a portion of the proceeds toward purchases at hobby shops and fabric stores, accumulating storage containers filled with fur, felt, and foam rubber.

In the years before Baltimore’s decaying waterfront was transformed by the shops and promenades of the urban makeover known as Harbor Place, Kevin would entertain on downtown streets, using his array of handmade puppets to lip-synch to recordings played on a portable tape machine. Mama and son skunks would sing Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World.” He’d spin a tune by Earth, Wind & Fire and have two puppets dance the Bump or he’d bring out a firefly character to sing Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Throughout, Bartee, whose skin was made from orange terrycloth, would banter with passersby. “Like my hair?” he would ask, before yanking off the wig. “Here. You can have it.”
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