Street Gang (53 page)

Intense, tenacious Moss turned in an operetta that was as romantic as it was revealing, seven melodious minutes of soliloquy in song and spare dialogue that played out on the brownstone’s rooftop deck, with a silhouette skyline as backdrop. It simultaneously reviewed and expanded the back stories of Luis and Maria, briefly introducing the bride’s mother and the groom’s proud father, seated in the open-air congregation. Among the other attendees were Gordon, Susan, Mr. McIntosh (stage manager Chet O’Brien), Gina, David, Bert, Ernie, the two-headed monsters, the Count, Cookie Monster, Oscar (in a shmutzed tuxedo), Telly, and Big Bird, who whispers “You look beautiful,” as Maria enters in an off-the-shoulder white gown (with just a hint of cleavage).

A Hispanic priest addresses the bride and groom and explains marriage in terms simple enough for preschoolers to comprehend yet elegant enough for adults to appreciate.

“When two people get married, what they do is make a promise to each other,” he says. “Luis and Maria are making a promise today, a promise to share their lives together, a promise to help one another and care for each other and love each other for the rest of their lives. They are celebrating this promise in front of you, the people they love most, their friends and their families.”

The service dissolves and up comes an intro, a segue to lyrics that touch on the inner dialogue of the participants: the beaming groom (“Look at her. Isn’t she wonderful?”), the bride with a late case of cold feet (“It’s altogether possible I’ve made a major error. My hands are cold, my forehead’s hot. It’s either love or terror”), the equally jittery little red ring bearer (“Don’t drop the rings, Elmo. Please, Elmo, don’t drop the rings”), the heart-heavy ex-boyfriend (“Isn’t it funny? I’ve seen her each day of my life. Now she’s becoming . . . become Luis’s new wife. I’m not used to thinking of her as anyone’s wife”), the wistful bachelor and best man, Bob, turning to maid of honor Linda (“Sometimes I wonder how I would feel being married. If I were married, would it be to someone like you?”), the longtime girlfriend, Linda, dreamily responding in sign language through a video thought balloon (“Sometimes I wonder how I would feel being married. I wonder if you wonder, too. I wish I knew”), the newly adoptive parents Gordon and Susan with junior attendant Miles (“Look at him. Isn’t he wonderful?”).

Luis and Maria exchange vows and rings, and the priest concludes, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

From the back row, Big Bird blurts out “Yay!” and Gina closes his beak to allow the bride and groom to kiss.

Just as the Mr. Hooper memorial had been writer Norman Stiles’s masterpiece, the wedding episode was Jeff Moss’s.
¹⁰

Together, they are the poles that held up the canvas tent that was
Sesame Street
in the 1980s, a reflection of the sometimes silly, sometimes sad, always surprising, relentlessly spinning cyclical circus of life.

Chapter Eighteen

T
he nineties were a time of transition on
Sesame Street,
as the original architects and builders of the enterprise faced changes in the cultural landscape, trials on the show, and their own mortality.

“Everything that can happen to a family happened to those of us who worked on
Sesame Street,
” said Dulcy Singer, who weathered her share of challenges as executive producer of the show during a period when its dominance in preschool television was threatened.

She had many tense days and difficult messages to deliver, but the worst moment came on an afternoon in early January, just eight days into the new decade. On January 9, 1990, the Ossining, New York, police raced to Stony Lodge Hospital, a sixty-one-bed psychiatric facility in suburban Westchester County, where Northern Calloway had flown into a violent rage, striking a staff physician. Police described Calloway as “agitated and troubled” as they arrived and slowly maneuvered around him, not wishing to make matters worse with sudden movements. Calloway clearly did not want to be handcuffed, and a scuffle ensued. The more Calloway struggled, the more danger he posed to himself and others.

Finally, as he was being subdued, he went into a frightening seizure and then dropped to the floor.

What followed came as a shock, even to the hospital’s trained staff: Calloway, just forty-one years old, went into cardiac arrest. He was transported by ambulance to nearby Phelps Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

It fell to Singer to break the news of Calloway’s death to
Sesame Street
’s cast and crew. “The hardest one to tell was Alison Bartlett,” Singer recalled. “She loved Northern. When she came on the show, they worked in Hooper’s Store together. He mentored her.”

Though still a teenager, Bartlett weathered Calloway’s ups and downs as tactfully as anyone on the set, even as she had good reason to be wary of him. He showed up unannounced one day at LaGuardia High School and proposed to her.

It was because of that incident—and another in which Calloway bit music coordinator Danny Epstein—that the actor had ultimately been dismissed. He finally ran out of second chances with a corporation that by all rights could have severed ties with him after his rampage in Nashville.

“We had to let him go because things got so bad,” Singer said. By the late 1980s, Calloway had become useless on the set and a burden. “He would stand around for a scene and look like he had potato chip crumbs on his face,” said Caroll Spinney. “I wondered why the makeup people didn’t wipe around his mouth. He was so out of it he didn’t check the mirrors, so that he’d look good for the camera. The last time they really used him he had only one line to say, because he couldn’t remember a second sentence. They’d shoot one sentence at a time and then change the camera angle.”

“In the early years of the show he had so many interesting, wonderful ideas, and he really cared about his character,” Singer said. “After the incident in Nashville, I had a hard time with the front office, convincing them that we should keep Northern on the show. But it was apparent to me that he was extremely ill, so I fought to keep him,” Singer said. “You don’t fire people because they are sick.”

It ultimately fell to Singer as executive producer to dismiss Calloway.

“I called Northern’s psychiatrist to find out the best way to break the news to him, but the doctor saw me as a villain and was little help,” she said. “Two of us met Northern at a restaurant because our bosses had suggested we meet in a public place. Northern actually took it well, thanking me for all the opportunities he had.” Singer was relieved that Calloway did not cause a scene.

The Westchester County Coroner’s Office in Valhalla performed an autopsy on Calloway. Cause of death, listed in the coroner’s report for Case No. 1990-0079, was exhaustive psychosis, now more commonly referred to as excited delirium syndrome (EDS). A chemical analysis revealed traces of antipsychotic drugs Carbamazepine and Thorazine in tissue, but no evidence of cocaine or recreational drugs of any kind. Most who succumb to EDS have been under the influence of illegal stimulants.
¹

Calloway was laid to rest following a sparsely attended memorial service in Ossining. It had been some time since his colleagues from
Sesame Street
had seen or heard from him. Most grieved the loss in private.

“When something happens in the news I often think,
I wonder what Northern would think of this?
” Sonia Manzano said. “You know, somehow, he lives on. He was a man of tremendous energy and potential. He could sing, he could dance, he could tell jokes, he could write music, he could produce,” she said, followed by a long pause. “But he always wanted it
now.
”

Today Manzano is married and mother to Gabriela Rose Reagan, who played Maria’s daughter, Gabi, for two seasons on
Sesame Street.
Her daughter is now about the same age Sonia was when she first stepped onto the
Sesame Street
set. Manzano smiled conspiratorially, with one eyebrow raised, when she spoke of how she and Calloway broke a television barrier back then, almost on a whim.

“When I first auditioned for
Sesame Street,
the script had it that David and Maria were up against tenement doors making out, like a scene out of
West Side Story,
she recalled. “The initial shooting scripts weren’t written that way. So it was Northern and I who decided that David and Maria would go steady. We played it up that way, taking it as far as we possibly could. Jon did not encourage it, but the writers picked up on it right away. Maria and David gave
Sesame Street
that added dimension of teen romance.”

Better that fans of
Sesame Street
remember Calloway just that way, as the handsome charmer who helped out Mr. Hooper in the store and had a thing for the Latina who used to curl up with a book on the fire escape that ran up the side of a brownstone on Sesame Street.

“I once gave a speech at a university and a professor in her late thirties came up to me,” Manzano recalled. “She said, ‘You and Northern were the J. Lo and P. Diddy of my generation.’ ”

 

When no one was looking, Northwestern University freshman Stephanie D’Abruzzo tore a full-page ad out of a stray copy of the
Chicago Tribune
and went happily on her way back to the dorm. May 16, 1990, had just gotten even better for the diminutive communications student from Pittsburgh.

The ad she had taken heralded fabulous news for a would-be puppeteer: the Muppets were going to have a permanent presence at Walt Disney World, a place where the public could celebrate their zaniness. D’Abruzzo, an irreverent brunette with a huge singing voice, thought she just might venture down there to see them in performance someday. And perhaps there would be an internship possibility.

During her first year living at the Communications Residential College at NU, D’Abruzzo had gained the freshman fifteen—“and then some,” she said. She had become slightly self-conscious about her appearance. “I had a bad late-eighties and then an early-nineties perm,” she once told her hometown
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“It was obvious early on [in college] that looks mattered. I was a character actor who didn’t look right for character parts.

“When I would watch the old Bugs Bunny cartoons or
The Muppet Show,
I realized how multilevel the humor is. Watching old
Sesame Street
and
Muppet Show
episodes, I began to think [puppetry] was a great way to do character work without it mattering what I look like.”
²

It helped that she already had a repertoire of comic voices that allowed her to play “any size, shape, sex, or species.”
³

“As I went back to my dorm room that day, I saw that the message board on the door had a note from my friend Ryan. It said, ‘Sorry about Jim Henson.’ ” D’Abruzzo didn’t know what to make of it.

“The previous week, there had been a bit of a campus hoax, where it had been widely rumored that Steve Martin had died. In an age where most students did not have televisions in their rooms, and with no Internet handy, such pranks were easy to pull off in the vacuum of a then relatively Luddite college campus. So that’s where my mind headed: some sicko had started a new rumor. After all, there was no news of Jim Henson dying in the
Trib
that I had just swiped. But it didn’t take long before I learned that the horrible news was true.”

A friend on campus who had interned at the Jim Henson Company the previous summer called his friend Craig Shemin in New York to verify the report. Shemin, then working in the public relations department at Henson, had been fielding nearly every call that had come into the building that morning. The rest of the company was in shock behind closed doors.

D’Abruzzo walked around Northwestern in a daze, as well. “Whether I wound up going to classes that day remains a blur,” she said. “I do remember that I instantly signed up to use the dorm’s screening room for the rest of the day and into the night, and invited friends to come and watch Muppet movies and
Muppet Shows
and
Sesame Street
and anything else Muppet-related that we could dig up on VHS.”

In silence that night, the group watched a PBS special produced by Children’s Television Workshop and directed and hosted by Jon Stone.

“There is a tradition at Northwestern of painting this large rock that sits in the center of a cluster of South Campus buildings,” D’Abruzzo said. “Organizations do it to promote events and whatnot. I thought that maybe I should paint The Rock as a tribute to Jim that night. But no one was available to help, and it is a
really
big rock. Whole fraternities and sororities stay up all night to paint it. So my friend Kathe and I got some street chalk and did some sidewalk art. We drew a picture of Kermit and Ernie with the caption ‘Thanks, Jim.’ ”

The following week D’Abruzzo saw snippets of the Henson memorial on the evening news. “The dorm lounge had bad reception, and the news only devoted about fifteen to thirty seconds to the story,” she said. “I didn’t know any of those people who were singing and waving foam butterflies, but like many of them, my tears fell for a man I did not know.”

It’s a sorrow that Jim Henson didn’t live to meet D’Abruzzo, a third-generation Muppet performer. In her he would have found the rarest of the rare, a self-made female puppeteer who not only nailed a range of inspired voices and mastered the physical challenges, but snagged a Tony nomination for
Avenue Q,
a musical that simultaneously spoofed and saluted
Sesame Street.

 

Jim Henson and Jerry Nelson had been shooting the breeze in Central Florida one day, watching a video playback of a scene just taped at the Walt Disney Studios in Orlando. “I said to Jim that I was hoping I could retire soon,” Nelson recalled.

With that, Henson recoiled. “You are
not
going to retire,” he said firmly.

Nelson, slightly taken aback, turned directly to his boss, a bit surprised. Nelson was just getting to a point in life where there was enough money coming in to consider slowing down a bit. Plus, he had lost a daughter to cystic fibrosis and had been carrying the weight of grief for many years.