Street Gang (58 page)

Adding to the determined upbeatness would be a trio of singing rodents called the Squirrels (Crystal, Darlene, and Rhonda), and comic actress Ruth Buzzi, best remembered for
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,
would join the cast as Ruthie, the proprietor of the Finders Keepers thrift shop, a kind of precursor to eBay. Typical items for sale in Ruthie’s shop would be Jack and Jill’s pail and Cinderella’s glass slipper.

Significantly, a circle of trained child actors would now have a continuing presence on the show. The long-held tradition of using untrained children on the set, behaving as they would on a real street, would come to an end. That was not the way they did things on
Barney
.

Rather than impose changes she did not believe in, Dulcy Singer resigned before production commenced on the twenty-fifth season. She was replaced as executive producer by Michael Loman, a sitcom writer from California who had worked on
All in the Family, Happy Days,
and
Valerie.
CTW had commissioned a headhunter to identify outside candidates for the job, but Loman came in over the transom. He heard about the opening and pitched himself so successfully that he beat out other more qualified candidates, even though he had had no experience in children’s television.

The producers and writers, long accustomed to a line-of-succession policy, were enraged that their preferred candidate, Lisa Simon, was passed over. Simon had worked well with Getchell and was prepared to institute change. But as with many executive searches in the 1990s, the flash of the new trumped familiarity and fidelity.

Accommodating the new set forced CTW to find a new production facility that had the necessary height, width, and floor space, and
Sesame Street
accordingly relocated to the massive Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens, a Hollywood-worthy motion picture and television production facility.

CTW was about to spend serious money with these changes, but they hoped to make it back by capitalizing on the letter
Z.

 

After a few years away from
Sesame Street
to pursue theater roles, puppeteer Fran Brill returned to the series in 1993, in time for the major public relations and marketing push tied to the twenty-fifth anniversary. Without knowing it, unreasonable expectations were about to be heaped upon the puppeteer with the introduction of Zoe.

Adding characters had always been the province of CTW’s creative team, a process that took time, trial, and patience. But this time around, CTW executives abandoned the tried and true, choosing instead to adopt a model more in tune with what the bourgeoning cable networks for children favored. In this about-face, the producers and writers would not lead the charge, but rather specialists in marketing and product development, in tandem with the research department at CTW.

Zoe was like a plush toy in search of an identity, a carefully considered product that would be tested for its appeal with children in focus groups. Every aspect of its development was controlled and strategic. The decision to make Zoe a bright orange, for instance, was deliberate. That color would not only contrast with Big Bird and Elmo on the TV screen but stand out on the shelves at Target, where Barney and his friends were making bar code scanners beep as never before.

The zest to create Zoe was considered almost Frankensteinian by the writers working on the other side of the building from the execs, the outward sign of the widening schism developing between the creative and business sides. But Zoe was carrying additional burdens. Even before she made her television debut, she became a standard bearer for feminists at CTW who had grown tired of waiting for a breakout female Muppet. The women wondered, quite understandably, why the most beloved
Sesame Street
characters—Big Bird, Oscar, Bert, Ernie, Grover, Cookie Monster, Snuffy, Telly, the Count—were males performed by males.

Any number of female characters had been added through the years, including the always hilarious Grundgetta, Oscar’s trashy girlfriend. Though Grundgetta was originated by Brian Muehl in 1982, the prodigiously talented Pam Arciero had picked up the character and run with it in 1985.

There also was Prairie Dawn, Fran Brill’s terribly earnest, earthbound pragmatist in an ash blond human-hair wig. Prairie was the Muppet most liked by librarians.

Bit player Gladys undoubtedly may have been the funniest of the female characters. But Richard Hunt’s dairyland diva rankled feminists more than any other character. She was, after all, a cow.

The charge to promote Zoe was led by Dr. Valeria Lovelace, a social scientist who directed research for
Sesame Street.
Lovelace was the first activist research director. She vowed early in her tenure that research would no longer passively provide guidance to the production department but instead develop an active agenda for researchers to pursue and promote, a list of objectives that would be forced upon the creative team that had for so long driven the show. “She had little interest in the selfless role Research had played in the past,” Stone said. “She felt Research should be an entity of its own and be considered, within the corporate structure of CTW as well as in practice, at least equal to Production.”

For the producers, writers, and performers, Lovelace became an object of ridicule and derision. They nicknamed her “Maleria” and rebuffed and mocked her at every opportunity. One instance that became legendary involved a script about a showbiz sharpie named Walt Dizzy, in search of an actor to play a chicken in an upcoming production. Telly, badly bitten by the acting bug, obsesses about the part, practicing
clucks
and wing flapping. Alas, Elmo gets the role, but Telly lands another and all is well on
Sesame Street.
The script was heading into production when Lovelace put a halt to it: after reading the script, Research had concluded the material was unsuitable to air on the grounds of racism. “The part of a chicken should only be played by a chicken,” was their conclusion, Stone said. “Someone who wasn’t a chicken shouldn’t play the part of a chicken. When the writers and producers realized that Valeria wasn’t kidding, they explained that the whole art of acting is pretending to be someone other than who you are in real life, otherwise you wouldn’t mount a production of Hamlet unless a real Danish prince happened to show up at the audition. Norman Stiles suggested with a straight face that we air the piece as written and see how much mail we get from outraged chickens.”

Lovelace, an African American who had successfully pushed through a curriculum on race relations in 1992, was now determined to push Zoe into a starring role, with or without buy-in from the writers.

David Britt sanctioned the moves and the power shift, holding true to his contention that the production team—notably Stone and his acolytes—had become calcified and resistant to innovation, blind and deaf to the seismic changes that were under way in children’s television, heralded by
Barney & Friends.
He believed Stone not only dismissed as nonsense the purple dinosaur who had encroached on
Sesame Street
’s success but was contemptuous of households where children tuned in the show. “You know the old line that’s attributed to Hitler in the 1940s, when everything was going to hell: ‘I’m beginning to wonder if the German people are worthy of me’? Jon’s version of that was ‘Well, when the kids don’t respond anymore, they’re not worthy of having
Sesame Street.
’ He really had his picture of the show that was frozen in time.”

Fran Brill was accordingly handed a mandate: make Zoe a star that little girls will relate to and the products team can bank on.

Zoe received a mighty gust of public relations support. Encamped in Pasadena at the annual Television Critics Association summer meeting, TV columnists were hand-fed a Zoe-is-the-answer agenda. Writing in
TV Times,
the Sunday listings guide inserted into the
Los Angeles Times,
reporter Jack Matthews wrote, “Valeria Lovelace, who has headed research for eleven years, says the new characters are usually ‘the babies of writers, ’ but this year most were created to facilitate the show’s curriculum. ‘We usually move into the process when the character has been created and can go out and test them. We’ve been in the loop much earlier with these. . . . Every year we have created a female Muppet character, but they haven’t been successful. This year we’re trying to create a star who will be a very good role model for girls, in terms of taking initiatives and goals.’ ”
¹⁵

The
New York Times
reported that CTW was “counting on Zoe to fill an embarrassing lacuna that has dogged the show since its creation in 1969: the lack of a strong, female Muppet.” Lovelace said in the piece, “Little girls need to have role models on the show . . . [to] see them and say, ‘That’s like me.’ ”
¹⁶

In advance of the twenty-fifth season debut,
People
magazine got closer to the truth than its editors may have even realized. “Political correctness has created a monster on
Sesame Street
,” it declared. “Hoping to bring more positive female role models to children’s television, the folks at that august address have a new resident who is indeed perfectly PC—perpetually cute, that is. [Zoe] is scruffy, wide-eyed and the color of a radioactive orange Popsicle. Only three, she is already pegged to be a star—the first female supernova of the show.”

Brill was quoted extensively about a character that she had hardly had a chance to play with and develop. It was like asking a new mother to ruminate on the personality and potential of a one-month-old. Worse, the talking points she had been handed came from the public relations department, not the trusted corps of writers who understood the rigor behind character development.

“Before this time, writers were never driven by merchandising,” Brill said.“It was always, Go write for the character and see what develops. This was just the opposite, and you shouldn’t put out product before people have a chance to know who the hell you’re talking about. Zoe got burned with that. Also, before Zoe we weren’t designing puppets for their attractiveness. The Muppets are ugly when they’re just lying on the floor unanimated. They’re bath mats with big eyes. But when they’re animated, that’s a whole other story. Zoe marked the first time a character was created without it being a play-around puppet first. The very first thing I ever did on camera as Zoe was horrible because she hadn’t grown out of something that I had nurtured and developed. I was sort of doing this Carol Channing voice that was just too much. Over time I pulled her back because it wasn’t coming from anything within me.

“Jim Henson never used the word
cast
in discussing how he found the right person for a Muppet. Some people are more in tune with a puppet; it just depends what happens to your creative juices when you put it on. The classic story was Kevin Clash with Elmo. In my case, it was the opposite. Someone said ‘Let’s create this female blockbuster equivalent of Elmo. What color should she be? What color do we not have in the palette? Let’s see, Big Bird is yellow, Oscar is green, they went through all the colors, like going through a box of Crayolas. Oh, she’s got to be orange!’ Well, a year or two later we had this merchandising person say to us, ‘If only Zoe had been pink. It would be so much easier to sell her because girls love pink.’ ”

A pink Muppet? That, too, would come to pass.

 

Sam and Carol Gibbon had no intention of canceling their annual poker game with Dave Connell.

It was May 4, 1995, when the couple drove to River Edge, New Jersey, to join Connell and cronies Jim and Pat Thurman.

Dave’s daughter, Jan, and son, Alan, also were there, monitoring their father, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He chose to die at home rather spend another day in a hospital or move into a hospice.

“My dad had just started having a series of strokes, and the end was near,” Jan said. “One of the things Alan and I did before the card game was read
Ferdinand
to my dad, his favorite children’s story.”

The Thurmans and the Gibbons settled in around a table in Connell’s bedroom. “They got comfortable chairs and had drinks and told jokes and had a great time,” Jan said. “It was a beautiful tribute to their shared friendship.”

Sam and Carol went back in time the longest with Connell, to the first decade of
Captain Kangaroo
and the formative years of
Sesame Street.
The apotheosis of their creative partnership was
The Electric Company,
the sketch-comedy reading series that probably had as much or even more developmental impact on children in its day than
Sesame Street.
The pity is that because funding for the series dried up and it had no marketable characters to turn into plush toys or imprint on bedsheets to generate a revenue stream, production ceased in 1977 after 780 half-hour episodes.
¹⁷
On that day in Washington when Joan Cooney had convinced Barry Goldwater that CTW could wean itself off federal assistance, she had unwittingly made a kind of Sophie’s Choice:
Sesame Street
would survive,
The Electric Company
would not.

Bright guys who never took themselves too seriously, Gibbon and Connell became visiting faculty members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They had gone through a lot together and were permanently bonded by their shared love of comedy. After all, these were the guys who created an
Electric Company
word sleuth named Fargo North, Decoder.

“When we were little, Dad would stop off at Sam and Carol’s in Englewood Cliffs on the way home from work for a drink,” said Jan Connell, who worked in the television industry before opening a psychotherapy private practice in Warwick, New York. “Dad would get tanked until we were in bed, because he didn’t feel like dealing with it all. Then he’d come home after my mother had done everything, which was not very nice. But, at least, he admitted he wasn’t a model father and husband back then. I don’t think my parents ever got along. My father was very focused on work; there was not much room left for marriage. Like a lot of other businessmen at that time, he was very active sexually. Nowadays, you’d call it a sex addiction, and there would be trouble to pay in the workplace. But back then, with the discovery of birth control, there was sexual freedom that didn’t exist before, and STDs weren’t widely thought about. A lot of those guys were not saints, and they did it with secretaries and assistants and whoever was willing. Whenever there is the kind of tension and power that exists in the studio, all that intellect and talent, there’s a huge sexual energy attached to it. Plus, they were never home. The irony is, while these men were out trying to educate the world, their wives were left at home to raise the children they brought into the world.”