Mr. Rogers Never Wore Leather
I could tell you how to get to “Sesame Street” but, trust me, you don’t want to go. I thought I did after I saw the show recently and noticed that, 30 years later, almost the entire human cast was still there: Maria, Luis, Bob, Susan and Gordon.
Their 36th season begins Monday, , so I figured I’d use my journalist powers to stop by and thank them before it’s too late. It would be a kind of a media-age version of visiting my grandmother, with a fairly equal chance of being recognized.
I am not proud to say that on the subway to Queens, I still believed that “Sesame Street” was on some actual city block. A block where everyone is equal and respected and no one makes fun of a nice little boy for having “girl hair.” (Why my parents couldn’t take me to the barber once every few months is beyond me.)
But Sesame Street is a small soundstage. A soundstage where Carroll Spinney sat in the bottom half of his Big Bird costume that he’s been wearing since 1969, reading old New York Posts. Where two guys crawled out of the Snuffleupagus costume, like it was the morning after a rave. Where Mr. Hooper’s Store was stocked with goods labeled with the kinds of bad puns symptomatic of writing for 3-year-olds: Dooty Free Diapers and Hinee Poo Toilet Paper. Where -- and this would have the most massive psychological repercussions -- Maria was wearing leather pants.
The cast members were all really nice, but they seemed less like the people who raised me and more like a bunch of lefty actors from the ‘60s who have become oddly comfortable talking to puppets. Maria, whose real name is Sonia Manzano, was in the “Vagina Monologues.” She says men buy her martinis in bars because they remember her from “Sesame Street,” though I’m guessing it has less to do with counting to 12 than wearing leather pants.
Roscoe “Gordon” Orman wore a sweater with a Beverly Hills logo and told me a story about how Barbara Bush rubbed his head and he responded, “Is there anything else you want to rub?”
Loretta “Susan” Long said she once sang “A Policeman Is a Person in Your Neighborhood” to get out of a ticket. And Bob “Bob” McGrath told me that, not long ago at Disneyland, “this mom got all excited and shook her 6-year-old and told her to go get her little brother. And the boy looked at me and said, ‘Ma, he’s only on public television.’ ”
More harrowing still, I saw Oscar, who is also voiced by Spinney, flirt openly with Alicia Keys. “You’re supposed to be mean,” Keys said after a while. “Well,” Spinney responded, “it’s difficult at this moment.”
I don’t think Marvin Gaye could be that smooth with a puppet in his hand.
The cast, which is only signed up for one-year contacts, is disappointed that their fame has waned from their Wiggles-like heyday in the ‘70s, when they regularly visited the White House and were mobbed on the streets. Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and the Cartoon Network have sliced into “Sesame Street’s” ratings, and the show is down from 130 shows a season to 26.
PBS wanted to cut the shows to 25, at which point executive producer Lewis Bernstein said: “Which letter of the alphabet do you want me to fire?”
Doesn’t No Child Left Behind address this kind of stuff?
Sadder, I noticed a huge chest of familiar-looking, nameless creatures that were all known as “anything Muppets.” And a spare Grover, which they rotate through every year when the current Grover starts to wear out. I could look no more.
On my way out, I ran my hand through Big Bird’s costume, which, in retrospect, wasn’t so smart, considering the woman holding the costume was wearing white museum gloves. White gloves are the universal warning for “stay away.” At least that’s what I’ve gleaned so far from the Michael Jackson trial.
Sometimes it’s better just to store things away where they belong.