May 9, 1955: The muppets debut on television
Fri May 09, 2008 at 07:05:01 AM PDT
It is May 9, 1955. A studio arts major at UMCP interning at a local TV station has been asked to develop a short show based on contemporary versions of 4,000-year-old toys, no doubt partly because of his experience watching such shows and his work for the station when he was in high school.
On May 9, Sam and Friends debuts, and already viewers can see a difference between this college student's new vision of the craft and that of most in the field. Where the standard figures use wooden figures and strings, this 19-year-old trailblazer has attached wires to his foam rubber creations as he and his assistant, fellow UMCP student Jane Nebel, act out short scenes on television with their inanimate (yet very animated) characters.
Technically, these figures cannot be called puppets. They cannot be called marionettes. The term used to describe them, muppets, becomes synonymous with their creator, Jim Henson. (Oh, and Henson will marry that assistant four years later.)
If you were born after about 1966 and grew up in the U.S., and you had a television somewhere in your life, you probably do not remember that life before Sesame Street, which has arguably influenced children's education and safety more than anything but Head Start and Dr. Seuss.
As with the Civil War diary and the John Milton diary, much has been written on Henson, the muppets, child psychology and nearly every other topic even tangentially related. So I'm going to tell you a story you probably haven't heard, one you should know so you can use it as a lesson with your kids (if you have any) on being sure of yourself and not backing down from what you know is true:
Now, one of the less entertaining facets of authenticity debates is how much it hurts when you are telling the truth as you see it, or asking questions you think need to be asked, and the people you encounter either don't believe you or don't respect what matters to you -- and it's worse when they think they know where you're coming from. This is actually a major, recurring theme in the Harry Potter books, where you have characters disagreeing about what things mean or how significant they are, and friendships end up in peril because of this. It was a recurring motif on Sesame Street when I was a kid. Mr. Snuffleupagus: Big Bird could see him. Kids could see him. But until the mid-1980s, none of the grown-ups on the show could see him, and I always felt so bad for Big Bird and his rotten luck. What changed in 1985 was that a lot of child abuse scandals broke into the news that year, and the writers of Sesame Street realized that what children needed was the message that adults will believe them when they tell the truth, even if that truth isn't immediately visible or confirmable or palatable.
(A few paragraphs below that one on the linked page is the best analysis and explanation I have yet seen of what being bisexual means.)
This message of trust is particularly poignant to me because my parents did believe me — and because their parents' misdeeds (some of which I can and will talk about here, and some of which ... well, there's criminal activity involved, and I'd rather not type allegedly all day when referring to things like child rape and genitals being attacked with scissors and knitting needles) had no such audience.
I hope that each of you had a childhood more enjoyable than mine was. I won't go into significant detail, partly because I don't remember much of my life before college and partly because the diary after this one is such a downer, but when I stood up at my first eighth-grade assembly and said, "For the first time in four and a half years, I'm actually looking forward to a day of school," I was low-balling it.
We were relatively poor, I was an emotional, very random and very self-assured child (and I am an emotional, very random and very self-assured adult), and I was small for my age. I was the target of not just my class but other classes as well, which is a neat trick considering we had no official time between classes.
I went to high school 500 miles from that school, which did its level best to not care about a grandchild of its founders. (As my father is fond of saying, his mother would sigh and say "You know I don't run that school anymore" when anyone said anything bad about the place.) And high school was no better.
To sum up four years in a sentence, there is a really fantastic argument to be made that I am still alive because my parents listened to me when I complained and promised me they'd help once we figured out what I needed. I cannot fathom how much a parent's heart must ache, how difficult it must be to not cry buckets when a child 500 miles from home says, not trying for attention, "I just don't care about living anymore." (I am still not exactly fascinated by life — not suicidal, just apathetic — but the pain my death would cause people is unacceptable.)
For many parents, Einstein's famous remark about the two infinite things — the universe and human stupidity — misses the final member: their child's imagination. This is further compounded by that child's discovery of lying, followed by increased use of this discovery just as every other discovery gets used to death until its proper place in the world is determined. It is one two hallmarks of intellectual development which are hailed as negative and positive. (The other is the discovery of the word no.)
Teaching your kids that they can trust you, and teaching them the importance of not abusing that trust with them or with others, is absolutely essential to raising a healthy human being. And as with most essentialities, it is exhausting. In high school, I used my parents (mostly my mother) as therapists at least twice weekly, often more like four or five times a week, and between that and my parent-by-proxy, the local Oldies station (now you see another part of why Ohio hits me so hard), I managed to keep myself alive.
A friend of mine, who came out to her mother when she was in her early teens (as I remember the story), did not have such luck. Plans were made for reparative therapy, and my friend spent countless nights reading various Bible verses and praying to God to make her straight. She told me and several others once of how she would often wake up with her Bible open, as she'd fallen asleep praying and reading those Bible verses, hoping she'd wake up and not be attracted to girls.
She was saved, ultimately, not by a repentant mother who realized how this rift was crushing her daughter. She was saved not by a father who stepped in and showed his wife that love has no asterisk in the dictionary. She was saved by the moon.
She was taking a knife to herself one night so there would be no more exhausting nights of hoping to wake up a different person. And as she raised the blade, the moon shone off it. The resulting glint caught her eye and mentally distracted her from the task at hand.
Trust is what enabled my father to tell me in the car, one day as I was preparing to drive him somewhere, that he was remembering having been abused by his father. It enabled him to tell me that not only does he not fear death, he welcomes it. (He doesn't actively do this, but if he found out he was dying, he would be sad not for himself but for his family.) And when he thought he might have MS, trust enabled him to tell me how frightened he was by his body's falling apart. (Fibromyalgia, crippling depression and arthritis. The muscle weakness was just a sign of the fibro's progression. Joy.) Trust between me and my father has led to the simple sentence "Do a proper job," which carries more emotional weight than I could possibly detail here.
Trust enabled my mother to tell me of her suicide attempt with a bread knife when she was 11. Her father didn't remember the ordeal when she mentioned it some years ago, and he's the one who found her, then said, "My God, [second daughter], do we have to take you to a psychiatrist?????" I know of some of my parents' financial situation because my mother trusted me with the information.
Trust requires respect and love and can temporarily replace action. It yields mental stability and more trust and so is part of a perpetual cycle; trust begets more trust.
But sometimes that cycle is disrupted. Sometimes it is never started. I know this personally because of what my father has told me of the things his parents and grandmother did to him and his nine siblings. (The 10th grew up in another home, and for reasons entirely unrelated.)
Children suspected of being abused are often given dolls so they can demonstrate their interactions with the people they know. In many cases, they do not know they are being abused because their abusers make such action seem like another regular part of life. Social workers identify the abuse based on a child's saying "He touched me here" (86 percent of pedophiles are straight white men) and pointing to the genital area on the doll. It thus seems entirely appropriate and even fortuitous that one of the greatest children's education giants in modern history worked with glorified dolls.
I close this diary as I have closed others, inviting you to donate, this time to help children who so desperately need to feel safe trusting someone.
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