Last week, “Somebody Come and Play: 45 Years of ‘Sesame Street’ Helping Kids Grow Smarter, Stronger, and Kinder” opened at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center. The exhibit traces the show’s origins and evolution through artifacts on display, and on Tuesday night the library held a cocktail party to celebrate the opening. Guests included Cheryl Henson, daughter of the late Jim Henson; the Broadway composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, who writes songs for the show and performs on it; Bob McGrath, who has played Bob since 1969; Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, a puppeteer; Alan Muraoka, who plays Alan; Carole Delgado, whose husband, Emilio Delgado, has played Luis since 1971; Loretta Long, who has played Susan since 1969; Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who has played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969; and, hanging out in a leather shoulder bag on Spinney’s arm, Oscar himself, green and shaggy, in his usual mood. “I’m having a rotten time!” he said.
At the beginning of the party, Long and Spinney were talking to each other, Oscar between them. Long wore a purple-and-gold tunic, pants, and turban, and gold shoes; she was beaming. She had the same air of joyful authority that I remembered from my childhood. Spinney, who has white hair and who wore a gray suit with a high collar and red piping on the pockets, looked a bit like a svelte Captain Kangaroo.
A small crowd formed around them. A woman with two children went up and said hello. “I’m Shola Lynch,” she said. Lynch, a filmmaker (“Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,” “Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed”) and the film and audio curator at the N.Y.P.L.’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, appeared on “Sesame Street” as a child in the seventies, starting when she was two and a half. She learned about big and little with Big Bird; she talked about naps, directions, and feelings with Ernie and Bert.
“Shola with the hair!” Long cried out, making a big gesture with her hands. They hugged. Lynch wanted a photograph. “I have to be sandwiched between people I love,” she said. They sandwiched her. Oscar smiled.
Later, I talked to Spinney, and to Oscar, who looked at me, his eyebrows moving thoughtfully. I asked Spinney how he plays both Oscar and Big Bird, who are next-door neighbors. It was simple, he said: a stand-in operates whoever talks less in the scene, and he does both voices. As Oscar, he said, “It’s easy to switch from this—to this!” Suddenly, I was talking to Big Bird. I could practically see the beak. “I look better with my feathers on, too,” he said, as Big Bird.
“Yeah, you look like an idiot,” Oscar said, frowning.
“Oscar’s never liked me,” Spinney said.
I took a spin around the exhibit: a stoop inspired by the one on the show; Big Bird, eight feet high and canary yellow, with his nest and some multicolored oil barrels; Ernie and Bert, happy in their striped shirts, surrounded by Bert’s bottle caps, paper clips, and pigeon books, and Ernie’s drums; a Muppet known as Fat Blue, the mustachioed grump who tells Grover that there’s a fly in his soup; sheet music for “C Is for Cookie,” “Rubber Duckie” (accompanied by Ernie’s original rubber duckie), and “I Love Trash” (with an orchestration note that says “Extravagant Garbage Can Waltz”); sketches by Maurice Sendak, who, along with Charles Eames, Ezra Jack Keats, Ursula Nordstrom, child psychologists, artists, and many others, advised the show’s early producers; a cel from the animation of “Pinball Number Count,” the irresistible funk-driven 1977 counting song composed by Walt Kraemer and sung by the Pointer Sisters; Snuffleupagus, the size of a wooly mammoth, in a tutu; a photo area with two Honkers in the background; a panel of fur and felt samples at kid height; and, on the ceiling, Grover, flying among clouds as Super Grover.
In the seventies, one of the great pleasures of “Sesame Street”—besides its freewheeling joy, the Muppets’ delightfully weird shagginess, the humor, and the wildly singable songs—was the kindness of the adults. Sesame Street didn’t look like my neighborhood, but it felt like it, in part because Gordon, Bob, Susan, Luis, Mr. Hooper, and Maria felt like real friends. They listened, they were respectful, they sang about jobs and neighborhoods and the alphabet without condescension.
I spotted Bob McGrath. He wore a gray suit and a colorful Sesame Street necktie—Elmo, Bert, and so on—and he looked happy, just as he is on the show. When he saw me, his face lit up, and he smiled and waved. For a brief second I wondered if he somehow had seen me through the television.
McGrath told me about how the show had changed: fewer episodes per season, less human time, and younger cast members mixed in with “us dinosaurs.” (He is eighty-two.) The show, he said, has a younger viewership than it originally did: the kids who watch it are three and under, instead of four or five. “They can’t hang on to a story line as long as the older kids could, so the human element is only about the first twelve minutes of the show. It’s a much heavier Muppet-related show, and rightfully so. Kids who are one or two or three relate much better to a Muppet than they would a talking head.”
This explained a lot. I’d always thought that Elmo was a form of cutesy pandering that wasn’t true to the original “Sesame Street” vibe, and a friend with kids had told me, with a shudder, about her visceral reaction to a new character, Abby Cadabby, whose voice she found high and grating. But now that I realized they were aimed at the very young, who were mesmerized by bright colors and high voices, I decided to think of them more as Teletubbies—colorful, squeaky shapes that teach in a different way.
I talked to the puppeteer Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, who is blond and chipper, and to her puppet, Abby Cadabby, who is pink-haired and maniacal. “She’s a fairy in training,” Carrara-Rudolph said. She has a high voice. “They wanted to bring someone on who was representing a new culture.”
Abby Cadabby said, in a higher, louder voice, “Because I’m from the fairy world, I learn things differently. Like, I think tape is magical. Do you know all the things you can do with tape?!”
Carrara-Rudolph said that Abby Cadabby was also there to teach social skills, and “learning new things with a positive attitude, a sense of excitement and wonder.”
Abby Cadabby said, “You learn more from your mistakes sometimes, and that’s how you become—what’s the word? Resilient! And you have to have follow-through! And stick to it!” She whacked my notepad and my hand with her fuzzy pink hand.
“She’s very inquisitive!” Carrara-Rudolph said.
Abby Cadabby said, “Because part of my character is modelled after a dog!”
“Thank you!” I said.
“Thank you for saying thank you!” Abby Cadabby said.
Lin-Manuel Miranda said that he writes “a couple of songs a year” for the show. “I’m a lifelong fan. I also appeared on the show. It was a Faustian bargain. I got to be with all the Muppets that I grew up loving, but I was the bad guy—I was trying to get Big Bird to change habitats and leave Sesame Street. I rapped about different habitats like the jungle and the swamp, like more suitable habitats for a bird.”
In the back room, beneath Super Grover, was Loretta Long, who plays Susan. Like Bob, she seemed to know me: she beamed and gave me a big hug. She said that she’s writing a book called “My Best Friends Call Me Susan.” I asked her how the character had changed over the years. In the seventies, she said, “NOW did a wonderful thing for me. They did a letter-writing campaign and they expanded my role. They said, ‘Susan has an opportunity to be a real role model.’ So the writers wrote that Susan is a trained nurse. I explained to my husband, Gordon, that because I was a nurse I felt that I needed to help the community and I was going back to nursing. I didn’t ask his permission!” Around the time of the NOW campaign, Maria became a construction worker for a while.
Nearby, a woman strenuously attempted to take a selfie in front of a case containing Cookie Monster surrounded by flying cookies.
Sonia Manzano, who plays Maria, wore red-rimmed glasses and looked savvy as ever. On the show, she is married to Luis, and they have a daughter, Gabi; they own the Fix It Shop, which specializes in toaster repair. She was talking with Alan Muraoka, who plays Alan, who runs Hooper’s Shop.
“The show has changed as much as society has changed,” Manzano said. “In the sixties and seventies, feminism and the civil-rights movement impacted the show a great deal. Now I think we’ve changed into helping kids cope with the society that we’ve created—as opposed to create your own world, which was sort of the sixties vibe.”
“Very true,” Muraoka said.
“Standing on line, how to raise your hand, executive skills with Cookie Monster, teaching if I can not eat want one cookie now I’ll get two later. Can I control myself? Where in the sixties, it was, Don’t control yourself! Do your thing.”
“Some of the original shows, on DVD, now have a parental warning,” Muraoka said. In a “Masterpiece Theatre” takeoff, Cookie Monster has a pipe, and eats it. “Now, in our much more P.C., careful world, you’re like—”
“Do not smoke or eat pipes,” Manzano said. Satire is harder now; a Muppet can’t bang his head on a piano in frustration. Now they do more pop-culture parodies, like a “Mad Men” about angry ad men, and an upside-down “Downton Abbey.”
Shola Lynch and her two children had left the party just before the opening remarks, but I called her at the Schomburg Center later that week. “I couldn’t believe how moved I was,” she said. “Seeing Loretta and Caroll Spinney—we all called him Big Bird—now as an adult. And they remembered. And just to see my children in that space, and interacting with that material. It’s such a good show. It really is about community, and about education. There’s somebody for every kid to identify with, and there’s no alpha character. There’s nothing that compares to it.
“The seventies were a great time to come up,” she said. “ ‘Free to Be You and Me’ and ‘Sesame Street’ allowed us as young people to think about individuality, to explore and express ourselves.” They’d influenced her through adolescence and as a filmmaker. “In college I became focussed on applying the techniques that I’d grown up with to history. I wanted to invite you to be excited about it, which is the basic premise of ‘Sesame Street’: as opposed to saying ‘Yeah, you dumb kid, you should know it,’ we’re going to sell you letters, numbers, and information. I’m trying to figure out how to bring you into the fold. And that’s a real seventies spirit—inclusion, not exclusion.”
She laughed. “I have to live up to the standards set by the Street,” she said.
