comments

1. msilver on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:33 am

   Stop making up stories, Big Bird.

2. Cindy Scroggins on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:33 am

   great eyelashes

3. Michael Smith on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:33 am

   I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen “snuffleupagus” in writing before.

   But Snuffy has always been a little creepy to me.

4. Rick Neece on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:39 am

   Gesundheidt!

5. Lucy Foley on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:55 am

   That is a very provocative statement. He always meant a lot to me because I learned how to read and write by the age of 3, largely inspired by Sesame Street, and I always had an imaginary friend, so I understood the social implications for both him and Big Bird. But I always called him Snuffleufagus. There was never a ‘p’ in that name for me. I feel quite strongly about this. I have a lot more in me on this topic.

6. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm

   Best in the somewhat disturbing mode of the early years.

7. Aaron Winslow on October 23rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm

   Oh, Bird.

8. Lucy Foley on October 23rd, 2009 at 12:43 pm

   A friend of mine has an actual feather from Big Bird’s body in his ‘special things’ display cabinet in his home. How he got it is a story I can’t really get into here, but I have seen it, I have brushed it against my cheek, and yes, my heart thrilled to its presence.

9. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm

   I wish I still had a snapshot I took while in Paris visiting a friend in 1980. We had stopped for a late-afternoon coffee in a neighborhood where a French production company was shooting a children’s program that must have skirted dangerously near to copyright and other intellectual property violations in its close imitation of Sesame Street characters.

   What I recall, and what I photographed, was when a Parisian Grand Oiseau took five, plucked off his head, sat down on a low wall in an attitude of profoundly Gallic weariness, and gazed grimly into the middle distance as he dragged on an unfiltered cigarette.

10. Deron Bauman on October 23rd, 2009 at 1:16 pm

    Lucy, we are siblings in this.

11. Lucy Foley on October 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm

    Ok, I get to be Big Bird, you can be Snuffy.

12. Cindy Scroggins on October 23rd, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    Oh, Sheila, what a great story. Kind of like the sight of a bunch of witches and devils sitting around the plant cafeteria eating corn dogs on Halloween.

13. Amanda Mae Meyncke on October 23rd, 2009 at 1:28 pm

    Or Snow White, smoking in the back alley behind Disneyland.

14. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 1:41 pm

    Corn Dogs: Feast of Satan.

    “The back alley behind Disneyland”. That’s even funnier than the smoking.

    Grand Oiseau had a serious five o’clock shadow at four o’clock. He looked like someone you’d hire off a Marseilles dock.

15. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 1:57 pm

    Y’all, when I was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and lived in Dallas, come every Christmas Season I worked for KERA-TV (the public broadcasting station) in a booth set up in the North Park shopping mall. I hustled subscriptions; the lure was Sesame Street plushies. Donate to the station, and you took home a Sesame plushie.

    Forty-plus hours a week in something like a stand on a carnival midway, all full of Ernies and Berts and Oscars and Big Birds. People invariably wanted to buy them outright without subscribing. They also regarded my ‘station’ as a childcare booth. “Honey, you go over and stay with the lady there by Big Bird and wait till mama comes back.”

    Coworkers included both a guy who liked to dance while he sang the Curtis Mayfield songs from “Superfly” — and my friend Lee. One slow night, while I went off to grab a quick bite, Lee had a talk with a man who told her of being in a death camp with one of The Rothschilds. He had discovered that his fellow inmate had not only survived but had also wound up in Dallas, Texas. They sometimes went walking together in the mall. He told her about how a death camp guard had pinned to the back of his camp uniform a sheet of paper bearing the German word “TOT”. He asked Lee if she knew what “TOT” meant, and she said that she did.

16. Cindy Scroggins on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    Wow! That was a tad before my time in Dallas, otherwise I would have sauntered by and talked you up.

    Did you go to El Fenix, Wyatt’s or Kip’s for your bite to eat?

    I have Steve “Pat Boone” McKelvey lunch stories for all three. Kip’s is where I put chocolate sauce on my eyelids to horrify the Christian family in the next booth. At Wyatt’s, Steve always complained that he never got as much food as I did. Once I told him, okay, order exactly what I order and we’ll compare plates. So we ordered roast beef, broccoli and mashed potatoes. We got to our table, and my plate was piled high, while he has the most miserably small servings of food I have ever seen. At El Fenix, I saw a person I knew out in the mall, and I jumped like a monkey onto the iron bars of the restaurant to get her attention.

    Wish you’d been there, Sheila. NorthPark. Wow.

17. Teresa R. on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    I have some finger puppets of Bert and Ernie from somewhere (Spain, I think?) and the package identifies them as Eppie y Blas. Blas!

    Does anyone remember La Tartine from Northpark Mall? It was a nice little French place there in the 80s. I think it was called La Tartine.

18. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    Cindy, I would have begged you to apply for seasonal work in the booth, like I did Lee. Those 12-hour Saturday shifts I signed up for were killers.

    I don’t recall having enough time to actually sit down anywhere and eat.

19. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    Eppie y Blas les gusta La Tartine.

20. Cindy Scroggins on October 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    Teresa, I don’t remember such a place, sorry.

21. Dave Vogt on October 23rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm

    comma Mr. Aloysius

22. Sheila Ryan on October 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm

    The thing about your early 1970s version of Mr Snuffleupagus is that I swear he was modeled in part on a profoundly creepy anteater in a 1940 Fleischer Studios cartoon titled “Ants in the Plants”. I saw the cartoon on TV when I was a kidlet, and it creeped me out. (If you want to experience seven minutes of creepiness, you can find the Fleischer cartoon on YouTube. The snout-down-the-ant-tunnel sequence is the stuff of unsettling dreams.)

    My take on “Sesame Street” is kind of different, I reckon. I was generally high the first few seasons I watched it. Or in an analogous state of mind.

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