On Muppets and Outsiders

I watch a lot of vintage Sesame Street because I have a one year old. One of the things I have noticed is how the design of muppets has changed over the years. The clips from my youth, the videos made in the 70s and 80s, show off some raggedy looking puppets. It is as if every single character is based off a once or future junkie. There are the anonymous blue and green figures given square hipster sunglasses, with goatees and berets and turtlenecks. There are the blowsy female muppets with stringy blonde hair. So many heavy dark eyebrows. And Toots the Owl, who looks like a 65 year old jazz man who only recently beat the horse but still has the taste for sugar it causes.

The puppets of the 90s and 00s are so much cleaner. Their eyes are bigger, manufactures to read cute, not shifty.

I prefer the shifty ones.

Did everyone in the 80s have slightly disreputable people in their neighborhood? Even when we moved to the nicest suburb that we would, very briefly, live in, at the very end of the decade, there was one. His name was Sparky. He lived in the one halfway house located in this very fancy suburb—right over the town line, a few blocks from our house. Our house was on a strip of road right across from the only strip mall in this fancy suburb. There was a liquor store, a small grocery, and a video store there. And a stand alone clay hut that cycled between Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises and family-owned Chinese food spots. Sparky was probably the only other Black man for a few miles, so my dad befriended him.

My father, in addition to being an abuser, was also mentally ill, probably Bi-Polar though he refused any diagnosis or medications or treatment for most of his life. I don’t know which part of his pathology made him think it made sense to befriend a single, unknown, unstable man when he had three young daughters at home who spent long stretches of the afternoons in the house alone, but he did it. Nothing bad ever happened, don’t worry. But it was profoundly short sighted of him to do this.

The first few times Sparky came over, I just remember he and my dad playing chess. He came over in the afternoon, in my memory, it was after a Sunday dinner. They played two or three games—my dad was brilliant and very, very good at chess. He played with Sparky because, though he’d taught each of us to play, it was probably a better challenge to play against an adult.

After a few Sunday afternoons of chess, Sparky came by one weekday afternoon, when it was just me and my sisters at home. What I remember the most is seeing his shadow as he stalked back and forth on the front porch, first politely knocking, then pounding the door to get in. I think he’d spotted us outside, at first, and come up to ask to be let into the house, and we ran in and shut the door.

When my dad came home and found out, he was horrified. The next time Sparky came, he made a show of yelling at him from the porch to keep away, to stay away. And Sparky slunk off. Sometimes, we saw him walking up and down in front of that strip mall and all of us—my sisters, my dad, Sparky, me—would pretend not to see each. other.

Anyways, I think of that strange way of being, of what it means or doesn’t mean to be a neighbor, of the limits of care, when I see Hoots the Owl or Janice or some anonymous freak muppet in the background of a grainy Sesame Street video. I think, in the safety of adulthood, in the romance of memory, I want all of that in my neighborhood.

But up close, I’m not so sure.