And then the news came, on May 17, 1990 — a Thursday. My father walked out to get the newspaper roll which usually lay on the driveway, and came back in with the strangest look on his face. He gave the paper to me (this was only the second time this happened, and it did not feel good). On the front page, I read two terrible sentences:
"IT'S TIME TO STOP THE MUSIC. IT'S TIME TO DIM THE LIGHTS."
I immediately knew what it meant, and I could not stop the tears, did not want to read the rest. But the black-and-white picture of Statler and Waldorf was clear enough. And the dry yet confronting message, which I could not avoid reading in the end (of course), marked the end of an era. A dead end in Sesame street. A tear from the frog.
The end of the Muppet's soul.
Jim Henson Dies at Age 53;
Muppets' Creative Genius
(From M.O., our Times staff writer)
"Jim Henson, creator of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and the other Muppets who entertained and educated millions of preschoolers and their parents around the world, died early Wednesday of pneumonia. He was 53.
Henson died in a New York Hospital in Manhattan, where he had been taken to the emergency room less than 24 hours earlier suffering from "acute respiratory distress and symptoms of pneumonia," hospital spokesmen said."
(The first time my father gave the newspaper to me in much the same way, was the day after Fred Astaire died, on June 22, 1987. I remember the heading:
"SWING TIME IS OVER."
Picture: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing away in Top Hat, B&W. I think it's fair to say that I saw every single musical of Fred Astaire at least a couple of times, mostly as a kid. Often on Sunday afternoons, when the classics channel still showed old dance movies, I browsed through the yellow pages after having seen Astaire do his magic, and read all the advertisements about tap dance schools. And just dreamed. I never quite got beyond the point of dreaming about tap dancing, and drawing dance scenes every which way, but that was fine by me).
(TOP HAT (1935): Fred Astaire is (of course) a dancer, named Jerry Travers who is going to dance in a London show of producer Horace Hardwick, played masterfully by the ever funny Edward Everett Horton. The latter has a smart valet called Bates (Eric Blore), who reminded me of a "modern" version of Frankenstein's Igor (with more wit though). Ginger Rogers is (of course) Astaire's love interest, Dale Tremont, and there is (of course) a love rival "Alberto Beddini !!!" (the fantastic Erik Rhodes). The cake is completed with the juicy Helen Broderick, who is Hardwick's wife Madge.
And when Rogers tells Astaire that "If Madge doesn't care, I certainly don't," and Irving Berlin's Cheek to cheek starts playing, it's just … heaven.)
When I arrived at school, Marbles was sick. We talked about Jim Henson in lunch recess, barely able to say a word. When later we parted to go home, Marbles, with a strange mysterious look in his eyes that ended at infinity, whispered the words — so extremely silent that I still wonder whether he really said them on that day, in the way I remember (I must confess that because of his Presbyopia, his eyes always seemed to end at infinity) …
"It is time to start."
The next day, we sat together in biology class, and while looking through a microscope at a Petri dish where some body part of a minuscule being was spread out in glycerin, we whispered about the plan. The Movie. Our fantasy world on screen, with hand-made puppets, quite different from muppets but still quite related.
A movie about rodents.
Rats.
We realized that it would be desirable to have a larger team, and we knew exactly who to talk to. So we recruited Svenn, knowing that underneath his royal stiffness there was a guy with lots of fantasy and ideas, wanting — needing — to break out, and on the other hand knowing that his analytical mind would help us organize things. It was the start of a deep friendship which would last till that car passed the corner.
And, partly because of sympathy that almost flirted with pity, we also asked Mary. The fact that he came from quite another world in more ways than we could even begin to imagine, was an incentive — sure — but we reckoned he just wanted to be part of a gang of friends, have friends, and that we could be that gang. We did not know how the logistics would work out — that is, whether his parents would allow him to join our project (taken that he would tell them in the first place). But that was the part that was beyond our control. The only thing we could do in this stage was ask him, and see what happened.
We didn't have to ask twice.
Five weeks after we asked Svenn to be a part of the dream, he succeeded in getting funds from the school's board after several visits to the principal, showing our plans and sketches of the puppets. (I had advised him to stalk the board, and that was exactly what he did.) We received ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS in cash, which was a true miracle. And it was enough to buy the material we needed (such as cloths of various kinds, and ping pong balls of course). Marbles's parents already had a good home video camera, so we did not have to worry about that aspect of the game.
We were also allowed to shoot scenes on the school grounds, but it never got that far.
Another thing we established was the fact that whenever we wanted, we were allowed to use the school's main hall — named Custer Hall after the great general — for working on the movie, which meant that we could sit together and make notes, and talk about our vision. We even received special tailor-made yellow passes to grant this approval.
Especially when it rained outside, we got plenty of movie ideas to work out.
The passes never kept us inside when Miss Spleen had to supervise, though: she was a true witch who did not understand our language — the human one, that is to say. Nobody had a clue what subject she taught, but the witch was part of the furniture alright, and Miss Spleen couldn't be ignored. She was only about five feet tall and weighed next to nothing, but everyone was scared to death whenever she stepped down from her broom and tried to kill someone with her wand. Rules had to be obeyed, and did not come with exceptions, even when the principal had granted them. So in the first encounter with Miss Spleen since we received the passes, and while we were brainstorming in Custer Hall, they got teared up by a furious Miss Spleen, screaming things to us which sounded French.
So we had to go for new ones. We mentioned what had happened, and the principal explained to us that he had no authority whatsoever when it came to Miss Spleen.
He advised us to avoid the woman at all times.
(While writing this down, I suddenly remember that Marbles and I also had other special tailor-made passes at some point — green ones — which allowed us to enter the nature reservation area which was owned by the school. These grounds were situated quite a distance away from the school — one had to use a special shuttle bus service to reach them — and spanned an area of dozens of square miles, near to the national park which covered a large area of the state. The reason we had those passes was our "plan" to develop a "mushroom meadow" with all kinds of fungi such as fly agaric (red hat and white dots — the gnome toadstools and certainly the best known mushroom ever), morels (brown spongy mushrooms with an exquisite taste), common stinkhorns (look like a male organ with a green hat, but smell kind of like a cesspool, with something very dead in it), and dangerously normal looking green death caps (the "don't-try-me-at-homemushroom" — perhaps the most lethal in the world), growing them from the spore data bank we kept. While this is even an ambitious task for a trained mycologist with a lab, the plan was certainly highly unique for youngsters, and we made it visible by planting mushrooms — the fruiting bodies, that is — of various kinds in a tiny part of the meadow. This is best compared to planting a plant without its roots — or even better: a flower without its plant — so nothing could come out of it.
We knew that only too well, but the others did not.
We even made the local newspapers with the plan, but it's fair to say that the project failed miserably at the end.
Still, the idea was quite charming, and trying to make it work was a wonderful experience. Moreover, we made long walks in the reservation area, a thing which other students weren't allowed to do. And, while planting fly agarics on a Wednesday afternoon and talking about history class (in which the horrors of World War II were mentioned, if only too brief), a unique experience happened to us.
For minutes, we observed a white-tailed jackrabbit being chased by a young grey wolf, but just for the fun of it — at no point, the hare got hurt or even touched, and although it might sound weird, both Marbles and I had the impression that it was playing along. It was as if they had decided on that specific Wednesday afternoon, that the rules of Nature could be bent for a couple of minutes. I had never seen a wolf before in the surroundings, but I knew that they had been spotted a few times, the last time more than five years earlier.
They ran in big circles, not even very hard, and now and then they stopped, sized each other up, and proceeded again with the gracious dance. At one of these stops, the jackrabbit seemed to snap out of it, and probably realized that this game had been fun while it had lasted, but that it would not have a good ending if he didn't make a turn and ran for it. Which he did.
The wolf let the jackrabbit run away to the far end of the world, and it stayed for a while in the meadow, laying in the long grass and rolling around once in a while, apparently feeling good about himself.
Then it parted as well, slowly running, a bit ghostly, as only wolves can do.)