You Are a Muppet

Photograph courtesy of the author.

Sesame Street premiered in 1969, the same year that my eldest sister, Kate, was born. The genre of children’s television was in its infancy; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had premiered just the previous year, joining Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody on the limited roster of shows meant for the very young, and the idea of using gimmicks from commercial TV—a variety of segments, a sense of humor—to support children’s development (not just to keep them quiet or sell them toys) was revolutionary. In 1969, the Sesame Street universe was inhabited by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie—all Muppets—plus the humans Gordon and Susan, who were married to each other; Mr. Hooper, who ran the corner grocery; Bob—apparently, according to Wikipedia, a music teacher; and a rotating cast of kids, who seemed to have happily wandered in from the real world.

By the time I was born, in 1984, Sesame had grown. There were more Muppets, including the Count, Snuffy, Elmo, and my personal favorite, Grover, and more humans, including Luis, Maria, Linda, and Gina. There was merch: I took some early steps in Bert and Ernie slippers. And there were studies bearing out what the show’s creators had always claimed: watching Sesame Street could help little kids learn to read and count, improving their chances of success in school and potentially their entire lives. I watched Sesame Street every morning in my Bert and Ernie slippers and my jammies, sitting as still as I could in the rocking chair, hoping against hope that the cat would join me.

My mom had watched Sesame Street with both of my older sisters, and she liked watching it with me, too, which was no accident. The creators knew the value of co-viewing for children’s development, and they wrote the show to entertain parents as well as kids, with on-the-nose parodies of contemporary prime-time TV (among the most memorable, Miami Mice and Monsterpiece Theater), celebrity appearances (Judy Collins sang the alphabet with Snuffy; Jesse Jackson recited poetry on a stoop), and recurring sketches (who could forget Grover as the incompetent restaurant waiter?). Obviously, the Muppets, with their strangely expressive mouths and sophisticated sense of irony, were preferable to any cartoon, and particularly to the Disney-princess franchise—in which any human mom can recognize certain heteronormative toxins, of which my mom, child of one bad marriage, party to another, then finally and perhaps hesitantly in the one that would last, was perhaps even more acutely aware. She dressed all her daughters in overalls. One year she sewed me a cape like the one Grover wore to play Super Grover.

My first salaried job, in 2008, was at an uptight nonprofit run by an oil family in Washington, D.C. I disliked the job, which required me to wear nylons and organize policy “convenings,” the point of which I could not see, and I hated D.C., where irony seemed to have been smothered by earnest, middlebrow ambition. I wanted to move to New York, and I often took the bus up for the weekend. Coming back one Sunday, in the middle of Union Station, I saw an exhibition about Sesame Workshop: it, too, was a nonprofit, which I now considered my area of expertise; surely it wouldn’t require nylons; and it occurred to me that I should try to get a job there. After a couple of tries, I did. It was 2010, and I was twenty-six years old.

As an employee, my relationship with the Muppets became complicated. My job was to convince funders of the Muppets’ impeccable, unparalleled value for children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and even physical development; their unique ability to entertain while educating; the trust they commanded from parents. I believed in most of that, based on my own experiences with Grover and the gang, and I appreciated present-day Sesame Street’s increased emphasis on certain curricular themes in response to children’s changing needs. For example, in response to the childhood obesity epidemic, healthy eating had become a focus. This was not as radical a change as some reactionaries seemed to think at the time; Cookie Monster rapped about healthy foods, with backup vocals from Muppet fruits and vegetables, as early as 1988. More concerning to me was a certain new character who had been added to the cast I remembered.

In the early nineties, the producers had decided to introduce female Muppets to help balance the cast of mostly males; hence Rosita in 1991 and Zoe in 1993. Both of these characters had matted monster fur (turquoise and orange, respectively) and followed clothing-optional personal style guidelines, like the rest of the Muppets. But in the early aughts, they decided they needed a lead female character, and that this character should wear a dress. According to the creative director at the time in a New York Times interview, the show had been missing a certain dress-wearing aspect of being a girl. According to me, they must have thought a girly girl could help them compete with the kinds of characters that had kids’ and adults’ attention in those days. At any rate: enter Abby Cadabby, a literal fairy princess, humanoid-leaning and distinctly less hirsute than Rosita and Zoe—clipped pink fleece on her body and long hair with bangs on her head—who unfailingly appears in a dress, pigtails, and, I’d argue, mascara. At twenty-six, I still loved Oscar, Cookie Monster, and Grover. I felt neutral toward Big Bird, Elmo, Rosita, and Zoe. And I hated and disdained Abby Cadabby.

Why? I’d always liked dresses as much as jeans. Would I not have related to Abby, back then, as a kid? Maybe. But I hadn’t had the opportunity. Watching an all-male monster cast—wry, goofy guys who never seem to think about gender at all—I saw no difference between them and me. If I’d seen a pink, nonmonster princess next to them, I think I would have realized that my guys were guys and that I was supposed to be more like her; she was my assigned teammate, and our role was not to be goofy but to be pink. I was grateful to have identified instead with Grover, who, while male on paper, expresses no particular gender and is rarely referred to by pronouns. The cape—one-size, all-gender—suggests only valiance and flair.

Like most reactionary anger, mine contained a hypocrisy. When I argued, in my head or to coworkers, that all the “classic” Muppets—a slippery term that obviously changes with each passing decade—were effectively nonbinary, I did not think about Bert and Ernie, who were humanoid and masculine in a way that the others were not. Their tufty hair, their sweaters, their voices, and their dynamic as a gay couple—perceptible on some level, I think, even to young children—gave them a much more specifically gendered energy than Grover and the gang. Yet now that I think carefully about what makes them different, it isn’t their gender but their age. Most Muppets have an age—Big Bird is five, Grover is four, Elmo is three—but Bert and Ernie mysteriously don’t. Presenting as somewhere between thirty and seventy, they are certainly adults, because they live together on their own, in the garden-level apartment of Gordon and Susan’s building. With the exception of Oscar, other Muppets aren’t typically shown keeping house. They exist on the street or on the liminal space of the green screen. Bert and Ernie are adults, and they are human, and I suppose I accepted that these two conditions made gender unavoidable.

It’s funny how children’s media riles us. We all think we own it, that our own particular memory is the authentic one, and that any change is ruinous. A few years ago The New Yorker ran a piece by Jill Lepore bemoaning the twin plagues of commercial competitiveness and “ed-school fads”—which, she seemed to think, had ruined Sesame Street—and pronouncing the spirit of the early seasons dead. (Lepore made a curious exception for the international coproductions, of which she seems unlikely to have seen many.) The piece did not quote any current Sesame Workshop staffers, and it seemed to have gone un-fact-checked, an unusual editorial oversight that might indicate the contagious appeal of this kind of nostalgic rage. I was a few years out from Sesame then, and despite my own issues with the show, I was annoyed with Lepore and The New Yorker on behalf of my former colleagues. I knew how much research went into every decision. I’d spent five years telling funders about that research and getting money to do more of it. Wanting Sesame Street to stay the same is about as reasonable as wanting your childhood home to stay as you left it even after a new family moves in. Yet, to this day, I consider Abby Cadabby a betrayal of the show’s core values.

Sometimes, back at Sesame Workshop, when I started up my rant about the unfairness of Abby being human while the guys got to be monsters, someone would mention Rosita or Zoe. Sure, Rosita and Zoe were legitimate monsters, I’d say, but the gender-monster balance remained unfair because they were only minor characters. While that’s a disservice to Rosita (who appears in many segments, often singing and playing her guitar), I do think Zoe has been a bit in the wings, and the reason could be her shifty relationship to girliness. Apparently, when Zoe first joined the cast she wore only “light jewelry”—a clothing-optional look that makes perfect sense for a three-year-old, which she is. But in 2002 she began wearing a pink tutu every time she appeared. Ostensibly this was because she was, or became, obsessed with ballet like many girls her age, but also the aughts were an era of “postfeminism,” that dangerous idea that stereotypes are ancient history and thus ripe for revival. In retrospect, the monster in the tutu merely heralded the pink fairy. By the time I started working at Sesame, Abby had more airtime, more lines, and more merch than Zoe ever had.

Still, Zoe’s continued presence in the cast, as well as her current costume situation, calms me. Since 2018 she wears the tutu only sometimes, when she feels like it, often appearing in her natural state. She also, I read, drives a soapbox car around the neighborhood, accompanied by both a doll and a pet rock. This Zoe feels closest to the kid I was, a product of my own imagination as well as outside influences, a small person to whom the gender binary is interesting but not yet particularly relevant. A girl but not definitively so.

I called my mom to fact-check a few things and told her about what I was writing. She got it. At that age, she said, you are a Muppet.

Jane Breakell is The Paris Review’s development director.