How the Muppets Helped Me Grieve

The Atlantic

a day ago

Jim Henson's Creature Shop has sat, for the past 16 years, on the fourth floor of an office building in Long Island City, New York, behind a metal door that looks like any other. When I opened it one gray morning after the holidays, I was greeted by a plastic Christmas tree hung with fake fish skeletons and desiccated banana peels, Oscar leering nearby from his can, and a brown, fuzzy blob sitting on a table. At first I thought it might be a complete Muppet, until I saw, a few yards beyond, a matching brown, fuzzy, headless body. As the archivist Karen Falk began to lead me on a tour of the workshop—drawers of googly eyes, noses, and 'special facial hair'; filing cabinets for 'fur' and 'slippery sleezy'; a stack of banker's boxes, one marked 'Grover,' another 'Boober'—I looked back, briefly, to catch the bulbous nose and round eyes of Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock staring at me, or perhaps at his own body, waiting to be reunited.
'There are only three Snuffleupagi in the world,' Falk told me, gesturing toward a puppet near the entrance that she said was kind of an extra, deployed when Snuffleupagus needs a family member on set next to him. I reached out to give Snuffy's relation a little pet—his soft brown fur, curly and dense like a poodle's, was overlain with orange feathers—and scribbled a note: 'remarkably lifelike.' For a what? I later asked myself. For a giant woolly mammoth cum anteater puppet? But the space made it easy to slip across the human-Muppet divide and into Henson's world, where the realness of the puppets is sacrosanct. When I asked to take a picture of the decapitated Junior Gorg, just for my notes, Falk looked at me as if I'd asked to check under Miss Piggy's dress. 'We don't allow photos of things like that, Muppets without heads,' she tutted, and ushered me to another part of the workshop, where a handful of archival boxes had been set aside for me.
After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I'd come to grieve with the Muppets.
My father, Marshall, amassed many accolades over the course of his career—a gold record for playing bluegrass banjo on the Deliverance soundtrack; an Oscar for co-writing the script of Annie Hall; a Tony nomination for Best Book for the musical Jersey Boys, which won Best Musical in 2006 (and an Olivier Award, too)—but way cooler to me, as a kid, was the fact that for a brief stint, long before I was born, he'd been part of Henson's crew.
For much of my life, I knew little about the specifics. I do remember one time being feverish and crying for a Kermit doll after a doctor's appointment, even though, despite Dad's involvement in the show, I can't remember ever watching any Muppets, or even Sesame Street, at home. The local toy store was all sold out, so Dad called in a favor, and we headed to the old Muppet offices on the Upper East Side to pick one up. While we were waiting, I watched, slack-jawed, as puppet makers working on a new creation pulled googly eyes out of thin drawers, one after another, a fever dream come to life and branded in my memory like a surrealist madeleine. After that, the Muppets all but receded from my life.
That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I'd find when I walked into his room each day, his personality somehow refracted, as if I were looking at it through a prism; about whether a middle-of-the-night phone call might signify an Earth-tilting inflection point; about how devastating it was going to be to navigate the world without the beloved father I'd always looked up to.
At the end of each day, like any well-adjusted individual faced with looming, profound change, I chose to run screaming as far away from reality as I could, which is how I ended up in the arms of the 1970s Muppets. I had no grand plan. I simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they'd help keep me afloat.
Dad and Henson first connected through Al Gottesman, Henson's longtime lawyer. Their mutual affinity makes total sense to me, even a generation later. They were born three years apart and grew up delighting in Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. They shared an off-kilter sense of humor and a reverence for the silly. Although I can't remember ever seeing Dad with a puppet on his hand, when I was growing up he would put on elaborate bedtime shows for my sister and me, starring our menagerie of stuffed animals. Using a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool case—a bulky, black-leather valise full of primary-colored screwdrivers I liked to play with, a relic from his days attending Brooklyn Technical High School to appease his practical immigrant father—he made pince-nez out of a paper clip for my plush dachshund, Ollirina, a feisty Southern grande dame who propelled herself around by farting (my contribution); he then had her perform miraculous acts of levitation. Dad's tried-and-true finale: shooting my Ping-Pong-ball-sized plush hedgehog through a toilet-paper-roll cannon as I drumrolled on my lap. Looking back on this now that I'm a parent of three young children, I marvel that he could summon this level of creativity after dinnertime.
For a few months in the mid-'70s, Dad helped Henson write a failed Broadway Muppets revue, and what would become the pilot of The Muppet Show, called 'Sex and Violence With the Muppets'—Henson's attempt to establish the Muppets as not just for kids. Dad is listed as head writer on the script, in which Nigel, Sam the Eagle, and a few other Muppets put together a 'Seven Deadly Sins' pageant to determine which sin is the most deadly. Although the final show evolved from the pilot—Kermit replaced Nigel as the emcee; a human guest star was added—you can see from the script that its style was already developed, as was its tone: equal parts outlandish and sophisticated, countercultural, never talking down to the audience. Sloth arrives, of course, during the closing credits, too late to participate. One stage direction reads, simply, 'Chaos in progress.' The script established the framework with which Henson would go on to parody a vaudeville show from all angles—the divas (Piggy), the technical malfunctions (Crazy Harry, blowing up sets left and right), the well-meaning guy trying to hold the whole ball of crazy together (Kermit).
My father's contributions are impossible to disentangle from the general Muppetness of the script—collaborations work, he always told me, because they are collaborative—save for one: Despite being Brooklyn born and bred, with not a Nordic bone in his body, he is, by many accounts, the source of the Swedish Chef's accent and nonsense lexicon, the one typified by 'Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy, bork bork bork!' The character had originated with Henson in the '60s. Back then, he'd been German. For reasons lost to Muppetdom, at some point the character moved northwest, to a place with more centralized health care. And he needed an accent to match.
I loved listening to Dad parody foreign languages. He liked to throw off telemarketers by answering the phone as a hard-of-hearing woman from some indeterminate Latin American country, or as an eccentric Central European man, characterized by a sibilant, Peter Sellers–as–Strangelove delivery that would typically escalate into a shriek and send the person on the other end skedaddling to their next call. So I was not surprised to learn that, decades earlier, Dad had apparently reduced the Henson puppeteer Frank Oz to tears by mimicking languages during brainstorming sessions. He later made an ersatz-Swedish tape for Henson to listen to on his commute into the city from his home in Bedford. 'He would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish,' Henson's son Brian told Jim's biographer, remembering having heard my dad's tape. 'It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.'
All of this I learned from books, from interviews with Muppet staffers, and by emailing Falk, the Henson archivist. But the bulk of my embedding in Muppetdom over the past year involved watching The Muppet Show with my husband and three kids on weekend evenings, our world cocooned between the real, live present and a completely nonsensical 1970s. I'd slice up some apples and we'd cackle together as Rita Moreno flung a noodly Muppet man around set in a particularly violent tango; as Zero Mostel, only mildly indignant that a Muppet was eating him during his cold open, helped wash down his own arm with a little water; as Gene Kelly taught Kermit to tap-dance on the piano.
Given what I'd learned, was it a cosmic sign that my youngest, just 3 years old, started to develop an obsession with the Swedish Chef? He took to running around the apartment, crowing his bastardized version of the Chef's already bastardized Swedish and then, mimicking his new Nordic hero, flinging into the air whatever he had handy. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal; other times it was hard objects, which would necessitate a stern lecture (after my husband and I had taken cover) about the dangers of throwing things up, because they tend to come down, even if the Chef's flapjacks do not. After my son got a Swedish Chef action-figure set that included a small chicken and a handful of cooking tools, he would sit on the ground, brow furrowed in concentration, making the cleaver-wielding chef hop after the chicken—or sometimes, in keeping with Muppet sensibility, vice versa.
My daughters became obsessed with 'Pigs in Space,' a recurring Muppet sketch parodying Star Trek and other space operas of the 1960s and '70s. They erupted in cheers whenever the USS Swinetrek flew across the screen, indicating that the sketch was back again. The setup is that three pigs are flying through the cosmos—Captain Link Hogthrob, Dr. Julius Strangepork, and Miss Piggy as first mate—and … nothing really happens. John Cleese shows up as a pirate and tries to make a call from a payphone on the ship, while his parrot, who is in love with him, gripes that Cleese is neglecting her and should take her to dinner with all his doubloons. The ship is invaded by two alien beings, who turn out to be the Swedish Chef and his chicken, and after they leave, the pigs get bored. When the USS Swinetrek nears the end of the universe, where its crew will finally discover the meaning and purpose of life, the dinner bell rings, and the pigs get sidetracked. Miss Piggy is routinely degraded, asked by the boars to do the laundry or make more swill, though the audience understands that she's smarter and tougher than her male co-stars.
According to Oz, Miss Piggy's puppeteer, her toughness was hard-won. In multiple interviews, he has spoken about his need to understand the complete biographies of the characters he portrayed, even if viewers don't share that need. In Oz's mind, Miss Piggy was born on a farm, loved her father very much, and was grief-stricken when he died in a tractor accident. As her mother's subsequent suitors turned their attention to Miss Piggy, a single path forward emerged: to leave. She was later forced to do some things she wasn't proud of as she clawed her way to diva-dom, including appearing in a bacon commercial.
Does any of that come through the screen as she floats around in outer space? I suppose that, for some viewers, it does—that having a deep understanding of Miss Piggy's character somehow enabled Oz and the other puppeteers to present her simulated world as real enough that the audience would jump into it with her, feetfirst, willingly suspending disbelief.
Or maybe that's not why it works. 'It's just so weird,' my third grader said to me one night, with a snort. 'Like, why are there even pigs in space?'
I didn't experience what others warned me I might, after the months of decline that led to Dad's death late last year: picking up the phone to call him and forgetting that there would be no one on the other end, looking up from the sidewalk at the window where he worked for decades, expecting to see the light on and being knocked sideways that it was dark. I never forgot. I never expected the light to be on. But occasionally, I'd find myself dropping from one reality straight through to another, something most likely aided by my living just eight blocks from where I grew up. My neighborhood is saturated with memories spanning my whole life.
Passing a street corner, I would suddenly reverse-age four decades and see Dad's belt buckle sliding along my tricycle's handlebars, because I was so hot and sweaty and tired that I simply couldn't pedal one more inch, and he was pulling me around that corner, home. I'd be running the Lower Loop in Central Park, where we used to take our daily afternoon walks, and I'd pass a busker playing the fiddle and have to stop, hands on knees, to catch my breath, remembering the Flatt and Scruggs Dad played through his computer speakers. These temporal shifts through eras were uncontrolled, unexpected, all-encompassing. My scrim between reality and memory, truth and simulation, had become porous, faulty. Like the Swedish Chef, who starts making a turtle soup only to find that the turtle has woken up and is trying to escape, my reality was pitched, slightly, on its axis.
The first time one of these temporal shifts through eras, one of these free falls from today back to childhood, happened was a few nights after the burial. My husband, kids, and I gathered, the children freshly showered and damp-haired, and put on the Muppets, as we'd done, at that point, for months. The episode featured Señor Wences, the ventriloquist whose main act involved Johnny, a boy made from Wences's hand, on which he stuck two googly eyes, and on top of which he draped a ridiculous orange wig. His other star performers were a bespectacled chicken named Cecilia (Wences: 'Second name?'; Cecilia: 'Chicken') and Pedro, a surly talking head (literally just a head, not an MSNBC type) who, after a train accident that decapitated the poor puppet, spent his life, disembodied, in a box.
The episode's conceit was that Kermit has decided to do something new: a puppet show! 'It's a complete change of pace, folks,' he said to cheers. 'Yes, it's a real first!' Toward the end, Wences held up an egg and asked Cecilia Chicken to identify it. As she replied, softly and directly, 'My son' (rhymes with moan), a memory of childhood weekend breakfasts welled up from deep in my subconscious, collapsing time just as the puppets on-screen were collapsing their simulation. I saw the kitchen table, the oval wooden one my father had waxed by hand until it shone. I felt its slight stickiness beneath my hands. And by the stove was Dad, apron halved and tied around his waist, holding up an egg reverently, sighing, lovingly pronouncing it 'my son!' in Salamancan-inflected English, then cracking it, with a flourish, into a cast-iron skillet.
He used to do that with eggs.
I'd completely forgotten. For a moment, I stayed there at the kitchen table, giggling. I stayed with the feeling of being closer to my children's age than middle age; closer to those evenings spent cross-legged and damp-haired myself, watching my dad turn stuffed animals into performers; closer still to a moment years before my birth, when, across town at the Henson studios, in a healthy body with long legs kicked up on the desk in front of him, my dad held a bulky tape recorder to his mouth, paused, then started up for the first time in ersatz Swedish, the beginning of a thread that would reach out, decades later, and tether him to me.