Right now my wife and kid are sitting in the Fox Theater, watching Sesame Street Live without me. While I actually had a reasonably tolerable experience last year speculating about the actors' backstage sex lives, this year I thought it would be nice to give the two of them some mother-daughter time before Wood has a y-chromosomed suckling attached to her twelve hours a day. And frankly, when it comes to Sesame Street Live, once is enough to get the whole idea.
The snow keeps piling on top of itself here. The other night I took the dog for a walk and by the time we got back to our front porch I couldn't see the footprints from when we'd left. My mother is across the state, staring at various weather reports, anxious about rushing to Detroit in a snowstorm to mind Juniper while Wood labors. When she herself went into labor for the first time thirty-one years ago this week, my dad had to take her to the main road on a snowmobile where an ambulance waited to take her to the hospital. Hours later into that snowstorm, I was born. It was her birthday.
Wood had been certain this baby would be born a little early. All her friends that have given birth in the last few months have done so weeks or even a month early. We watched the full moon wane without incident. "Juniper was born on her due date," I remind her. But she's convinced from reading and excessive googling that second babies come earlier. "He'll come when he's ready," I say, but this does nothing to calm her. I know part of the stress comes from having taken a week of maternity leave before he's born, knowing that she'll have to return a week earlier when he's so small and still needing her.
I still haven't packed my hospital bag, charged up the camcorder battery, or cleared my SD cards of 6 gigs worth of boarded-up art deco theaters, graffiti, and old highway signs. And yet I feel a mounting pressure, too. I'd better pack that bag. And I do have a feeling I'll soon have something more momentous to photograph than packs of wild dogs and half-burnt houses.
We're all sitting at the dining room table while Juniper eats her dinner, and my wife is reading to me from a story in the paper about a 72-year-old man who learned that he was adopted after being abandoned at 2-days old in a snowy vacant lot during the Hoover administration:
"'Back then, it was either Jane or John Doe,' one nurse said. 'But they chose to name him Jimmy Snowbank.'"
"What are you talking about Jimmy Snowbank?" Juniper asks. These days she's like a cub reporter for the Poughkeepsie Journal with all the who what when where whys.
"Jimmy Snowbank was a baby they found in a snowbank. . .because his mama put him there. . . because she didn't want him I guess. . .maybe she was scared. . .maybe she was too young to take care of a baby. . .it's hard work. . .because they ask a lot of questions."
The next day there's like a thousand feet of snow outside so I dress her up in so many layers if you took a cross section it would look like they signed the magna carta back when we put her underwear on. With an impenetrable polyester exoskeleton in place, the final touch is a pair of pink Dora the Explorer sunglasses that cover half her face. Every time I put them on her she points at Dora and asks "who's that girl?" and I pretend not to hear her. Outside, she has no interest in making snow angels, but delights in making what she calls "butt prints." She orders me to sit down next to her, but I'm only wearing jeans and soon they're so clammy and cold my balls are snuggling up against my appendix for warmth. "Let's play Jimmy Snowbank," she says, and then she goes through some melodramatic pantomime about leaving me in a snowdrift and she's covering me up with snow and telling me to cry. She forgets nothing you tell her, I think, and then I can no longer feel anything below my belly button. Just when I'm sure they're going to find me frozen like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining with a two-year old wearing sixteen pairs of pants banging a stick against my head and barking at me to cry like Jimmy Snowbank, she tells me she wants to go back inside.
Once there, the feeling returns to my legs, and I sit down at the computer and show her this flickr set. She is so freaked out by seeing Elmo in all those real world situations. "What is Elmo drinking?" she asks. "Beer, probably," I say. "What is Elmo doing there?" "That's what happens when you drink too much. One time I had to sit with your mom in someone's front yard for a couple hours after a party. She looked just like that." I know that one's going to come back at some inappropriate time and get me in trouble. When we get to the shot of Elmo on the toilet Juniper starts hyperventilating. I have to answer at least a hundred questions like why is Elmo pooping and whose bathroom is that and finally what color is Elmo's poop?
To spend all day with a not-quite-three-year old is to regularly find yourself interrogated and trapped in all kinds of existential dead ends. Why does a mother leave a 2-day-old baby in a snowbank? Who is that girl on her sunglasses, really? What color is Elmo's poop? I used to lie like my mom did, but keeping track of all the lies is so exhausting. So now I just hum, and nod my head from side to side. And that worked until yesterday, when she learned to grab my cheeks and say, "Dada you have to talk to me!"
1. Elmo
2. Baby Ernie
3. Mama and Juney together
4. Penguin at zoo
5. "Inky" from Kurekure Takora
6. Juney in her own diaper
7. Jesus
8. Charlie Chaplin
9. Wild Thing
10. Green Ninja
11. Logan Summers
Last week, I walked over to the Fox Theater and bought these two tickets. I was going to see if they had any available for this week, but then the guy behind the ticket window told me he had two front row center tickets available for that morning's show. "She won't be scared of the giant characters that close, will she?" the guy asked.
"We can only hope so," I replied, realizing for the first time that this little indulgence could have unintended benefits. Perhaps a guy dancing in a six-foot Elmo costume just a few feet away would terrify my daughter so much that she would no longer have any interest in her mangy-red beloved. Here I was, willing to pay for and sit through two hours of canned dialogue and live-muppet dancing just to see the interior of Detroit's Fox Theater, and not only had I scored front row tickets without paying the 50 percent Ticketmaster surcharge, but could I also potentially release the headlock that the Sesame Workshop would have on my kid for the next three years in just a few minutes of screech-inducing costume-inspired terror? I had high hopes as I swiped the tickets away from the seller and giddily handed them to the top-hatted usher who opened the deco door for us into the theater's warm lobby.
The Fox is one of those theaters built in the Jazz age intended to transport the average theatergoer to a different world: with a gust of perfumed air it would blow the factory dust from their evening jackets and lift them up onto a magic red-velvet carpet and through an arabesque network of colonnades filled with tuxedoed booze-and-popcorn vendors, up and up through archways guarded by dragons and monkeys and Siamese coquettes, mezzanines under sixty-foot frescoed ceilings populated by armies of ushers eager to shuttle you to your proper entrance to the theater, and then you finally enter the theater itself, an orgy of oriental ornament held up by cyclopean Corinthian columns flanked by pensive Burmese Buddhas and Persian lions contemplating nicely-nippled Hindu deities. Outside in the snow and the soot and the wind chill you could not hide from Detroit in February, but inside this theater, the price of a ticket bought you not only the words and the songs and the sights of whatever was to appear on stage, but it took you off those streets and into Kublai Khan's court; into the dreams of Nebuchadrezzar himself.
I carried Juniper in my right arm, holding her cheek up to my cheek and pointing at the elaborate ceiling, the opulence that threatened, I thought, to overwhelm us both. "Isn't it beautiful, Juney? Look up. Isn't it amazing?"
"Elmo!" she shouted.
Sure enough, among the seraphim and cherubim adorning the ceiling, I saw Elmo's bug-eyed mangy red mug staring down at me. Smiling. It was a giant mylar balloon that some spoiled little chit had carelessly released from his grip during a previous matinée. I speculated about how they could ever get it down. Slingshot? BB gun? While I wondered, Juniper looked back from her front row perch at the hundreds of kids who were filling the seats behind her and the balcony above. "Who's that boy?" she asked. I had no idea which one of the kids holding flashing LED Elmo gewgaws or clutching other trappings from the concession stands she meant. "That boy is someone's whose parents planned ahead and did not wait until the morning of the show to buy him tickets," I said. "Ha ha!" I added.
We sat and waited until fifteen minutes after the show was supposed to start before the lights finally dimmed. I stood Juniper on my lap so her butt rested on my chest. I wanted to get a good look at her face when the characters came out, and I wanted to be ready to catch her and comfort her in case she decided she was terrified of those real, giant muppets and needed to leave immediately.
But even to my hardened heart, the pure joy in my daughter's eyes melted me so much I grabbed her close and smelled her hair as Bert walked out on the stage, followed by Ernie, followed by Prairie Dawn, and she pointed and despite the blaring noise from the speakers I could see each word on her lips as she said it. I never looked at the stage. My eyes were on my daughter's face. When a half dozen or so characters had made it out on stage, dancing to the opening number, the look on her face was the same as I imagine might have fallen across Coronado's visage had he discovered the seven cities of Cíbola in the Arizona desert rather than tumbleweeds. It was the same look Sir Galahad might have given the holy grail after years of toil and search. It was how Albert Einstein might have looked at a sheet of notebook paper that contained a unified field theory.
She was, in other words, delighted.
I looked up at the stage. Prairie Dawn, Telly, Baby Bear, Zoe, Big Bird, Burt and Ernie were all there. The Count was there. The turquoise one who is always talking about burritos and amigos was there.
I realized it didn't matter what the characters were saying. For the first ten minutes of the show, all the kids in the theater basically just pointed at the stage and at the top of their lungs screamed the preschooler equivalent of: "ARRGGHHAHHOOOOAYEAYEYIIIIII HOLY FUCKING SHIT THERE'S COOKIE MONSTER!!!!!!!" Still, there was something in Juniper's eyes that indicated anxiety. It wasn't just her. As time went on and more and more characters came on stage, but still there was a definite sense of unease among the entire audience. What was wrong with all these preschoolers? Couldn't they just sit back and enjoy a dance routine about oral hygiene or whatever? Then I realized what geniuses the writers of Sesame Street Live truly were. It was all dramatic tension. The song quieted down, the dancing muppets moved to the side of the stage, and one spotlight focused on the middle of the set. There was a burst of paper, a flash of red fur, and then every living being in the joint under the age of six suddenly collectively lost their shit. It was like 1955 Elvis Presley combined with the 1964 Beatles with a dash of 1988 Joey McIntyre and just a pinch of 1997 Leonardo DiCaprio (in Japan). There was a sudden sonic vacuum in the theater as hundreds and hundreds and children captured their breath and then released, screaming and pointing at the stage:
"ELMO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
And my sweet Juniper was right there with them. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.
So a man standing there in the six-foot Elmo costume basked in the love of a thousand ecstatic toddlers, while a pre-recorded voice sang and he flapped the giant muppet lips to the words. It didn't matter what he said. It didn't matter what any of them said. As long as Grover fell down, as long as Elmo was always on stage, the dollars all those parents spent on tickets and ticketmaster fees and LED spinning Elmo gewgaws and stuffed Elmos and overpriced popcorn and juice boxes was worth it. I tried to pay attention to the nonsensical plot but lost interest after about five minutes, when I started imagining what the lives of the touring Sesame Street Live: Super Grover! Ready for Action road crew were like in between performances. From the several characters that came out without muppet costumes, I could tell they were all in their early twenties. This was probably a pretty good gig for a graduate from the Dance-Theater department of the College of Wooster, you know, before they move to New York City and work as receptionists at pilates studios before making their big breaks and proving to their parents that it was all worth it. I imagined the romance and heartbreak that must occur among the staff: Ernie catching Bert giving an assistant carpenter head behind Hooper's store; The Count making gentle love to the guy who plays the dancing broccoli without taking his costume head off. Elmo telling Zoe that she's a sweet girl, and the time they spent together was nice, but when they get to Fargo and the tour ends, he's going back to a girl who's been Glinda's understudy in the traveling production of Wicked. Zoe getting all drunk and fucking Telly back in the hotel room they've been sharing just to make Elmo jealous. I like Telly. He reminds me of the oafish kid in your fifth grade class who's two months late for a haircut and who brought homemade cupcakes on his birthday but one of them had a dead fly in the frosting and everyone in the class made fun of him and no one ate theirs, including you, but you still want to hug him and tell him that everything will be all right some day even though you're pretty sure things will never be right for him in this world.
The plot had something to do with superheroes or something. I think they were trying to get Grover his superpowers back by learning even superheroes need baths and sleep and good nutrition. All I know is I haven't seen a more inspiring performance of Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero since the climactic moments of Short Circuit 2.
About forty minutes in the bastards left the stage for a fifteen-minute intermission, and all the kids shook their heads groggily from the muppet-induced hysteria. It was then that they brought out the balloons. An army of men carrying dozens of the same mylar Elmo balloons Juniper had spotted on the ceiling emerged from cloisters at the sides of the theater, creating a feeding frenzy of children begging for and parents buying the $10 souvenirs. Juniper started walking over to a guy with the balloons all by herself, screaming for one as I dragged her back to our seats. Soon the theater behind her was filled with dispersed floating evidence that I am a lousy father. A lousy father who waited with her for the lights to dim again, feeding her cherrios, and then watching her face while the muppets reappeared and the desire for mylar diminished, and the spectacle of color, and fur, and song spread out across the stage just inches from her eyes.
Behind me a black father wooted during one skit when Cookie Monster started "rapping." I turned and saw the honest joy in his eyes as he stood up and did a little dance, enjoying the show with his two little girls as wide-eyed as mine. God it was so lame, and so awesome. We are parents. This is what we do.
Last weekend, Max Summers gave Juniper his giant Elmo, because, in his own words, he was "so over Elmo."
Yesterday afternoon, I heard Juniper "cooking" at her new stove, and when I walked in I discovered Elmo's bloated corpse sitting on her bedroom floor, his gaping maw stuffed with innumerable plastic frankfurters. Apparently she stuffed them down his gullet one by one until the poor creature could no longer refer to himself in third person or harass that pothead family that lives behind his window shade. I did not know whether I should be disturbed that my child had committed such a sadistic act of savagery, or whether I should be proud of her.
Either way, considering the way she once longed for his presence in her life when denied it, I have to think this is proof that compromising my elitist attitude about things like old Elmo might not be such a bad idea after all.
Well, operation "ignore Elmo and hope he goes away" is a fucking bust, just two weeks after I first noted that somehow my child had spontaneously started talking about "Elmo" even though she's never seen him on television, played with any Elmo toys, or to the best of our knowledge been exposed to that little shitbird in any possible way.
As I suggested then, Elmo may very well embody the Jungian "child" archetype, filling a niche in the collective unconscious that does not require a toddler to be exposed to his self-referential blatherings in order to know who he is. But now, I fear, Elmo has taken on new dimensions in our daughter's mind. No longer content to think of him as a mere colleague-in-whining and comrade-in-crappy-pronunciation, I believe that Elmo now embodies the "hero" archetype to Juniper, and she expects him to one day ride up to our home on a white steed and rescue her from these evil parents who dress her like a Bavarian Disco Baby, refuse to let her watch normal television and only buy her wooden toys from the Jura region of eastern France. Why else would she wander over to an open window, and call out to him like Isolde to Tristan, like Thisbe to Pyramus, like Wendy Darling to Sandy Duncan in drag:
Alas, poor Juniper, your "hero" failed to show. Now get over here and eat this pureed kale and play with this sleek Scandinavian wooden thingamabob that just worked so much better with the furniture than any of those crappy licensed toys they sell at Wal-Mart. Then we'll read to you from a vintage children's book filled with mid-century illustrations and put you in your crib next to that handmade stuffed creature that you don't give a rat's ass about and I'll sing you a Belle & Sebastian song to sleep. Elmo can't hear your cries, Juniper. He can't hear your cries.
There are a couple boxes of pampers stacked next to Juniper's crib. Last Sunday she woke up from her nap and played sweetly in her crib for a few minutes. She hopped over to the diaper boxes and pointed directly at a little picture of Elmo on the box, and said, clear as anything: "Elmo."
"Holy fuck Wood, did you hear that?"
"What?"
"She just said E-L-M-O."
"She did?"
"Have you been letting her watch Sesame Street while I'm at work like that woman you know from playgroup whose German husband doesn't want their kid watching TV but she lets the kid watch it all day anyway?"
"No, I swear. She's never seen Elmo on television or anywhere else as far as I know."
"Don't say that name, you'll encourage her."
"Where did she learn it?" asked Wood.
"Elmo!" said Juniper. "Elmo, Elmo, Elmo."
Don't get me wrong, I harbored no illusions that Juniper wouldn't be stricken with inevitable adoration for that self-narrating mangy-red-haired orange-proboscised muppet. One could easier cheat the grim reaper than avoid the dreaded Elmo. Still, I didn't expect it so soon. Wood and I sat around trying to figure out where she could have learned it:
"When she was about eight months old I let her hold an Elmo doll that my secretary has in her cubicle," I offered.
"I think there might be an Elmo book on the shelf in the YMCA's daycare," Wood speculated. "I know they read her a Barney book once."
The thing is, I don't really think anyone needed to tell her who he was. Elmo has simply found his way into the collective unconscious. Children are now born knowing his name; they just wait for their lips and tongues to be capable of saying it.
