Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Friends | Oct 13 2005

K, who works for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit foundation behind Sesame Street (“and so much more,” says K), told me this morning that a new muppet will appear on the show next September. Correction: not a muppet. In 2004 The Jim Henson Company, run by the late Henson’s son and daughter, sold the muppet “property” to Disney. This included Kermit the Frog and Miss Pippy and other less popular muppets, along with the Muppet Show and the various Muppet movies. Disney also acquired the term muppet, so the puppet characters on Sesame Street are no longer referred to as muppets but friends. (To confuse matters, some of these friends are also monsters. The distinction depends on whether the friend is meant to represent a human. Non-human friends are monsters; human friends are just friends. The give-away here is fur: only monsters are covered in fur. Thus Grover and Oscar are monsters, while Bert and Ernie are not. All four, however, are friends. One exception to this fur rule is Big Bird, who is covered in feathers, not fur, but is definitely a monster, albeit an unrelentingly friendly one.)

But I digress.

K wouldn’t tell me anything about the new friend because it’s a big secret and no one outside of Sesame Workshop is supposed to know. I told her I understood, which really I didn’t, and instead made up my own new friend. She’s called Terri, and she’s a self-described slut. (As Terri explains it, calling herself a slut is her way of reclaiming her feminine power.) Terri is into a lot of new age practices and phenomena such as channeling, reincarnation, and crystals, and also various “unsolved mysteries” such as UFOs and Crop circles. I picture her in a purple slip and several scarves. She has sex with all the other friends, sometimes more than one at a time. Since she’ll only do this in the graveyard (you didn’t know there was a graveyard near Sesame Street, did you?), she’s affectionately known as “Cemetery Terri.” Her presence on Sesame Street has a remarkably positive effect on the other friends. For example, Oscar becomes less grouchy, and Cookie Monster develops a broader, though no less voracious, appetite.