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By Root 451 0

the streets near Central Park until I saw the Museum of Natural History looming in front of me. In the predawn light and the orange and blue glow of the streetlamps, I saw several enormous shapes writhing on the ground. When I got closer, I could see these were the famous balloons, weighted to the ground. I stepped around a barricade and showed my official parade pass, my eyes agog as Kermit the Frog rose as if from slumber and stretched to his full length. I thought of all the sketches I’d done of him and wondered at the enormity of the scale of his construction. How did they put something like that together? I didn’t have time to consider the methods for too long, though. I had a float to catch.

Traveling along Central Park West and then down Broadway performing Cookie Monster was an amazing experience. I practically got chills putting this professionally made and very famous puppet on my arm. Now I could look at the construction of a Muppet up close, not through a TV screen. The materials were of much higher quality than what I used back home. But puppeteering is puppeteering, and Cookie Monster worked pretty much the same way that puppets like Bartee did, so I poked Cookie’s head out through the curtain of the float and went to work. Despite the fact that I spent the parade in an enclosed structure, I still had a good view through a small gap in the curtain; it was the largest crowd I’d ever seen, and certainly the biggest audience I’d ever had.

By all rights, I should have been exhausted. I’d barely slept, I’d gotten up when it was still dark, I’d ridden in a cramped float for five hours traveling at a very slow pace, and I had nearly lost my voice performing Cookie, too excited to realize no one could hear me over the noise of the parade. Then I’d gone to a reception for the parade participants (where I briefly met Jim Henson), but when it was all over, I was ready to do it again. I wanted to get up and do it every day of my life. On the train ride back to Baltimore, I relived every moment of my visit, knowing that I had much to be grateful for on that Thanksgiving. And though I would go on to perform in the parade many times, nothing ever matched that pulsating, life-changing first trip down Broadway to Herald Square.

ONE OF THE most imaginative endeavors I’ve ever been involved in is “Elmo’s World,” a colorful, lively celebration of creativity, presided over by one of the most inventive little monsters on Sesame Street.

Start with the set, for instance. Instead of an elaborately realistic backdrop like Sesame Street’s, with its brownstones, sidewalks, stores, and other lifelike interiors and exteriors, “Elmo’s World” takes place in a crayon drawing of a universe as conceived by Elmo himself, though it was actually Mo Willems, one of the Sesame Streets writers, who dreamed it up. Through a mix of computer-generated graphics and live action, the line between “reality” and “pretend” is blurred. Elmo can move freely between these two worlds, until they are an inseparable combination of both. Simply watching “Elmo’s World” encourages kids to incorporate elements of their imagination and their reality into a seamlessly rich and stimulating environment that they choose to create.

“Elmo’s World” sprang from the fertile imaginations of some truly creative writers, including Judy Freudberg, Tony Geiss, and supervising producer Arlene Sherman. In 1998, Sesame Street’s thirtieth season, Elmo and I got our big break.

As I’ve mentioned, for the last three decades, Sesame Street’s audience had gotten steadily younger, and our research indicated that children struggled to pay attention to the show after about forty minutes. Three-year-olds had once been our youngest viewers, but now the show was attracting large numbers of two-year-olds and even babies as young as ten months. The magazine format of Sesame Street was confusing to these younger viewers, and as a result their attention was wavering.

The show hadn’t had a major format change since its inception, and there was trepidation about tampering with the formula. But