My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [25]
Like most kids, we loved soda, but it disappeared as quickly as it showed up. One night, when I was about six, Dad took his personal bottle of ginger ale, which we were instructed never to touch, out of the refrigerator and marked the level of the liquid on the bottle with a dark line.
The next afternoon when he got home from work, he went into the kitchen and then came back out and made an announcement: “Everybody in the car.” I got excited thinking we were going someplace fun. My mom asked him where we were going, but he simply shushed her and got us kids out the door.
“George! George!,” Mom called to him from the front steps as my brother and sisters and I jumped into the car. “You’re taking this too far!” she said with a nervous laugh.
But off we went with Dad, thinking he was taking us on a great adventure. Thirty minutes later, we were parked in front of the Baltimore City Hospital’s emergency room.
“Okay, everyone out of the car. We’re going to get your stomachs pumped so I can find out who drank my ginger ale.”
Ne-Ne had her arms folded across her chest defiantly, Pam and I were looking at each other, completely clueless, and Georgie was squirming. Finally, close to tears, he confessed.
No one ever took a slug from my father’s ginger ale again. Very creative parenting, don’t you think? No yelling, no hitting, just an unforgettable reminder to mind his word.
It takes a creative mind to put a positive spin on a child’s more, uh, hands-on endeavors. I probably spilled gallons of Elmer’s glue on the living room carpet, and who knows how much ink, pencil, and crayon wound up on surfaces other than paper, but my mother took it all in stride, knowing full well that a tipped-over jar of paint or spilled glitter was an accident.
It’s a good thing my father was equally tolerant of my creative urges, which sometimes simply overwhelmed me. When I was about twelve, I got possessed by “monkey fever.” I didn’t have any suitable material to make my monkey, but my mind flashed on the lining of my father’s Sunday-go-to-church overcoat. It was made of a plush black synthetic fur piling—absolutely perfect monkey fur. Only after my scissors had done their handiwork and I’d cut that lining out of the coat and finished the puppet did I come out of my “must-create” fog. Lord, what had I done?
I knew I was in for it, and I didn’t want to wait until Sunday when my father went to put his coat on, so I took the monkey and put it on the dresser in my parents’ bedroom. Then I went into our room and sat on the bed awaiting my fate.
A little after five I heard my father come home, and I prepared myself for the worst. Five minutes later, I heard footsteps coming down the hall, and my heart boomed in my chest. My father loomed in the doorway, cradling the monkey like a baby in his arms.
My father wore his sternest look. He held out the monkey to me. “What’s his name?”
I croaked out, “Moandy.”
He took another step toward me and gently handed me Moandy the Monkey. His expression softened, he nodded and said, “Next time, ask,” and turned and walked out of the room.
A moment later, I heard him ask my mother, “Did you see what Kevin made?”
“I saw he used up a good bit of your coat.”
The two of them laughed but quickly shushed each other. Though they wanted me to learn a lesson and respect other people’s possessions, I slept better that night because I knew they understood me.
Ruining a good coat was a creative risk I never dared attempt again. But I had glimpsed the depths of my parents’ devotion to me and my dreams, and I can never thank them enough for all the truly creative ways in which they have contributed, and still do, to my success as an artist, entertainer, and person. They propelled me from one supportive environment to another—to Sesame Street, where creative risks are rewarded.
MY PERFORMANCE AS Elmo begins in the minds and imaginations of a team of highly accomplished writers. Even before the writers get started on a season