My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [39]
After I performed that sketch, some friends and colleagues told me that Elmo’s fear seemed especially palpable. The fact is that I, like so many people around me, was feeling some very real fear and tension myself after 9/11, and I was able to channel that emotion into my performance. Maybe it would have been easier just to carry on with the business of entertaining kids and teaching them lessons from our regular curriculum, but at Sesame Street, we saw an opportunity to perform a service for children and their parents by transforming something horrible into something positive.
After 9/11, we traveled to various schools around the city, met with young children who’d lost parents or who’d been displaced from their homes and their schools. Many of them were struggling to deal with a bewildering set of circumstances, made even more difficult by the fact that their parents were trying to cope with their own conflicting feelings. I know that Genia and I found ourselves treading water assisting Shannon as her fears for my safety in New York and the proximity of her own home to Washington, D.C., nearly swamped her.
The enormous loss of life was too difficult a subject for us to deal with directly, and the wounds were too fresh, but we did craft a show around loss: Big Bird adopts a wild pet turtle, who wanders off. Everyone on the street helps him to cope. Demonstrating the kind of courage we all need in the face of loss, Big Bird rallies and thanks his many friends for their support.
We also created two shows to deal with a serious side effect of 9/11—bullying and cultural diversity. Even in a time of crisis, when not many of our political leaders were championing the message of tolerance, Sesame Street rose to the occasion and bravely faced a difficult but important topic—and one that has been central to the show from its inception.
OFTEN IT IS harder to find the courage to face a personal difficulty than it is to understand and accept a large-scale tragedy. After many years together, and a lot of time apart, Genia and I finally admitted that our relationship was in trouble. We love each other deeply, but after seventeen years, it was not enough to sustain our marriage. We struggled for a long time over the impact that our separation and eventual divorce would have on our daughter.
Few children can emerge unscathed from the impact of divorce. (In fact, we filmed—but never aired—a Sesame Street sketch dealing with divorce; the test audience of kids found it too unsettling and confusing, despite how carefully our research department and curriculum writers structured the segment. The kids, not all of them children of divorce, couldn’t get past the idea of losing a parent.) Like many couples, Genia and I didn’t want our child to get caught in the middle.
I know that “courage” is a difficult word for some to associate with divorce, but making a difficult decision, weighing the effects of that choice on a number of other people, and following through was not easy for either of us. Though we both ached inside, we were more worried about our child than ourselves. Summoning up as much courage as we could, Genia and I sat Shannon down and explained to her what was happening and what she could expect.
Like any youngster in her situation, Shannon expressed concern that her mom and dad weren’t going to be together in the same place anymore. The familiarity and the comfort she drew from that routine had not been lost on either Genia or me. As tenderly as we could, we had to deliver the harsh but ultimately helpful medicine of truth: We were no longer going to live together as a single unit, but we would always be her mommy and daddy, and we would not love her any less.
Our words would have been useless unless Genia and I backed them up with a consistent message in our actions. As clichéd as this statement might