My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [47]
WE MANAGED TO make it work—most of the time. When Ne-Ne got older and started socializing more, I wasn’t allowed in the room when she was hanging with her girlfriends. I didn’t like playing the pesky little brother role, and I hated being away from my puppet-making supplies, but my mother insisted I give her the space she needed.
Feeling dejected, I would leave the house, head for the construction site of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and sit on the recently poured roadway waiting for someone to discover I had run away from home. I imagined my family arriving to beg forgiveness, to tell me how wrong they’d been to kick me out of my space, to soothe me with offerings of lasagna—my favorite.
I’d sit on that bridge watching my house for any signs of them heading out to find me. I’d wait, and I’d wait, and I’d wait some more. Then my growling stomach would betray me, and I’d remember that I’d already missed the ABC After-School Special and I was about to miss The Beverly Hillbillies. And so I’d trudge home, defeated by my weak will but cheered by the thoughts of dinnertime and the small screen. Hadn’t anyone noticed that I’d been gone?
Sometimes, on my way home, I’d stop off to visit our neighbor Miss Marie DeLoach, an elderly woman with no teeth. She reminded me of the black comic Moms Mabley, whom I’d seen on The Mike Douglas Show. Miss Marie didn’t have Moms’s sharp wit, but she offered me something else—her respect and admiration. Miss Marie loved my puppets and, by extension, me. “Kevin,” she’d say, “you just keep at it. You’re going to do something big with those puppets one of these days.”
MISS MARIE KNEW of my growing reputation as the neighborhood Ed Sullivan, since I’d been doing backyard shows for the local kids starting at the age of nine. The first show I ever did was adapted from a story I found in a frayed, coverless children’s book we had at home. The details are now hazy, but it involved a dog puppet and a sailboat—both of which I built myself.
These early public performances were a cooperative effort. To entice my audience, I offered free treats I bought from a neighbor, Miss Fleming, who ran a candy store out of her home. My mother helped hang the bedsheet I used as a stage (I’d poke my puppets over the top and stay hidden behind it), and I even enlisted the aid of Orlando to serve as chief “shusher”—he’d spirit away any of the kids who cried uncontrollably and distracted the others.
Eventually everyone in my family and quite a few people in the neighborhood and at school helped me out. A classmate’s mom donated the ballet tutus her daughter outgrew for my “costume shop”; sometimes I would be given foam, fabric, or other supplies for puppet and set building; Lee McCullough, my friend Lorraine’s mother, was a constant source of encouragement and made the second-best biscuits on earth. (No one can ever outbake a boy’s grandmother.) At various times, different neighbors and friends lent my father their vans or trucks when my productions grew too elaborate to fit in the Get Out and Push.
Once I began putting on shows locally, my father was instrumental in helping me find a larger audience and grow as a performer and artist. He was not only my driver, chauffeuring me and a carload of puppets and equipment from one gig to another; he also helped me build the sets and stages. Besides teaching me to sew and helping me with my earliest efforts, my mother served as my PR department by helping to get the word out about a show, and was my head of marketing and educational research, letting me know when an audience got restless or when they really enjoyed a particular bit. She didn’t go to my shows just to watch me—she was watching the crowd’s reaction, too! Mom showed her belief in me by doing things like tracking down Kermit Love or reaching out to local people who she thought would be of help