My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [6]
To be a truly successful puppeteer, to not only entertain but really connect with children, I must reach into my own heart to project love to every boy and girl in the audience—even when I can’t see them. My mother set a powerful example for me by loving all her daycare children as if they were her flesh and blood. When I am performing Elmo in front of the camera, I remind myself that somewhere out there, there’s an impressionable kid perched as close to the television as I used to sit, feeling that same electromagnetic pull, wanting to reach through that screen to touch and be touched. Like my mother, like Elmo, I strive to touch the heart of every child I come into contact with, because that connection is so vital.
From time to time, my mother encountered children who needed extra love and understanding. These weren’t the kids who would draw on the couch with crayons. (Those I prefer to think of as “creative risk takers”—little puppeteers-in-the-making whom I identified with.) If my mother saw a child who needed a supplement to the love and attention they got at home, she would become their advocate on every level. She gave love generously, just the way Elmo does. One child, a shy, sensitive little girl with few friends who was often picked on at school, told my mother sadly, “Miss Gladys, those other kids don’t ever want to sit by me.”
Her words set my mother in motion. Mom made sure the girl’s mother knew how her daughter was feeling and began to build up the child’s confidence by telling her over and over that she was intelligent and talented. She defended her against neighborhood bullies, and she even wrote a letter to the child’s teacher asking her to be on the alert for other kids who were teasing her.
Slowly but surely, the other kids did want to play with the child. My mother gave this little girl love like she was one of her own, and the result was a child who blossomed. Love was my mother’s weapon of choice, and it worked every time. Many years later, as an adult, that girl returned to Turner’s Station, and she thanked my mother for all she’d done to build up her self-esteem and make her feel valued. And she wasn’t the only one of the daycare kids who came back to thank my mother—at least two dozen of Miss Gladys’s kids, now well into adulthood, still call her. That gesture always touches Mom, but she keeps things in perspective and points out a simple truth. “Imagine,” she says, “if you’re a child going into someone else’s house and expecting them to take care of you. You’d be looking for nothing but a bunch of love.” And more than anything, that’s what my mother strived to provide.
Mom knew to adjust her caregiving style in dealing with different children, just as I’ve learned to fine-tune Elmo’s tone depending on my audience. My parents naturally made the same kinds of adjustments in parenting me and my three siblings. While we were one very united family, we kids also happened to possess four extremely distinct personalities.
Take my brother, George Jr. The same fearlessness and drive that made him such a standout on the basketball court didn’t translate as well off the court, mutating into a willfulness and devil-may-care attitude that got him into hot water more than once. One night in the 1970s, George set out for a party in a John Travolta–inspired ensemble. What afflicted him later wasn’t Saturday Night Fever but plain old alcohol.
This story has grown legendary in my family due mostly to the role a