My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [60]
Instead, she found a smiling, vibrant lady who said, “Things are okay. My buddy’s come back to visit me.” She reached over and gave Elmo a squeeze, and he sang and danced the hokey pokey, as only Elmo can. Both women giggled like schoolgirls. The niece reached across the table to get Elmo to dance again, but her aunt suddenly grew serious. “Oh, no! You can’t wear him out—his batteries only last so long. But he really makes me laugh and smile.”
Elmo is a bundle of optimism, just like the children (both young and old) who love him. He’s learning that life has its rough patches, but he lives in a world where he is supported by a caring group of friends and family (yes, that’s a crayon drawing of his parents on the wall in “Elmo’s World”) who help him get through his days. And Elmo’s frequent interactions with babies—those born optimists—lift his spirits and help him view the world as a place of hope and possibility.
I’m an optimist, too. When I hear about people like that Katrina victim, one of the thousands who have shown such resilience and who still manage to have a positive outlook, I truly do feel that everything will be okay. I volunteered to join a team of children’s television performers to travel to the New Orleans area in the wake of the storm to entertain kids. I went down there with a heavy heart, but when I returned to New York, despite the physical devastation I’d seen, I felt hopeful and inspired by all the people I met on my travels.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), led by Senior Vice President of Educational Services Peggy O’Brien, arranged for our trip. The show Between the Lions tapes in Mississippi (it is produced in part by Mississippi Public Broadcasting), and its cast had already done a few local shows for displaced victims. Lions executive producer Judith Stoia and Peggy O’Brien created a minitour with stops in Louisiana (Baton Rouge and Lafayette) and Mississippi (Long Beach and Ocean Springs). They wanted to go to New Orleans, but this was mid-October, and authorities were limiting access to the most heavily damaged areas.
My Sesame Street castmates Maria (Sonia Manzano), Alan (Alan Muraoka), and Papa Bear (Joey Mazzarino), along with Leona from Between the Lions (Pam Arciero) and a walk-around Arthur character from the animated Arthur series, visited a host of schools during the four-day tour. The Sesame Workshop donated DVDs, Fisher-Price contributed Elmo toys, the organization First Book provided books, and the visit was a big success.
CPB continued to push for a New Orleans tour, and finally, on November 28, I joined my colleagues from the show—Emilio Delgado (who plays Luis), Alan Muraoka, and Lisa Buckley, as well as Pam Arciero and Carmen Osbahr. Freelance producer and director Lisa Simon, who had been to Sri Lanka following the tsunami to work on relief efforts there, coordinated our visit.
I really didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at the airport and the bus took us into New Orleans, and as it turned out, I didn’t have a lot of time to take it all in. We had a rehearsal scheduled for five-thirty that same day, and this was one show we all wanted to be prepared for. But in the end, it didn’t matter how good the show was. We were there as much to comfort as to entertain.
We went to inner-city schools, where we performed in buildings with collapsed walls and boarded-up windows. Classes were being held there because those schools were in the best condition. Often the students were a mix of kids from three or four other schools, where combined faculty and staff made a heroic effort to establish some kind of normalcy in the lives of children who’d seen too much and lost too much. We did four shows a day, and we were grateful each time we got off the bus and entered another school. We could forget the destruction we saw on the street and focus instead on the hope inside those school buildings.
Amid all that devastation, there were reasons