My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [8]
Somehow, though, the sting of those remarks didn’t last very long. My house was always a safe haven, the one place where I felt accepted and where everyone understood my interest in building puppets. Because my parents treated me and my budding passion with respect—showing their support by driving me to hobby shops and fabric stores for supplies, taking me to my first gigs as a performer, and encouraging me to make contact with professionals who would ultimately help further my career—I must have developed a thicker hide than most kids my age. Over time, the teasing and taunting had little effect because I felt so protected and secure in my parents’ love, and I genuinely didn’t care what the other children (or their mothers and fathers) thought of my hobby.
When the kids realized they weren’t getting to me in a way that would cause me to stop doing what I loved, eventually they just left me alone. “He’s being creative and building things,” my parents would tell the other parents. “If he’s enjoying himself, we don’t really care if he’s out playing with other kids or not.” My family taught me that it was right to ignore the clamor of the crowd and go your own way.
I received this message over and over: You are loved just as you are. As an adult, I have never forgotten the value of that, and it’s a message that Elmo and I try to express as frequently as possible.
By the time I was fifteen, I was capable of staying up all night, sitting at our kitchen table working on puppets. My mother, a gifted seamstress who even made fabric coverings for her shoes to coordinate with her dress, taught me to sew on her old Singer; my father helped me build puppet stages out of scrap wood he’d salvaged. I found materials to build puppets with and spent whatever money I had on supplies. Surrounded by piles of felt, fabric scraps, fake fur, foam, and glue, I could sit for hours happily lost in building puppets.
Once I snatched my mother’s fluffy beige bedroom slipper, bending it in the middle before transforming it into a hand puppet. When I showed her that I’d turned that slipper into a puppet named Rocky, making it sing and dance to Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain,” she forgave my thievery with a smile. Little did she know that this was just the beginning of my making off with personal items in the name of puppet creation. I think of it now: What few material possessions my parents had, I was eyeballing—and going after with a pair of scissors! But they hardly batted an eye.
“WHEN YOU’RE A parent, everything changes. You’ll see things differently—just you wait.” Over and over, after my wife and I found out we were going to have a baby, we’d hear those words, and truth be told, we’d roll our eyes. But, of course, those folks turned out to be right once our daughter, Shannon, was born. We immediately began to look at the world differently, to consider the needs of someone other than ourselves, and to give those needs top priority. (We quickly learned that when a diaper needs to be changed, it needs to be changed now, not at the next commercial.) We worried about different things, after Shannon. We found joy in different things, after Shannon. And most of all, we had an increased capacity to give and receive love, after Shannon. Though Genia and I are now divorced, our child brought love into our lives in a way we never expected.
At this point—ten years into Elmo’s life and five years before “Elmo’s World” would debut—the fuzzy red monster was already a big part of my life, as were children. By now, I’d worked for and with kids for most of my life, but I never really thought about being a parent myself.
When I found out that Genia was pregnant, I was overjoyed to know that I was going to be a father. I wanted to see my baby right then and there! I had no idea nine months could take so long to pass. Elmo was an important part of my life, and I was eager for this brand-new child to