bailesu:

I was in the first wave of Sesame Street fans; the show premiered less than a year before my birth, so they were still trying to figure out what they were doing when I first began to watch it in the early seventies.  I loved it.  I loved it so much that I had Bert and Ernie puppets that I got for Christmas, so I could do my own skits with them.  That was my first exposure to the Muppets.

By the time I got too old for Sesame Street, the Muppets were on the air.  I loved that show to death, even though a lot of it was pitched way over my head, because the show was a love letter to forms of entertainment which had died before I was born.  But the show did an incredibly good job of creating something which adults like my parents and kids like me could both enjoy.  By the time it ended, I was old enough to understand that TV doesn’t just magically happen; there are people who make it.

Lots of people dramatically reject the stuff of their childhood around the age of 10-12, trying to become all grown up when they aren’t.  I never did, though some things quietly dropped out of my life in my quest for new horizons.  But I continued to watch the Muppet movies, I watched Fraggle Rock and I tried pretty much anything Henson made; I actually enjoyed The Dark Crystal, unlike most of humanity. 

I attended the same university as Jim Henson, though that was purely by chance; I was there when he died and I have rarely been so incoherently angry in my entire life; he died pointlessly because he refused to get help until it was too late and that was a tragedy. 

He made me laugh and made me cry and made me think and I can offer no higher tribute to an artist than that.  He was a creative genius and he made millions of people happier than they would have been without him.  So I mourn him on this day.  God, I’m crying as I type this and it’s been decades.

The muppeteers are dying, one by one.  Many of my childhood icons are.  (Somehow, you expect them to be immortal, but no one is.  Death comes to us all in the end.)  I just wish he could have had another twenty years.  But part of growing up is learning there’s some things you can’t control.

Anyway, I miss him and the work that he did and the joy he brought.  Good lives too often end too early and his was one of them.

God bless you, Jim Henson.