From Publishers Weekly
It's hard to believe, but it's been more than 20 years since beloved preschooler icon Elmo made his debut on Sesame Street—in fact, Clash wasn't even the first puppeteer to try his hand at bringing the "baby monster" to life. It was Clash, though, who gave the character the high-pitched voice and distinctive laugh that quickly endeared him to young viewers and eventually led to his own spinoff series. When he writes about Elmo, in fact, he verges on describing the Muppet as if it possesses its own personality. Clash's working relationship with Elmo is used as a starting point to discuss basic themes like love, tolerance and courage, but it's the story of his life before meeting his furry partner that often holds the most interest. He talks with obvious affection about his childhood growing up in an African-American suburb of Baltimore, encouraged from a early age to follow his talent for designing and performing with puppets. Though generally upbeat, this is no sugar-coated tale; Clash describes his initial struggles to make a name for himself on other children's shows, and speaks frankly about the toll performing on Sesame Street took on his marriage. (Sept. 25)
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Review
Praise for My Life as a Furry Red Monster:
“It should come as no surprise that the man behind America’s most beloved red furball is as wise, warm, witty, and wonderful as Elmo himself. My Life as a Furry Red Monster is an entertaining sneak peak at the life and times of one of the most endearing and enduring characters ever created.”
—Katie Couric
“I love Elmo and I love this book. What a cutie-patootie. Thanks, Kevin!”
—Rosie O’Donnell
“This delightful book illuminates a man’s journey from child to parent, student to teacher, puppeteer to Muppeteer, and reveals to us who our favorite red furry monster really is—a gifted, humane, empathetic entertainer named Kevin Clash. His book is a meditation on the things that really matter—to Elmo and to all of us.”
—Julianne Moore
“In lively and wonderfully written prose, Kevin tells the story of how he came to be the most popular educator and entertainer of children in the country. His riveting tale weaves together the adventures, idealism, love, and optimism that Kevin has experienced both as himself and as a furry red monster.”
—Joan Ganz Cooney, cofounder of Sesame Workshop and creator of Sesame Street
“Kevin has given life and breath to one of the most beloved characters in contemporary pop culture. His heart and soul radiate not only through Elmo, but up and down Sesame Street, through this book, and around the world. Not only is Kevin a brilliant artist, but he’s a fabulous human being as well.”
—Vanessa Williams
About the Author
Kevin Clash has been with Sesame Street for twenty-six years and is coexecutive producer of “Elmo’s World.” He has won three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Performer in a Children’s Series and six for his work as coexecutive producer of an Outstanding Pre-School Children’s Series. He has a daughter, Shannon, and lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Love
When I tell folks what I do for a living ("What'dya mean you're Elmo? You're a forty-five-year-old six-foot African American male with a deep voice, get outta here"), after they regain their composure, they ask me to explain Elmo's popularity. Elmo is instantly recognizable in nearly every country in the world. He knows heads of state, A-list celebrities, world-class athletes, Oscar winners, Tony winners, Grammy winners, spelling-bee winners, and lots of babies. If Elmo had a cell phone, it would never stop ringing. Why is this little fur-and-foam bundle of energy such a phenomenon?
I have a one-word answer: love. Elmo connects with children and adults on the purest and most fundamental level, and that is the human desire to love and be loved. It's as simple as that.
Though I've said "Elmo loves you" thousands of times, maybe millions, the thrill remains because children crave hearing that they are loved. (So do most adults, even if they won't admit it.) And kids love to say it back--"I love you, too!"--and you know they mean it, no matter how many times they say it.
"I love you." Those are magic words--basic, simple, easy to say, but as adults we often forget their power. We often forget to say them. But Elmo reminds me on a daily basis that love is the foundation for a happy life. And before we can love each other, we have to learn to love ourselves.
Back home in Turner's Station, a blue-collar community located just east of downtown Baltimore, Maryland, there was plenty of love to go around. In fact, my mom had so much love to give that she shared it with all the neighbor kids, running a family-style daycare center out of our two-bedroom, one-bath home. My siblings--Georgie (the oldest, George Jr.), big sister Anita (we called her Ne-Ne), and little sister Pam--grew up in a kind of kid heaven, where children and love naturally intersected and were never in short supply.
Money, however, was. Officially, my hometown is called Turner Station, but we always referred to it as Turner's Station--just tradition among the locals, I guess. It's fitting that the name confusion exists, because there really are two towns in my mind--the Turner's Station of my youth and memory and the Turner Station of a harsher reality. My father worked hard as a flash welder operator at Raymond Metals to put a roof over our heads, and Mom's daycare work supplemented his income. But that said, I never, ever felt poor in that house, though there were days when all we had for dinner were mayonnaise sandwiches.
Our small brick ranch house on New Pittsburgh Avenue was an unremarkable structure, not much different (at least on the outside) from most others in the neighborhood. It had a side entry and a two-step cement stoop where the neighborhood men often sat smoking and chatting in the quiet of a summer's evening. A chain-link fence kept the constant flow of bicycle, tricycle, wagon, hopscotch, and jump-rope traffic off our small patch of lawn and out of the few geraniums, petunias, and four-o'clocks my mother tried to keep thriving in her front-yard garden.
If our property was remarkable in any way, it was because we had two sheds in the backyard instead of the usual one. My father was, and is, an inveterate pack rat. His excuse was that in addition to his day job, he brought in money by being a neighborhood handyman. So any scrap he could salvage from a demolition or remodeling job went into the bursting-at-the-seams shed.
"You can't believe what someone threw away today," he'd announce at dinner, recounting his latest find. Before long, like my dad, I started saving and salvaging my own scraps--old buttons, fabric, a worn-out fuzzy slipper, odd bits of plastic or Styrofoam, boxes--any materials that I could turn into the simple puppets I began building and fiddling with as a child.
Now, lest you start picturing a Sanford and Son type of junk lot--even though Dad was often told that he looked like Redd Foxx--you need to know that our house sat just a few hundred yards from the Chesapeake Bay. We had a huge backyard dominated by a willow tree, and beyond our lawn a field of tall fescue grass waved in the warm breezes off the water. Depending on the wind direction and tide, the air was filled with the sweet scent of the salty water or the fertile smell of the tacky mudflats we delighted stomping through in search of seashells. On the worst days, the chemical odors from the nearby Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point overpowered all.
We lived within a half hour ride of vibrant downtown Baltimore, yet our neighborhood was a bucolic mix of homes and vacant fields where we roamed and aired our young imaginations. Necessity remained the true mother of invention, however, and we kids weren't the only creative ones. I still remember one field where enterprising Mr. Shelton parked a school bus he had converted into a general store. Mom would send me to this mobile pit stop for a few necessities, saving her a trip to Miss Hill's grocery farther away on Wade Street.
My mom was the ultimate "working mother," before that phrase came into vogue. Not only was she busy raising my siblings and me, she had a house full of neighborhood kids in the daycare center she ran. As a result, growing up, my home was filled with the controlled (and sometimes uncontrolled) chaos that children bring. With the four of us there, plus the half dozen or so kids from the neighborhood Mom watched, all that energy exerted a magnetic pull on other toddlers and preteens in the neighborhood.
Our house was a place where many kids took their first staggering steps, where the smell of baby powder and dirty diapers dueled for dominance, and where each evening my mother leaned her hip wearily against the counter as she prepared dinner, while I sat at the table making art with assorted empty cereal and Kleenex boxes, colored paper, crayons, and Elmer's glue. I kept one eye on my creation-in-progress and the other on the paper towel roll, waiting for that last sheet to be torn off so I could pounce on the cardboard cylinder and claim it.
I undoubtedly inherited my "crafty" instincts from my parents, Gladys and George Clash. Mom sewed like a pro, and Dad loved to draw and make things, and they often got into the spirit of creating with us kids. Once, after a huge snowstorm, my parents helped us construct a massive snow fort--a squared-off igloo. Mom made a flag for us to fly using iron-on letters on red cloth. Though the snow melted, the name we gave to our winter playhouse stuck, and the red flag found a place in our living room. From that point forward my house was known as Fort McKids.
Between neighborhood children, my many relatives who lived nearby, the daycare kids and their parents constantly dropping by, our home life was structured mayhem. And as on Sesame Street, humor was a mainstay. I'm grateful for having grown up in what was basically "kid central," because it later made being on the set of Sesame Street feel like I was back with my family. With that many kids around, you can be sure that on any given day, the house was populated by at least one grouch and several monsters, and a cookie was certainly something to be devoured, not savored or shared.
Though our house was modest, my sense of home felt larger than our four walls. It extended into the multitude of other homes in which I felt welcome. As a kid, I loved the Sesame Street song, "People in Your Neighborhood," because it perfectly captured the connectedness I felt in mine. The homes of our neighbors, Mr. Bernard and his wife, Miss Rose, and Mr. Melvin and Miss Lee, as well as Miss Ada, Miss Marie, and Miss Eunice, were nearly as familiar as my own. I can still taste the crabs my father's friend Kakie (never Mr. Kakie, always just Kakie) shared with us.
No matter how much activity was going on in the house, I always carved out time to watch Sesame Street and other children's shows. My mother never used television as an electronic babysitter, but I'm like so many of my generation with a fierce devotion to the medium that came into our homes on a small screen and somehow enlarged our world beyond all measure.
Sesame Street first aired when I was ten years old, and as soon as I heard the sprightly opening bars of the theme song, I was entranced. I was one of those up-close sitters. I'd park myself a few inches from the RCA color television set we had. I was so close, I could feel the static electricity of the screen tugging at the peach fuzz on my face and smell the wonderful aroma of electrically heated dust coming from the vents of that lustrous wooden console. No matter how many times my mother yelled, "Kevin! Move back before you go blind!" I'd still feel myself powerfully drawn into that world, and the worn-out seats of my Lee jeans bore witness to the pull I was powerless to resist.
I was instantly taken with this new show, with these creatures called "Muppets"--Jim Henson's trademark way of combining "marionette" and "puppet"--and little did I know that I was already setting the course of my life to exchange my New Pittsburgh Avenue address for 123 Sesame Street. Love makes you do crazy things sometimes.
He may not look like it, but that Elmo's a love machine.
When parents tell me, "My child lives for Elmo," I tell them that Elmo lives because of their child's love for him. I don't just mean that Elmo is alive in their child's imagination, though that is certainly a part of it. That child and Elmo aren't just experiencing love; they're creating more of it to go around, and in doing so they make the world a better place.
It works like this: Elmo feeds off the love he receives from kids, from the adult characters on the show, and from his fellow Muppets. He doesn't just take that love in as a fuel and use it up. Instead, he drinks it in and gives it right back in spades. He's a kind...
