no.16 - Jim Henson's Pneumonia

At dinner tonight I said to my daughter, "Do you want to hear a song about being green?"

"Okay."

"It's sung by a frog." I added.

"Yes, yes yes!" She said.

We had just been talking about frogs and the color green.

I got up and I put on It's Not Easy Being Green and when I sat back down, I started to feel sad.

It's a sad song, but sadder still because I was transported to a moment the summer after I graduated from college when, for reasons too strange and complicated to explain here, I was visiting a friend on the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secrets of the Ooze.

I had been there for a few days. My friend, had been doing the hard work of coordinating a performance under a hundred pounds of turtle costume while the puppeteers controlled his face.

That night, sitting around drinking and having a good time, these guys were all talking about working on Sesame Street when I asked what I thought was an innocent question.

"Was Jim Henson really as good a guy as he seemed?"

All the puppet work on the film was being done by the Henson Creature shop. They all knew him. Personally. The puppeteer nearest me lost his smile and his face pulled into a grim expression. The air seemed to leave the room. "Yeah." He said, closing his eyes. "Yeah, he was."

These guys loved him. They loved him like a father and a great friend.

They pretty much hated everything else. They hated the crappy movie they were working. They hated the directors and the producers and, man, they hated Vanilla Ice (a "star" in the movie and at the very brief height of his fame). They hated the script so much they forced me to read it so I could suffer along with them. They hated the food and the beer and coffee they got in the morning. They hated North Carolina (where they were filming) and probably South Carolina too.

But they loved Jim Henson. Jim died of Pneumonia a little more than a year before.

"He should have gone to the doctor." One the puppeteers said quietly as if Jim had broken his heart. The party ended as everyone drifted back to their rooms or out of the house.

Listening to Jim Henson sing that song, you can hear how gentle he was, even doing something as seemingly unimportant as pretending to be a frog.