When I was a kid, my parents got us this big book about American Indians, a wide-ranging overview of tribes in various regions. It was one of my favorite books to browse. The varying customs and ceremonies; the many ways that different tribes hunted or grew foods, the wide range of kinship patterns — fascinating. That book was a great introduction to the fact that “American Indians” and “Native Americans” are terms that lump together a whole bunch of people with nothing in common besides being on this continent before Europeans were.
It’s kind of funny that out of all the different customs that should’ve seemed strange to ten-year-old me — odd-sounding foods harvested in harsh conditions; unusual initiation ceremonies; ritualized wife-swapping; human sacrifices at a chief’s funeral — the one that I had most trouble getting my mind around was the section about Hopi kachina dancers, masked and costumed dancers representing gods and spirits. From fuzzy memory, when kids came of age, a special private kachina dance was held for them, and after the ceremonies, the dancers removed their masks, and the kids discovered for the first time that the dancers were men they knew. Then each kid got a chance to look through a mask and see the world as a kachina saw it, and the boys were afterwards eligible to become kachina dancers themselves.
I didn’t get it. Hadn’t they always figured that these were people? What’s so special about looking through a mask — won’t the world look just the same as it does through eyes? It just seemed like a completely alien custom.
It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I finally made a connection between kachina dancers and something in my world. A couple years after Jim Henson’s death, I was watching a show about his life and works, and for the first time in my conscious memory, I saw Henson on camera operating Kermit the Frog.
If anyone had asked me before then, I would have said that of course I knew the Muppets aren’t real; they’re just puppets, felt and fur and foam, operated by humans that you can’t see on camera. But seeing Henson with Kermit on his arm, and Frank Oz with Miss Piggy on his…I discovered that no, I hadn’t really known, because it was a shock to see that indeed, Kermit is not an independent entity.
Even now, when I’m watching Sesame Street or my Muppet Show DVDs with my son, it doesn’t entirely register. I can make myself see the hand motions and imagine the puppeteer just below the bottom of the screen, but it’s an effort. Kermit and Ernie & Bert and Miss Piggy and Big Bird and the Count and Fozzie and Cookie Monster and Gonzo….they’re all real to me, in a way that puppets on other shows aren’t. (Barney’s just somebody in a costume to me. The inhabitants of the realm of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers — they’re obviously just puppets. Between the Lions? Good puppets, but puppets.)
I wonder how many people my age, the first generation raised on Sesame Street, have the same unconscious impression. I wonder how many of us see the Muppets as, certainly not gods (they’re way too fallible) (although then again, comparing with some pantheons, they might fit right in), but at least as living beings, spirited entities, part of our common mythology. I wonder how many of us, seeing Henson and Kermit, felt the collapse of an assumption we hadn’t realized we had.
I wonder how many of us, while sorting laundry, have put a sock over our hand, and pushed in the toe to make a mouth, and tried to experience the world as a Muppet experiences it.