Rainbow Connection

So The Muppets Take Manhattan has been on cable a lot lately, and I have to tell you, I haven’t laughed so hard in my life. Animal is hilarious, and I love the musical number with the rats in the kitchen. The amount of adult humor and messages in these movies and shows is amazing. My dad told me that he missed “The Muppet Show” because of all the adult humor in it, and I never understood that until now. The truth is that the Muppets have a special place in my heart, but I think that I haven’t fully appreciated them until now.

There was this bit in The Muppets Take Manhattan with Ralph working in a dog kennel that caught my eye. There was a guy who came in with a dog name Snuckums, and he told Ralph to get Snuckums some rubber toys. He said, “Snuckums prefers the rubber Wall Street Journal to the rubber Washington Post.” I don’t know why I liked this so much, but I just started laughing out loud. It’s probably the political connotation of liking one news rag over the other. Are there liberal and conservative Muppets?

Then, there is one of my favorite shows, “Fraggle Rock”. In Fraggle Rock, there are these guys called Doozers, and all that the Doozers do is stay busy by building these sugar towers. To this day, I have no idea why they did that. Then, much to their surprise, these snooty little Fraggles come along and eat their hard work. It is kind of like most of our jobs. We stay busy doing work, and we have no idea how our work fits into the world. Then, if we are one of the lucky few that gets to actually see the fruits of our labor, our work is either destroyed or conspicuously consumed.

Who can talk about the Muppets without talking about Sesame Street? I still can’t here “Let it Be” without thinking “Letter B”. And who could forget “Rubber Ducky”, by the lovable Ernie? One of my Lesbian teachers had a pet theory that Burt and Ernie were Gay. She was making fun of the fact that the Sesame Street guys actually came out with this whole big statement saying, “Bert and Ernie are not Gay!” This shows you how deep this whole Muppet thing gets for some people. I am not saying that I have a position on this theory, but two guys sharing a bedroom for over 30 years is a little bit suspect. Don’t you think?

And who can talk about the Muppets without talking about Kermit The Frog? Every time that I hear “Rainbow Connection” I feel warm inside. Kermit always had a special place in my heart, and I never knew why. My Mom tells me that even when I was still in the crib, when Kermit came on the TV, I would just light up. I remember when he used to do the news, “This is Kermit the Frog here reporting live.”

I think that now I know why I loved Kermit so much. I think that we all love Charlie Brown because he is such a loser, and we are rooting for him. Kermit is the opposite. Kermit is everything that we want to be. He has this old school Hollywood dorky coolness about him that reminds me of Fred Astaire. He plays an instrument and he loves strong women. He is a leader who genuinely loves his friends, and when the going gets tough, he always does or says the right thing to make everything better. If we had more Kermits in the world, then the world would be a better place. We need them for the lovers, the dreamers, and me.