It's amazing how much of this movie feels like it's speaking to me directly.
I've been attending and working at a Shakespeare camp in Staunton, VA for years. I was a camper from 2004 to 2008 (six sessions and plays in all), and I've been a counselor since 2010 now. I have made so many close friends there, to the point where it isn't friendship. It's family. Literally hundreds of people have entered my life because of that place, and all of them make me who I am today.
We've always been called YCTC - short for Young Company Theatre Camp - and we've always stayed at a boarding school called Stuart Hall. It's always been that way, at least since I started.
This year, two big things happened. The name was changed to ASCTC - American Shakespeare Center Theatre Camp, in an attempt to associate us more closely to the company we're under. And I just found out, about a month ago, that we'll no longer be living at Stuart Hall next year - a place I've felt more at home than in any other in my life. We're now moving over to Mary Baldwin College, for a variety of different reasons.
As a counselor, and a role model for my kiddos, it's my job to be okay with these things, to show them that they're good things. But the name has changed and the location has changed, two things that have just always seemed like they would never change.
Flashforward to me watching The Muppets, and all of a sudden - Kermit helps me understand:
"You know, what's important isn't this building or a name - it's each other."
I think that more than any other Muppet movie, this one is about how our lives are given meaning by the people we surround ourselves with. The more I see it and think about it, I realize how much of its philosophy is integral to my life at this moment, in more ways than I've stated here. I owe Jason Segel, James Bobin, Nicholas Stoller, Bret McKenzie, Kermit, Piggy, Walter and all of them so, so much.