New and very interesting post from Steve Whitmire

[antsamthompson9]

Bill Barretta

Huh…I will never deny or question what someone believes in their heart, because that’s who they are. But there’s a lot of assumption, misinformation and a big part of the story missing in here that...

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[Grumpo]

Bill Barretta

Huh…I will never deny or question what someone believes in their heart, because that’s who they are. But there’s a lot of assumption, misinformation and a big part of the story missing in here that...

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@antsamthompson9, as always, thank you for your very informative inputs!

Speaking for myself, i found that the following reply to Bill's post resonates with me the most:

Rick Burkhardt
I was born in 1970 and grew up with the Muppets, and I have really REALLY strong feelings and opinions about them. (Of course I do — they taught me to read and count!) I don't know any of the top-tier Muppet performers personally, but it makes a huge amount of sense to me that Steve (and others) who have inhabited the world of Muppets would also have really strong feelings and opinions about them. You are all WILDLY GREAT ARTISTS, some of the very best in the world. It's (sadly) normal for great artists to have major disagreements, sometimes in public, about where their art should go (or where it's already gone). (How many great rock bands have spent decades suing each other...) I respect Steve's feelings here. I respect Bill's too. I hope it can all get worked out ultimately, however slowly, in the personal world, if not the professional world. The professional (art/film/tv) world famously can be hard and mean — which is so NOT the Muppet world... I'm sure it's very hard, and sometimes painful, for the humans who've brought us so many decades of Muppet happiness to try to inhabit both.
Grace, as Frank O'Hara wrote, to "live as variously as possible."

P.S. I tend to rant when excited, and almost started on another one of those long posts nobody likes to read, about an artist' right to have strong values and strong opinions of his own (this is even a necessity, to be a good one) -- even if that can occasionally get the best of him; about each artist having their own heightened perception and specific creative process for the depth of their characters (quoting Frank Oz creating fictional biographies for his own, or David Suchet’s rigorous preparation process for Poirot); the subtle difference between debating a principle and denigrating the person, all but forgotten these days; or that the best way to win an argument is by citing words the other guy never said (e.g. half of the web now thinks that "whitmore wants muppets to die with original performer", totally untrue); some measure of recognition for man's talent and his years of service; etc...

But this brief message exchange with Bill in comments section of his post is better than a 1000 words of mine:

Jim Hemstead
Thank you, Bill Barretta ! I'm a fan of Steves, but I never understood this stance.

Author
Bill Barretta
I’m a fan of his too. Truly.

 

[antsamthompson9]

 

[antsamthompson9]

https://stevewhitmire.website/a-grande-cuppa-joe-to-go/, https://www.facebook.com/MikeQuinnS...EyMxLhGgRucqDB19kJVBoidAnsya4MHk7D5C1UwWcHm2l

 

[FanOfOneTimers]

https://stevewhitmire.website/a-grande-cuppa-joe-to-go/, https://www.facebook.com/MikeQuinnS...EyMxLhGgRucqDB19kJVBoidAnsya4MHk7D5C1UwWcHm2l

Cue the music

 

[MWoO]

When Steve was let go he literally begged Disney to let him do the Live Muppet Show and I think he said he would do it for free. It's really disingenuous for him to say he had let go of The Muppets in 2005. He pleaded to get his job back for quite some time after he was fired.

The fact is, no one wants to work with Steve and I think this proves why. He is a gatekeeper and giving narcissist vibes acting like he is the only one who can be Kermit instead of Jim. Of all the people to agree with the online comments, he should not be one of them. He was once in Matt's shoes and he is basically attacking all performers who didn't know Jom personally.

 

[Grumpo]

A small fanfic of my own. No offence intended, to any fans, puppeteers or agencies! I like and respect them all, and i really enjoy Tough Pigs articles (except one). I had to simplify and reword things for clarity (my apologies!) which are, of course, far more complex and nuanced. None of the below is a direct quote, though every line has source(s) in recent discussions from the web. Any errors in interpretation are mine and mine only, and are deeply regretted. OK, so here's how i read the discussion so far: DRAMATIS PERSONAE: FANS1 and FANS2 - two sides of Muppet fandom from my previous post, each worried about the future of the Muppets in their own way, some PUPPETEERS, other FANS.

FANS1: Listen, we've been watching all these clips on Youtube lately, and something is off with Kermit.
FANS2: Shut up haters, you are not helping.
FANS1: But he's off! Maybe if Kermit changes the tone...
TOUGH PIGS: Don't worry. Let us tell you, Kermit sounds off to you only because he is more like Jim than ever before.
FANS2: Also, Matt really works hard at it!
FANS1: Appreciate that, but Kermit still seems not the same. Maybe if he changes his tone...
SMALL FACTION OF FANS1: It's not the tone guys, it's his personality...
FANS1: Like we were saying, if new Kermit changes the tone it will be good!
TOUGH PIGS: Let us tell you, when Steve became Kermit everybody hated his Kermit too.
FANS2: See? People hated Kermit back then.
FANS1: Not what i recall - Can you tell me who hated Muppet Christmas Carol?
SMALL FACTION OF FANS1: Right! Maybe Kermit's pitch was higher but his personality...
FANS1: Like we were saying, if new Kermit changes the tone it will be good!
FANS2: He just needs more time!
FANS1: But it's been 10 years already!
FANS2: We meant, more screen time in movies and series, to make him a hit.
STUDIOS (announces): And here comes, the long awaited, the one and only -- The Muppet Show!
STEVE (to FANS1): Listen guys, I get what you are saying. We are losing Jim's influence here and that's what really made Muppets great; they will become just a tribute band without it. Incidentally, speaking of Muppet Show, if you want proper Jim's Muppet Show you need to have proper Kermit. And it's really not just the voice, it's all of his personality. People need to recognize Kermit as Kermit they love, that's really important for the whole thing to work. Here's what's missing in his character now [(see the list in his post)] and Jim's way to pass it on was by getting a new guy to pick things from previous performer over time, not by crowd auditions. What's more, it's important to have only one person...
TOUGH PIGS: Move on everybody, move on. Just a crazy ex-employee rambling, nothing to pay attention to. We love Steve, but let us tell you, the deranged bloke wants to fire Matt and kill the franchise! And he said you have to know Jim to be in the Muppets, too!
FANS1 & FANS2: This is fascistic! Hate you ex-comrades, eh? Want to stop the show now?
BILL: Huh...If i knew i needed to know Jim I could’ve just stayed home.
SOME FAN: He didn't say that, Bill.
FANS1 & FANS2 (to SOME FAN): Shut up, gaslighter!
STEVE: What are you talking about? I have nothing but respect for the guys - i brought in David and Matt to the team myself and myself arranged for them to take over the Richard and Jerry's roles, they do a great job! Dave is like a brother to me. If you gotta have your Muppets at any cost, by all means, enjoy the show! But let me tell you, the best efforts will not be as efficient without Jim's influ...
FANS1 & FANS2: You just want your job back! Let us tell you, crazy dude, you are never coming back, so just shut up!
STEVE: Listen, at this point i do not want to go back myself! (SMALL FACTION OF FANS1 faints) As for my mental health, like Mark Twain said "The report of my death was an exaggeration" despite Tough Pigs best efforts; love them too. But listen guys, the truth is the truth, however you look at it.
FANS1 & FANS2 (continue): Narcissistic jerk, he needs a shrink! He just keeps dissing Matt and throwing the entire crew under a bus!
MIKE QUINN: A little sanity, please? Steve never said any of these things! Criticizing Kermit does not mean dissing Matt - you are just seething over things Tough Pigs told you to seethe over!
FANS1 & FANS2: No! He wants to kill the franchise and fire Matt! We saw him weeping when he lost the froggy, now he just attacks everything on sight!

(CURTAIN)

SMALL FACTION OF FANS1 (after coming back to their senses): Listen, why don't we just watch the show and have everybody decide for themselves? Apart from insults, ALL sides may be right, in their own way -- The show might be not as good as Jim's but it might be good enough for the viewers, let's all hope for that! =)

 

[antsamthompson9]

1.5K views · 95 reactions | It's the love holiday, so I guess I'll give you a love story. Actually, it's more of an obsession story, but I recently heard a podcast guest describe obsession as “love that just forgot to be reasonable.” So, I guess it still qualifies as a love story. I've thought a lot about just how to write about this or even if I should write about this. Who does it benefit? What does it accomplish? In my recent reflections on this, I've adopted a wisdom pearl of my own creation: “Don't bring your wine stain to someone else's tablecloth.” It's probably the same sentiment as “Don't rain on someone else's parade,” but I like the visual of mine better. My wise friend, Andy MacDonald squarely hit the nail on the matter when he told me, “The only person you should write anything for is you.” So, I'll write it for me and share it with you. I've had three major obsessions in my life. The most obvious one to anyone who has ever met me for any amount of time, and the one I've had the longest, has to be the Muppets. I've told my origin story probably hundreds of times about being a small child and being captivated by the colorful, musical, funny characters that populated the television screen throughout the late 70's and early 80's. I knew everything there was to know about the show and it's performers. I collected anything Muppet related I could get my hands on. I took my copy of Christopher Finch's coffee table book,“Of Muppets and Men” to school everyday and scoured every photograph for details. This obsession was my childhood driving force and provided the springboard for everything that came after in regards to my puppetry career. Yet I had no childhood aspiration to work for The Henson Company. Maybe that sounds odd, but I just didn't think it was possible. I thought it very possible to create something of my own: to create my own characters, to make my own silly shows and to entertain myself and the people around me. At the time, that seemed as easy as 1-2-3. But working for the Muppets just didn't seem feasible. At a Puppeteers of America Festival in the early 90's, my dad asked a Henson puppet builder/wrangler what it would take to get a job at The Henson Company, which still owned all of it's franchise characters at the time, and he was told I already had two strikes against me: I was a white and I was male. The core team of performers since the time Jim Henson assembled them had predominately been white males. The Company knew even then that diversity was an issue in regards to the makeup of their performers. So, I put the idea of having anything to do with The Henson Company out of my mind. Again, it just didn't seem feasible. I got my undergrad degree and my Master's degree and started my company and the journey unfolded from one year to the next, not because of any great foresight or plan I had crafted. I hated the idea of a “5-year plan.” My attitude had always been, “how am I supposed to know what's going to happen with any of this?” I moved from Alabama to Atlanta and kept touring and creating original shows and allowed my imagination to keep going and going. One opportunity lead to another. I expanded to creating an Etsy store with a plush and puppet line. I taught puppet making once a year at the Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. I also developed a regular roster of performance venues. And in the midst of all that, the Muppets (specifically, the Muppet Show characters) were going through their own changes. They had been sold to a German entertainment company that quickly went belly-up. The franchise was re-acquired by Jim Henson Productions and then sold again to Disney. In 2005, Disney, in collaboration with the Henson family, began looking for a group of performers for what eventually (although not officially) became known as a “B” cast. These were performers who could puppeteer and voice the major Muppet Show characters for such events that the main performers wouldn't necessarily want to do. This included things like appearances/shows in the Disney theme parks, Disney cruises, public appearances. Basically, they wanted to treat the Muppets like the suit versions of the Disney characters in order to maximize their visibility and offer the public as many chances as they could to interact with the Muppet Show characters. When the main performers got wind of what Disney's plan was, Muppet fans were first exposed to the manifestos of Steve Whitmire, who took over the role of Kermit the Frog after Jim Henson's death in 1990. In an 8-page scathing screed addressed to “all the puppeteers in the world,” he listed many (I'm quite confident it was not all) of his grievances with Disney and their treatment of the Muppets and Jim Henson's legacy and intentions for the characters. Having worked alongside Jim as a performer since he was hired as a teenager in 1979, he saw himself as the rightful torch-keeper and intention-interpreter. This was a role he gave himself. It should be noted that with a few exceptions, a majority of the folks who worked for Jim Henson were contract workers. This was especially true of the performers. To my knowledge, none were salaried but Jim kept them all working consistently and he worked tirelessly to create opportunities for their continued employment and paychecks. Technically, he was under no obligation to any of them. But he chose good people that he liked working with and understood the value of consistency for the sake of the work environment he wanted to create and the characters they all brought to life. As anyone who has worked in the entertainment industry will tell you, that alone made Jim an anomaly. Disney's plan to bring unknowns into the circle suddenly threatened the sacrosanct environment (to say nothing of future potential income) the core team had grown quite used to. Thus I entered the fray. At the request of Heather Henson, who'd become familiar with my work, I auditioned in NYC with a host of other hopefuls. Kevin Clash was the Muppet coordinator for “Sesame Street” at the time and was scouting new talent along with the Disney folks who were behind the producers' table. Jane Henson joined them right before I did my voice audition for the main characters. She had a beaming smile on her face the whole time. I was called back the next day to work with the actual puppets. Was this happening? I couldn't believe it. It did not seem feasible. Yet, there I was: one moment performing the world's most famous second-banana Bear, the next the world's most famous Frog. And it just seemed natural. Like the most instinctive thing in the world for me next to breathing. I don't know how to fully describe it. In the end, the project was shelved because of an effective mob-campaign that Steve Whitmire was able to assemble on various Muppet fan websites and message boards. Many heeded his call to voice their outrage and Disney backed off. The 9 of us who'd been workshopping those characters were dropped like hot potatoes. Well, it didn't seem feasible, anyway. But I'd gotten the bug. Eventually, Disney did get the characters into the Parks by having Park puppeteers lip sync to a track recorded by the main performers. A suitable compromise had been reached. “Sesame Street” held a cattle-call audition in the midst of all this in 2006 and I was invited to participate. I was also asked to stay a day after the general auditions for a closed workshop for Ernie and Bert, characters that Sesame wanted to do more with but were hindered by, you guessed it, Steve Whitmire, who had taken over Ernie since Jim's death. Why these companies did not wash their hands of this problematic performer once and for all during any of this is beyond me. He became a contract negotiation nightmare. He would hold his characters hostage until his demands were met. He epitomized brinkmanship. And because he wielded power in two camps of performers who all wanted to keep their positions by staying in his good graces, Steve kept them all in check and on notice. I moved to NY in the fall of 2006 and had my 15 minutes of fame on two episodes of Sesame in 2008 during Season 39 as a utility Muppet performer. I was warmly welcomed by some of the performers. Others, in suspicious tones, questioned how I got a microphone on my first day or how I got a mailbox in the performer green room on my first season. But the work was amazing. I'll never forget it. I felt like I was home doing the most natural thing I could ever do. But, I was still a newbie and subject to the whim of talent coordinators and puppet captains, with whom I was never sure of my footing. With so many unknown variables and not thrilled at the prospect of getting a jobby-job in NYC just to stick around on the off-chance I might get called in again, I moved back to Atlanta and dusted off my touring shows. My NY experience had taught me two things: generally speaking, when you take a leap of faith, fate will often rise to meet you half-way. Also, NYC can tell you when it's time to come up and also when it is time to leave. I didn't necessarily think that would be 2 years, but that's how it turned out. But I've always wondered what might have happened if I'd stayed. It just didn't seem feasible. However, my name kept coming up in regards to Ernie. Mostly because of Jane Henson, who told me that it “was nothing new. Every time it has come up I've told them the next Ernie should be Dave Stephens.” So, when Sesame had a voice over session scheduled for Ernie and Steve was playing hard-ball, I got the call. Steve started sending emails to the other Sesame performers. Then I got emails from Sesame performers telling me, in a rather threatening tone, “You are not Ernie. Steve Whitmire is Ernie.” On Jerry Nelson's advice, I took the gig and I did well. The producers were thrilled. The engineers were thrilled. Everyone in the room was thrilled. That was the last work I ever did for Sesame until they called me in for a third Ernie audition and gave the role to a patsy who had no prior experience with the character and only limited experience with monitor puppetry. He was set up to fail in an attempt to prove Steve's importance and significance. Except for my work with the stage adaptation for “Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas,” my phone never rang from Muppets or Sesame again until 2016, the Friday before Christmas, when I got a call from Brian Henson in regards to recasting the world's most famous Frog. Non-puppetry people may have some vague memory of this being newsworthy because it did seep out into the public arena when Steve Whitmire played the bleeding heart on national television and in press interviews, none of which resulted with his desired outcome of being reinstated. His Muppet career was over, thanks in large part to his own efforts to defend it. What can I say about that Frog experience? Well, not much. But I was one of four who made it through the auditions and onto an extensive training workshop, during which the writing on the wall seemed pretty evident to me in regards to the outcome. The Disney reps definitely had a favorite and it was most definitely not me. When the call finally came with their decision, while I was devastated, I wasn't shocked. I had tried to prepare myself for it. I tried to bolster up my emotional response, but it was no use. I tried rationalizing the experience by telling myself that even if the Frog didn't pan out, I'd still be on the talent roster if projects materialized in the future. Subsequent interactions with the folks at Muppets and Sesame let me know that any attempt I made to be hired would be met with moving goal posts. It was not going to be feasible. And that was it. Almost 10 years ago. And in that time, more of my world has turned into rubble around me. Maybe some of that is my fault, some of it is due to the aftermath of a global pandemic, a boom in the home-seller's market and industry internal politics. Thus I have found myself back in the very place where it all started in earnest. I think a lot of times when something falls apart, part of the grieving process is an attempt at understanding where it all came from in the first place. Why and how did this fixation manifest? There are studies now linking the connection between puppetry (fantasy) and neurodivergent people that shed some scientific light, but specifically, in my own experience, what had triggered it was a mystery. It probably should have stayed that way. You can never un-eat the apple from your own Tree of Knowledge once you've taken a bite. Circumstantially having to move back to my home county caused me to make some realizations that have brought a lot of things into focus. We moved here in 1982, when I was 5 ½, from Ocala, FL. I have many happy memories of that early time in my life when memories began forming. I have early memories of school; playing behind a puppet booth with toy Sesame Street puppets in a classroom. I turned all my toys into characters: an upside down toy saxophone looked like a creature's head, a green cheerleader pom-pom looked like Muppet hair. I was a child of my imagination, who locked in every time the Muppets were on television and I sat as close to the screen as I possibly could. I even lied to my mother at church one night by telling her I was sick so she would take me home so I could watch the Muppets. By the time she turned on the dial, the credits were rolling and I learned a valuable lesson about the passage of time and instant karma. I was also surrounded by supportive, loving older folks who served as surrogate grandparents that showered me with attention. They were also my guardians every Sunday morning while my mother was in the choir loft and my dad sat behind the pulpit. I may not have had any friends my age, but I had a network of people who loved me, cared for me and made me feel safe. Until we moved to Alabama. Tired of working as a staff pastor for larger churches, my father accepted the role of senior (and only) pastor at a small, community Southern Baptist Church outside of Foley, Alabama. Over a weekend, my entire reality changed. I had never really put that into perspective, especially putting myself back at that age to try to understand the gravity of it. But when I did, I did not realize the void I would be starting into: the void inside myself. From one Sunday to the next, I was sitting with Charles and Frances Finney, like I'd done every Sunday of my young life that I could remember, to then sitting alone on the second pew of a strange church I'd never been in before, surrounded by strangers, and being told to behave and that I was being watched. That's a lot for a 5 ½ year-old to shoulder. I made the transition well enough, I suppose. I didn't get into too much trouble, though there were a few incidents of acting-out that most young children experience as they test the boundaries of their behavior and their independence. But I never factored in the emotional weight of such a dramatic transition. Then, as if discovering a loose thread on a sweater, I realized the connection. It had been the Muppets. They were the only connection I still had to that part of my childhood when I felt secure and stable. I may have lost the school I knew, the older folks who loved me and every other familiar thing about my life up to that point, but I could still connect with the Muppets and get back to that safe, emotional place. I pulled the thread further to realize that I had built a dream and an entire career based on a coping mechanism from my childhood trauma. I pulled and pulled that thread until suddenly I realized I had only the thread and nothing left that resembled a sweater. But in that moment of emptiness I had an epiphany. One I probably should have come to a long time ago. A friend asked me what could be big enough to replace the Muppets in my life. I told him, “you don't need the big thing.” The big thing is a myth. YOU are the big thing. I hate that damn cliché, “you are enough,” but it was right. I'd made the Muppets such a big thing. It was a long way to fall. I did get to have some pretty incredible experiences and got to share space and thank my heroes, so it was far from being all a wash. If anything, the experience looked like a Richter scale reading of peaks and valleys. Unless you have been under a cultural rock over the last month, you probably know that the Muppets are attempting a comeback with a Disney+/ABC special which hearkens back to the old Muppet Show that everyone knows and loves. And for all I've read/seen/heard, the team has been fairly successful in recreating what was familiar but in a modern context. It's also provided work opportunities for folks who've been around the franchise at various times in both performer and production roles. The brand is hoping that the success of this special will justify production of a series. Based on the reviews from casual viewers, fans and critics, I would be very surprised if it didn't. Steve Whitmire also tried to get in his two cent's worth prior to it's release. But his power has significantly diminished. This latest narcissistic display allowed a lot of his true believers to finally see what the rest of us have seen for quite some time. He has a lot of grievances without any solution that doesn't point back to himself. His career since 2017 has involved a lot of fantasy conventions where he charges people for autographed photos. I wonder how the demand for those will be affected by his latest public tantrum. I stopped engaging with new Muppet content in 2017 when the franchise passed on me and made it clear my working relationships with both Muppets and Sesame were over. It just became too painful to even try to engage. In some instances, even the prospect of interacting with certain performers who were involved evoked physical PTSD anxiety responses. I had to block it all out for my own self-preservation. I even sold off most of my Muppet collection, which, at one point, filled an entire room in my house. So, I was thankful that nobody asked me what I thought of the special. I have no opinion. I haven't watched it. But, I hear it's good and hit the notes people wanted it to hit. So, if it benefits the community by providing more work, then it's successful in the grand scheme. Most of the complaints in regards to the Muppets since 2017 involve Kermit's voice. Of the four contenders up for the role, I was the only one who never got notes from our voice coach, who was a highly regarded industry voice over artist. But Disney's final choice made the most sense. They chose an experienced, veteran performer who already had established clout within the ranks who didn't need to prove himself as a performer. The only upper hand (ha-ha, pun) I had was sounding right. Not much of a choice, really. Doesn't mean it didn't sting then or still. Landing that gig would have changed my life. And my life did change, just not in any way I would have predicted or expected. Whether or not the change was for the better is relative and a question I ask daily, although one I try not to think about with any frequency. I saw a meme recently (seems like all modern wisdom comes from memes nowadays) that said, “When something is not for you/it will hurt you until you/understand it.” I think there's a lot of truth in that. I also think the hurt doesn't just go away because you understand something. But maybe understanding is the start of the path toward healing. Another recent favorite read, “Every corpse found on Mt Everest was once an extremely motivated person.” Last week a cashier came up to me while I was working at the Customer Service desk. “Oh, I thought you were working the desk,” they said. “Why's that?” I asked. “Because a customer asked why Kermit the Frog was paging the produce department....” Maybe this isn't much of a Valentine, but Valentines are hard for the brokenhearted. | David Stephens

It's the love holiday, so I guess I'll give you a love story. Actually, it's more of an obsession story, but I recently heard a podcast guest describe obsession as “love that just forgot to be...

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[MWoO]

1.5K views · 95 reactions | It's the love holiday, so I guess I'll give you a love story. Actually, it's more of an obsession story, but I recently heard a podcast guest describe obsession as “love that just forgot to be reasonable.” So, I guess it still qualifies as a love story. I've thought a lot about just how to write about this or even if I should write about this. Who does it benefit? What does it accomplish? In my recent reflections on this, I've adopted a wisdom pearl of my own creation: “Don't bring your wine stain to someone else's tablecloth.” It's probably the same sentiment as “Don't rain on someone else's parade,” but I like the visual of mine better. My wise friend, Andy MacDonald squarely hit the nail on the matter when he told me, “The only person you should write anything for is you.” So, I'll write it for me and share it with you. I've had three major obsessions in my life. The most obvious one to anyone who has ever met me for any amount of time, and the one I've had the longest, has to be the Muppets. I've told my origin story probably hundreds of times about being a small child and being captivated by the colorful, musical, funny characters that populated the television screen throughout the late 70's and early 80's. I knew everything there was to know about the show and it's performers. I collected anything Muppet related I could get my hands on. I took my copy of Christopher Finch's coffee table book,“Of Muppets and Men” to school everyday and scoured every photograph for details. This obsession was my childhood driving force and provided the springboard for everything that came after in regards to my puppetry career. Yet I had no childhood aspiration to work for The Henson Company. Maybe that sounds odd, but I just didn't think it was possible. I thought it very possible to create something of my own: to create my own characters, to make my own silly shows and to entertain myself and the people around me. At the time, that seemed as easy as 1-2-3. But working for the Muppets just didn't seem feasible. At a Puppeteers of America Festival in the early 90's, my dad asked a Henson puppet builder/wrangler what it would take to get a job at The Henson Company, which still owned all of it's franchise characters at the time, and he was told I already had two strikes against me: I was a white and I was male. The core team of performers since the time Jim Henson assembled them had predominately been white males. The Company knew even then that diversity was an issue in regards to the makeup of their performers. So, I put the idea of having anything to do with The Henson Company out of my mind. Again, it just didn't seem feasible. I got my undergrad degree and my Master's degree and started my company and the journey unfolded from one year to the next, not because of any great foresight or plan I had crafted. I hated the idea of a “5-year plan.” My attitude had always been, “how am I supposed to know what's going to happen with any of this?” I moved from Alabama to Atlanta and kept touring and creating original shows and allowed my imagination to keep going and going. One opportunity lead to another. I expanded to creating an Etsy store with a plush and puppet line. I taught puppet making once a year at the Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. I also developed a regular roster of performance venues. And in the midst of all that, the Muppets (specifically, the Muppet Show characters) were going through their own changes. They had been sold to a German entertainment company that quickly went belly-up. The franchise was re-acquired by Jim Henson Productions and then sold again to Disney. In 2005, Disney, in collaboration with the Henson family, began looking for a group of performers for what eventually (although not officially) became known as a “B” cast. These were performers who could puppeteer and voice the major Muppet Show characters for such events that the main performers wouldn't necessarily want to do. This included things like appearances/shows in the Disney theme parks, Disney cruises, public appearances. Basically, they wanted to treat the Muppets like the suit versions of the Disney characters in order to maximize their visibility and offer the public as many chances as they could to interact with the Muppet Show characters. When the main performers got wind of what Disney's plan was, Muppet fans were first exposed to the manifestos of Steve Whitmire, who took over the role of Kermit the Frog after Jim Henson's death in 1990. In an 8-page scathing screed addressed to “all the puppeteers in the world,” he listed many (I'm quite confident it was not all) of his grievances with Disney and their treatment of the Muppets and Jim Henson's legacy and intentions for the characters. Having worked alongside Jim as a performer since he was hired as a teenager in 1979, he saw himself as the rightful torch-keeper and intention-interpreter. This was a role he gave himself. It should be noted that with a few exceptions, a majority of the folks who worked for Jim Henson were contract workers. This was especially true of the performers. To my knowledge, none were salaried but Jim kept them all working consistently and he worked tirelessly to create opportunities for their continued employment and paychecks. Technically, he was under no obligation to any of them. But he chose good people that he liked working with and understood the value of consistency for the sake of the work environment he wanted to create and the characters they all brought to life. As anyone who has worked in the entertainment industry will tell you, that alone made Jim an anomaly. Disney's plan to bring unknowns into the circle suddenly threatened the sacrosanct environment (to say nothing of future potential income) the core team had grown quite used to. Thus I entered the fray. At the request of Heather Henson, who'd become familiar with my work, I auditioned in NYC with a host of other hopefuls. Kevin Clash was the Muppet coordinator for “Sesame Street” at the time and was scouting new talent along with the Disney folks who were behind the producers' table. Jane Henson joined them right before I did my voice audition for the main characters. She had a beaming smile on her face the whole time. I was called back the next day to work with the actual puppets. Was this happening? I couldn't believe it. It did not seem feasible. Yet, there I was: one moment performing the world's most famous second-banana Bear, the next the world's most famous Frog. And it just seemed natural. Like the most instinctive thing in the world for me next to breathing. I don't know how to fully describe it. In the end, the project was shelved because of an effective mob-campaign that Steve Whitmire was able to assemble on various Muppet fan websites and message boards. Many heeded his call to voice their outrage and Disney backed off. The 9 of us who'd been workshopping those characters were dropped like hot potatoes. Well, it didn't seem feasible, anyway. But I'd gotten the bug. Eventually, Disney did get the characters into the Parks by having Park puppeteers lip sync to a track recorded by the main performers. A suitable compromise had been reached. “Sesame Street” held a cattle-call audition in the midst of all this in 2006 and I was invited to participate. I was also asked to stay a day after the general auditions for a closed workshop for Ernie and Bert, characters that Sesame wanted to do more with but were hindered by, you guessed it, Steve Whitmire, who had taken over Ernie since Jim's death. Why these companies did not wash their hands of this problematic performer once and for all during any of this is beyond me. He became a contract negotiation nightmare. He would hold his characters hostage until his demands were met. He epitomized brinkmanship. And because he wielded power in two camps of performers who all wanted to keep their positions by staying in his good graces, Steve kept them all in check and on notice. I moved to NY in the fall of 2006 and had my 15 minutes of fame on two episodes of Sesame in 2008 during Season 39 as a utility Muppet performer. I was warmly welcomed by some of the performers. Others, in suspicious tones, questioned how I got a microphone on my first day or how I got a mailbox in the performer green room on my first season. But the work was amazing. I'll never forget it. I felt like I was home doing the most natural thing I could ever do. But, I was still a newbie and subject to the whim of talent coordinators and puppet captains, with whom I was never sure of my footing. With so many unknown variables and not thrilled at the prospect of getting a jobby-job in NYC just to stick around on the off-chance I might get called in again, I moved back to Atlanta and dusted off my touring shows. My NY experience had taught me two things: generally speaking, when you take a leap of faith, fate will often rise to meet you half-way. Also, NYC can tell you when it's time to come up and also when it is time to leave. I didn't necessarily think that would be 2 years, but that's how it turned out. But I've always wondered what might have happened if I'd stayed. It just didn't seem feasible. However, my name kept coming up in regards to Ernie. Mostly because of Jane Henson, who told me that it “was nothing new. Every time it has come up I've told them the next Ernie should be Dave Stephens.” So, when Sesame had a voice over session scheduled for Ernie and Steve was playing hard-ball, I got the call. Steve started sending emails to the other Sesame performers. Then I got emails from Sesame performers telling me, in a rather threatening tone, “You are not Ernie. Steve Whitmire is Ernie.” On Jerry Nelson's advice, I took the gig and I did well. The producers were thrilled. The engineers were thrilled. Everyone in the room was thrilled. That was the last work I ever did for Sesame until they called me in for a third Ernie audition and gave the role to a patsy who had no prior experience with the character and only limited experience with monitor puppetry. He was set up to fail in an attempt to prove Steve's importance and significance. Except for my work with the stage adaptation for “Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas,” my phone never rang from Muppets or Sesame again until 2016, the Friday before Christmas, when I got a call from Brian Henson in regards to recasting the world's most famous Frog. Non-puppetry people may have some vague memory of this being newsworthy because it did seep out into the public arena when Steve Whitmire played the bleeding heart on national television and in press interviews, none of which resulted with his desired outcome of being reinstated. His Muppet career was over, thanks in large part to his own efforts to defend it. What can I say about that Frog experience? Well, not much. But I was one of four who made it through the auditions and onto an extensive training workshop, during which the writing on the wall seemed pretty evident to me in regards to the outcome. The Disney reps definitely had a favorite and it was most definitely not me. When the call finally came with their decision, while I was devastated, I wasn't shocked. I had tried to prepare myself for it. I tried to bolster up my emotional response, but it was no use. I tried rationalizing the experience by telling myself that even if the Frog didn't pan out, I'd still be on the talent roster if projects materialized in the future. Subsequent interactions with the folks at Muppets and Sesame let me know that any attempt I made to be hired would be met with moving goal posts. It was not going to be feasible. And that was it. Almost 10 years ago. And in that time, more of my world has turned into rubble around me. Maybe some of that is my fault, some of it is due to the aftermath of a global pandemic, a boom in the home-seller's market and industry internal politics. Thus I have found myself back in the very place where it all started in earnest. I think a lot of times when something falls apart, part of the grieving process is an attempt at understanding where it all came from in the first place. Why and how did this fixation manifest? There are studies now linking the connection between puppetry (fantasy) and neurodivergent people that shed some scientific light, but specifically, in my own experience, what had triggered it was a mystery. It probably should have stayed that way. You can never un-eat the apple from your own Tree of Knowledge once you've taken a bite. Circumstantially having to move back to my home county caused me to make some realizations that have brought a lot of things into focus. We moved here in 1982, when I was 5 ½, from Ocala, FL. I have many happy memories of that early time in my life when memories began forming. I have early memories of school; playing behind a puppet booth with toy Sesame Street puppets in a classroom. I turned all my toys into characters: an upside down toy saxophone looked like a creature's head, a green cheerleader pom-pom looked like Muppet hair. I was a child of my imagination, who locked in every time the Muppets were on television and I sat as close to the screen as I possibly could. I even lied to my mother at church one night by telling her I was sick so she would take me home so I could watch the Muppets. By the time she turned on the dial, the credits were rolling and I learned a valuable lesson about the passage of time and instant karma. I was also surrounded by supportive, loving older folks who served as surrogate grandparents that showered me with attention. They were also my guardians every Sunday morning while my mother was in the choir loft and my dad sat behind the pulpit. I may not have had any friends my age, but I had a network of people who loved me, cared for me and made me feel safe. Until we moved to Alabama. Tired of working as a staff pastor for larger churches, my father accepted the role of senior (and only) pastor at a small, community Southern Baptist Church outside of Foley, Alabama. Over a weekend, my entire reality changed. I had never really put that into perspective, especially putting myself back at that age to try to understand the gravity of it. But when I did, I did not realize the void I would be starting into: the void inside myself. From one Sunday to the next, I was sitting with Charles and Frances Finney, like I'd done every Sunday of my young life that I could remember, to then sitting alone on the second pew of a strange church I'd never been in before, surrounded by strangers, and being told to behave and that I was being watched. That's a lot for a 5 ½ year-old to shoulder. I made the transition well enough, I suppose. I didn't get into too much trouble, though there were a few incidents of acting-out that most young children experience as they test the boundaries of their behavior and their independence. But I never factored in the emotional weight of such a dramatic transition. Then, as if discovering a loose thread on a sweater, I realized the connection. It had been the Muppets. They were the only connection I still had to that part of my childhood when I felt secure and stable. I may have lost the school I knew, the older folks who loved me and every other familiar thing about my life up to that point, but I could still connect with the Muppets and get back to that safe, emotional place. I pulled the thread further to realize that I had built a dream and an entire career based on a coping mechanism from my childhood trauma. I pulled and pulled that thread until suddenly I realized I had only the thread and nothing left that resembled a sweater. But in that moment of emptiness I had an epiphany. One I probably should have come to a long time ago. A friend asked me what could be big enough to replace the Muppets in my life. I told him, “you don't need the big thing.” The big thing is a myth. YOU are the big thing. I hate that damn cliché, “you are enough,” but it was right. I'd made the Muppets such a big thing. It was a long way to fall. I did get to have some pretty incredible experiences and got to share space and thank my heroes, so it was far from being all a wash. If anything, the experience looked like a Richter scale reading of peaks and valleys. Unless you have been under a cultural rock over the last month, you probably know that the Muppets are attempting a comeback with a Disney+/ABC special which hearkens back to the old Muppet Show that everyone knows and loves. And for all I've read/seen/heard, the team has been fairly successful in recreating what was familiar but in a modern context. It's also provided work opportunities for folks who've been around the franchise at various times in both performer and production roles. The brand is hoping that the success of this special will justify production of a series. Based on the reviews from casual viewers, fans and critics, I would be very surprised if it didn't. Steve Whitmire also tried to get in his two cent's worth prior to it's release. But his power has significantly diminished. This latest narcissistic display allowed a lot of his true believers to finally see what the rest of us have seen for quite some time. He has a lot of grievances without any solution that doesn't point back to himself. His career since 2017 has involved a lot of fantasy conventions where he charges people for autographed photos. I wonder how the demand for those will be affected by his latest public tantrum. I stopped engaging with new Muppet content in 2017 when the franchise passed on me and made it clear my working relationships with both Muppets and Sesame were over. It just became too painful to even try to engage. In some instances, even the prospect of interacting with certain performers who were involved evoked physical PTSD anxiety responses. I had to block it all out for my own self-preservation. I even sold off most of my Muppet collection, which, at one point, filled an entire room in my house. So, I was thankful that nobody asked me what I thought of the special. I have no opinion. I haven't watched it. But, I hear it's good and hit the notes people wanted it to hit. So, if it benefits the community by providing more work, then it's successful in the grand scheme. Most of the complaints in regards to the Muppets since 2017 involve Kermit's voice. Of the four contenders up for the role, I was the only one who never got notes from our voice coach, who was a highly regarded industry voice over artist. But Disney's final choice made the most sense. They chose an experienced, veteran performer who already had established clout within the ranks who didn't need to prove himself as a performer. The only upper hand (ha-ha, pun) I had was sounding right. Not much of a choice, really. Doesn't mean it didn't sting then or still. Landing that gig would have changed my life. And my life did change, just not in any way I would have predicted or expected. Whether or not the change was for the better is relative and a question I ask daily, although one I try not to think about with any frequency. I saw a meme recently (seems like all modern wisdom comes from memes nowadays) that said, “When something is not for you/it will hurt you until you/understand it.” I think there's a lot of truth in that. I also think the hurt doesn't just go away because you understand something. But maybe understanding is the start of the path toward healing. Another recent favorite read, “Every corpse found on Mt Everest was once an extremely motivated person.” Last week a cashier came up to me while I was working at the Customer Service desk. “Oh, I thought you were working the desk,” they said. “Why's that?” I asked. “Because a customer asked why Kermit the Frog was paging the produce department....” Maybe this isn't much of a Valentine, but Valentines are hard for the brokenhearted. | David Stephens

It's the love holiday, so I guess I'll give you a love story. Actually, it's more of an obsession story, but I recently heard a podcast guest describe obsession as “love that just forgot to be...

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I think Steve was right in the sense that there should only ever be one performer of a character at a time. There shouldn't be a "B" team for The Muppets. At least not the core cast. No one should be wondering which Kermit they were going to get. However, while there should only be one main performer at a time, that doesn't mean Steve was the only one who should be that performer.

Both sides have valid points. Steve wanted what he felt he deserved, compensation wise, and Sesame Workshop wanted someone cheaper and easier to work with. Eventually, Steve's insistence on always being THE Ernie got him removed from the character entirely, making someone else THE Ernie instead. Same with Kermit.

Its a delicate situation. I don't want any performer to be totally and easily replaceable, but I also don't want a performer holding a character hostage. There was just this unspoken understanding from Disney that the performers ARE the characters and have certain stipulations or they could walk and an understanding from the performers that they can and will be replaced, but Disney is willing to put up with some demands to avoid the backlash. It all comes down to what each side is willing to put up with before pulling the trigger. Steve just made things too difficult to be worth keeping around.

 

[Grumpo]

1.5K views · 95 reactions | It's the love holiday, so I guess I'll give you a love story. Actually, it's more of an obsession story, but I recently heard a podcast guest describe obsession as “love that just forgot to be reasonable.” So, I guess it still qualifies as a love story. I've thought a lot about just how to write about this or even if I should write about this. Who does it benefit? What does it accomplish? In my recent reflections on this, I've adopted a wisdom pearl of my own creation: “Don't bring your wine stain to someone else's tablecloth.” It's probably the same sentiment as “Don't rain on someone else's parade,” but I like the visual of mine better. My wise friend, Andy MacDonald squarely hit the nail on the matter when he told me, “The only person you should write anything for is you.” So, I'll write it for me and share it with you. I've had three major obsessions in my life. The most obvious one to anyone who has ever met me for any amount of time, and the one I've had the longest, has to be the Muppets. I've told my origin story probably hundreds of times about being a small child and being captivated by the colorful, musical, funny characters that populated the television screen throughout the late 70's and early 80's. I knew everything there was to know about the show and it's performers. I collected anything Muppet related I could get my hands on. I took my copy of Christopher Finch's coffee table book,“Of Muppets and Men” to school everyday and scoured every photograph for details. This obsession was my childhood driving force and provided the springboard for everything that came after in regards to my puppetry career. Yet I had no childhood aspiration to work for The Henson Company. Maybe that sounds odd, but I just didn't think it was possible. I thought it very possible to create something of my own: to create my own characters, to make my own silly shows and to entertain myself and the people around me. At the time, that seemed as easy as 1-2-3. But working for the Muppets just didn't seem feasible. At a Puppeteers of America Festival in the early 90's, my dad asked a Henson puppet builder/wrangler what it would take to get a job at The Henson Company, which still owned all of it's franchise characters at the time, and he was told I already had two strikes against me: I was a white and I was male. The core team of performers since the time Jim Henson assembled them had predominately been white males. The Company knew even then that diversity was an issue in regards to the makeup of their performers. So, I put the idea of having anything to do with The Henson Company out of my mind. Again, it just didn't seem feasible. I got my undergrad degree and my Master's degree and started my company and the journey unfolded from one year to the next, not because of any great foresight or plan I had crafted. I hated the idea of a “5-year plan.” My attitude had always been, “how am I supposed to know what's going to happen with any of this?” I moved from Alabama to Atlanta and kept touring and creating original shows and allowed my imagination to keep going and going. One opportunity lead to another. I expanded to creating an Etsy store with a plush and puppet line. I taught puppet making once a year at the Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. I also developed a regular roster of performance venues. And in the midst of all that, the Muppets (specifically, the Muppet Show characters) were going through their own changes. They had been sold to a German entertainment company that quickly went belly-up. The franchise was re-acquired by Jim Henson Productions and then sold again to Disney. In 2005, Disney, in collaboration with the Henson family, began looking for a group of performers for what eventually (although not officially) became known as a “B” cast. These were performers who could puppeteer and voice the major Muppet Show characters for such events that the main performers wouldn't necessarily want to do. This included things like appearances/shows in the Disney theme parks, Disney cruises, public appearances. Basically, they wanted to treat the Muppets like the suit versions of the Disney characters in order to maximize their visibility and offer the public as many chances as they could to interact with the Muppet Show characters. When the main performers got wind of what Disney's plan was, Muppet fans were first exposed to the manifestos of Steve Whitmire, who took over the role of Kermit the Frog after Jim Henson's death in 1990. In an 8-page scathing screed addressed to “all the puppeteers in the world,” he listed many (I'm quite confident it was not all) of his grievances with Disney and their treatment of the Muppets and Jim Henson's legacy and intentions for the characters. Having worked alongside Jim as a performer since he was hired as a teenager in 1979, he saw himself as the rightful torch-keeper and intention-interpreter. This was a role he gave himself. It should be noted that with a few exceptions, a majority of the folks who worked for Jim Henson were contract workers. This was especially true of the performers. To my knowledge, none were salaried but Jim kept them all working consistently and he worked tirelessly to create opportunities for their continued employment and paychecks. Technically, he was under no obligation to any of them. But he chose good people that he liked working with and understood the value of consistency for the sake of the work environment he wanted to create and the characters they all brought to life. As anyone who has worked in the entertainment industry will tell you, that alone made Jim an anomaly. Disney's plan to bring unknowns into the circle suddenly threatened the sacrosanct environment (to say nothing of future potential income) the core team had grown quite used to. Thus I entered the fray. At the request of Heather Henson, who'd become familiar with my work, I auditioned in NYC with a host of other hopefuls. Kevin Clash was the Muppet coordinator for “Sesame Street” at the time and was scouting new talent along with the Disney folks who were behind the producers' table. Jane Henson joined them right before I did my voice audition for the main characters. She had a beaming smile on her face the whole time. I was called back the next day to work with the actual puppets. Was this happening? I couldn't believe it. It did not seem feasible. Yet, there I was: one moment performing the world's most famous second-banana Bear, the next the world's most famous Frog. And it just seemed natural. Like the most instinctive thing in the world for me next to breathing. I don't know how to fully describe it. In the end, the project was shelved because of an effective mob-campaign that Steve Whitmire was able to assemble on various Muppet fan websites and message boards. Many heeded his call to voice their outrage and Disney backed off. The 9 of us who'd been workshopping those characters were dropped like hot potatoes. Well, it didn't seem feasible, anyway. But I'd gotten the bug. Eventually, Disney did get the characters into the Parks by having Park puppeteers lip sync to a track recorded by the main performers. A suitable compromise had been reached. “Sesame Street” held a cattle-call audition in the midst of all this in 2006 and I was invited to participate. I was also asked to stay a day after the general auditions for a closed workshop for Ernie and Bert, characters that Sesame wanted to do more with but were hindered by, you guessed it, Steve Whitmire, who had taken over Ernie since Jim's death. Why these companies did not wash their hands of this problematic performer once and for all during any of this is beyond me. He became a contract negotiation nightmare. He would hold his characters hostage until his demands were met. He epitomized brinkmanship. And because he wielded power in two camps of performers who all wanted to keep their positions by staying in his good graces, Steve kept them all in check and on notice. I moved to NY in the fall of 2006 and had my 15 minutes of fame on two episodes of Sesame in 2008 during Season 39 as a utility Muppet performer. I was warmly welcomed by some of the performers. Others, in suspicious tones, questioned how I got a microphone on my first day or how I got a mailbox in the performer green room on my first season. But the work was amazing. I'll never forget it. I felt like I was home doing the most natural thing I could ever do. But, I was still a newbie and subject to the whim of talent coordinators and puppet captains, with whom I was never sure of my footing. With so many unknown variables and not thrilled at the prospect of getting a jobby-job in NYC just to stick around on the off-chance I might get called in again, I moved back to Atlanta and dusted off my touring shows. My NY experience had taught me two things: generally speaking, when you take a leap of faith, fate will often rise to meet you half-way. Also, NYC can tell you when it's time to come up and also when it is time to leave. I didn't necessarily think that would be 2 years, but that's how it turned out. But I've always wondered what might have happened if I'd stayed. It just didn't seem feasible. However, my name kept coming up in regards to Ernie. Mostly because of Jane Henson, who told me that it “was nothing new. Every time it has come up I've told them the next Ernie should be Dave Stephens.” So, when Sesame had a voice over session scheduled for Ernie and Steve was playing hard-ball, I got the call. Steve started sending emails to the other Sesame performers. Then I got emails from Sesame performers telling me, in a rather threatening tone, “You are not Ernie. Steve Whitmire is Ernie.” On Jerry Nelson's advice, I took the gig and I did well. The producers were thrilled. The engineers were thrilled. Everyone in the room was thrilled. That was the last work I ever did for Sesame until they called me in for a third Ernie audition and gave the role to a patsy who had no prior experience with the character and only limited experience with monitor puppetry. He was set up to fail in an attempt to prove Steve's importance and significance. Except for my work with the stage adaptation for “Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas,” my phone never rang from Muppets or Sesame again until 2016, the Friday before Christmas, when I got a call from Brian Henson in regards to recasting the world's most famous Frog. Non-puppetry people may have some vague memory of this being newsworthy because it did seep out into the public arena when Steve Whitmire played the bleeding heart on national television and in press interviews, none of which resulted with his desired outcome of being reinstated. His Muppet career was over, thanks in large part to his own efforts to defend it. What can I say about that Frog experience? Well, not much. But I was one of four who made it through the auditions and onto an extensive training workshop, during which the writing on the wall seemed pretty evident to me in regards to the outcome. The Disney reps definitely had a favorite and it was most definitely not me. When the call finally came with their decision, while I was devastated, I wasn't shocked. I had tried to prepare myself for it. I tried to bolster up my emotional response, but it was no use. I tried rationalizing the experience by telling myself that even if the Frog didn't pan out, I'd still be on the talent roster if projects materialized in the future. Subsequent interactions with the folks at Muppets and Sesame let me know that any attempt I made to be hired would be met with moving goal posts. It was not going to be feasible. And that was it. Almost 10 years ago. And in that time, more of my world has turned into rubble around me. Maybe some of that is my fault, some of it is due to the aftermath of a global pandemic, a boom in the home-seller's market and industry internal politics. Thus I have found myself back in the very place where it all started in earnest. I think a lot of times when something falls apart, part of the grieving process is an attempt at understanding where it all came from in the first place. Why and how did this fixation manifest? There are studies now linking the connection between puppetry (fantasy) and neurodivergent people that shed some scientific light, but specifically, in my own experience, what had triggered it was a mystery. It probably should have stayed that way. You can never un-eat the apple from your own Tree of Knowledge once you've taken a bite. Circumstantially having to move back to my home county caused me to make some realizations that have brought a lot of things into focus. We moved here in 1982, when I was 5 ½, from Ocala, FL. I have many happy memories of that early time in my life when memories began forming. I have early memories of school; playing behind a puppet booth with toy Sesame Street puppets in a classroom. I turned all my toys into characters: an upside down toy saxophone looked like a creature's head, a green cheerleader pom-pom looked like Muppet hair. I was a child of my imagination, who locked in every time the Muppets were on television and I sat as close to the screen as I possibly could. I even lied to my mother at church one night by telling her I was sick so she would take me home so I could watch the Muppets. By the time she turned on the dial, the credits were rolling and I learned a valuable lesson about the passage of time and instant karma. I was also surrounded by supportive, loving older folks who served as surrogate grandparents that showered me with attention. They were also my guardians every Sunday morning while my mother was in the choir loft and my dad sat behind the pulpit. I may not have had any friends my age, but I had a network of people who loved me, cared for me and made me feel safe. Until we moved to Alabama. Tired of working as a staff pastor for larger churches, my father accepted the role of senior (and only) pastor at a small, community Southern Baptist Church outside of Foley, Alabama. Over a weekend, my entire reality changed. I had never really put that into perspective, especially putting myself back at that age to try to understand the gravity of it. But when I did, I did not realize the void I would be starting into: the void inside myself. From one Sunday to the next, I was sitting with Charles and Frances Finney, like I'd done every Sunday of my young life that I could remember, to then sitting alone on the second pew of a strange church I'd never been in before, surrounded by strangers, and being told to behave and that I was being watched. That's a lot for a 5 ½ year-old to shoulder. I made the transition well enough, I suppose. I didn't get into too much trouble, though there were a few incidents of acting-out that most young children experience as they test the boundaries of their behavior and their independence. But I never factored in the emotional weight of such a dramatic transition. Then, as if discovering a loose thread on a sweater, I realized the connection. It had been the Muppets. They were the only connection I still had to that part of my childhood when I felt secure and stable. I may have lost the school I knew, the older folks who loved me and every other familiar thing about my life up to that point, but I could still connect with the Muppets and get back to that safe, emotional place. I pulled the thread further to realize that I had built a dream and an entire career based on a coping mechanism from my childhood trauma. I pulled and pulled that thread until suddenly I realized I had only the thread and nothing left that resembled a sweater. But in that moment of emptiness I had an epiphany. One I probably should have come to a long time ago. A friend asked me what could be big enough to replace the Muppets in my life. I told him, “you don't need the big thing.” The big thing is a myth. YOU are the big thing. I hate that damn cliché, “you are enough,” but it was right. I'd made the Muppets such a big thing. It was a long way to fall. I did get to have some pretty incredible experiences and got to share space and thank my heroes, so it was far from being all a wash. If anything, the experience looked like a Richter scale reading of peaks and valleys. Unless you have been under a cultural rock over the last month, you probably know that the Muppets are attempting a comeback with a Disney+/ABC special which hearkens back to the old Muppet Show that everyone knows and loves. And for all I've read/seen/heard, the team has been fairly successful in recreating what was familiar but in a modern context. It's also provided work opportunities for folks who've been around the franchise at various times in both performer and production roles. The brand is hoping that the success of this special will justify production of a series. Based on the reviews from casual viewers, fans and critics, I would be very surprised if it didn't. Steve Whitmire also tried to get in his two cent's worth prior to it's release. But his power has significantly diminished. This latest narcissistic display allowed a lot of his true believers to finally see what the rest of us have seen for quite some time. He has a lot of grievances without any solution that doesn't point back to himself. His career since 2017 has involved a lot of fantasy conventions where he charges people for autographed photos. I wonder how the demand for those will be affected by his latest public tantrum. I stopped engaging with new Muppet content in 2017 when the franchise passed on me and made it clear my working relationships with both Muppets and Sesame were over. It just became too painful to even try to engage. In some instances, even the prospect of interacting with certain performers who were involved evoked physical PTSD anxiety responses. I had to block it all out for my own self-preservation. I even sold off most of my Muppet collection, which, at one point, filled an entire room in my house. So, I was thankful that nobody asked me what I thought of the special. I have no opinion. I haven't watched it. But, I hear it's good and hit the notes people wanted it to hit. So, if it benefits the community by providing more work, then it's successful in the grand scheme. Most of the complaints in regards to the Muppets since 2017 involve Kermit's voice. Of the four contenders up for the role, I was the only one who never got notes from our voice coach, who was a highly regarded industry voice over artist. But Disney's final choice made the most sense. They chose an experienced, veteran performer who already had established clout within the ranks who didn't need to prove himself as a performer. The only upper hand (ha-ha, pun) I had was sounding right. Not much of a choice, really. Doesn't mean it didn't sting then or still. Landing that gig would have changed my life. And my life did change, just not in any way I would have predicted or expected. Whether or not the change was for the better is relative and a question I ask daily, although one I try not to think about with any frequency. I saw a meme recently (seems like all modern wisdom comes from memes nowadays) that said, “When something is not for you/it will hurt you until you/understand it.” I think there's a lot of truth in that. I also think the hurt doesn't just go away because you understand something. But maybe understanding is the start of the path toward healing. Another recent favorite read, “Every corpse found on Mt Everest was once an extremely motivated person.” Last week a cashier came up to me while I was working at the Customer Service desk. “Oh, I thought you were working the desk,” they said. “Why's that?” I asked. “Because a customer asked why Kermit the Frog was paging the produce department....” Maybe this isn't much of a Valentine, but Valentines are hard for the brokenhearted. | David Stephens

It's the love holiday, so I guess I'll give you a love story. Actually, it's more of an obsession story, but I recently heard a podcast guest describe obsession as “love that just forgot to be...

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Interesting that the biggest kickbacks/arguments [...] are from people who have “worked” Kermit or wanted to do the role. Figures…
(source)

"One Muppet one voice" was the story of high hopes and broken dreams. It must have been really hard for candidates picked by Disney to work as kermits and other muppet characters on cruises and events to see their hopes come to nothing.

Artie Esposito also talks about it in his interview he posted on this forum, and there was an account of it from Gabriel Velez ten years ago on old blog of Steve. I think there were some workshop videos posted back then, but i cannot find them now. The Muppet wiki has a detailed account of it in this section.

It must have been tough for the guys, undoubtedly talented puppeteers dedicated to the point of obsession. I recall one of the people involved, or somebody close to them was venting his/her/their anger anonymously by posting angry comments aimed at Steve, full of internal details of uncertain level of plausibility, under the nickname Felt Throat at the time of his departure. Interestingly enough, after Steve, who some of them (not Artie and Gabriel, by their own admission) apparently took to be their arch-brinkman nemesis, was gone, their chances did not improve. It looks like some things got worse instead. (Could it be that other members of the core team or Disney took note of these posts as well, and it hurt the chances for the whole group?)

• Was "one Muppet one voice" right thing to do?
  

  They are presented as living characters and, in the case of The Muppet Show characters, as working actors, so they had a life outside of the project and outside of whatever script they were performing. And so to do that, the particular slant of the performer always has to be present.
  (source)

• Was Steve the only person supporting it?
  

  As for the multi-casting idea, we all went against it back when the Muppets were first sold to Disney. Not just Steve, we did it together.
  (source)

• And, finally, was Steve that hard to work with?
  

  He’s capable of very deep performances. The falling out between me and Steve is really about business ethics. Working with him on set was always good. And he really worked hard and is one of the most physically capable, if not the most physically capable, puppeteer in the world.
  (source)