Today they held an outdoor media event here in New York honoring Sesame Street on their 40th anniversary on television. This involved a ceremonial (temporary) street renaming ceremony across Broadway from the Workshop's headquarters near Lincoln Center at West 64 Street and culminated with the unveiling of a custom sign made for the occaision.
caroll_spinney had already alerted me to this upcoming event a couple of weeks earlier after informing me that I wouldn't be able to watch them tape for the 2010-11 season already in production because his Mondays (i.e. my day off work) were cancelled (and for that future 25-show season, Big Bird will only appear on 4 episodes). So Caroll invited me down to watch the press event today. However of course that didn't grant me any press credentials so I wound up getting kicked out by security-in-black from the park block barricaded off for the show several times no matter how unobtrusive I tried to be, even almost getting hit by a couple of taxis and a bus while being forced out into a lane of traffic. Eventually though I did manage to find a decent spot on the other side of the zone and was able to witness and record the festivities even while having to compete with the legitimate media on hand.
Caroll was actually there to puppet Oscar, with his stand-in Matt Vogel inside Big Bird. The core longtime principal cast members were present as were the Muppet monster stars such as Elmo and Abbycadabby. What was really strange though was that they also had the costume character Elmo (the real one) and Abby on hand too in the background.
So they had the usual speeches from both Sesame Workshop and City reps and then they unveiled the sign. Afterwards the real press moved in close to do all their interviews for the news tonight and Workshop staffers all dressed in Sesame t-shirts post for pictures with the cast.
( More pictures here... )Funny how after knowing Caroll all these years I never had my picture taken with Oscar until now.
Oscar was nice enough to give me a video byte to air and later Big Bird gave me a sound byte.
Now I've got to come back here tomorrow when everybody is gone and tape a wraparound for RTR on this block.
On Tuesday PBS will air the season premiere of Sesame Street on the actual 40th anniversary of the show's 1969 debut. Turns out that was the show I watched them tape back in February.
Here's the recap from that show.After finishing up there and saying goodbye to Caroll and his wife Debi, I had some errands to run, including swapping out RTR tapes at MNN, dropping by my storage space to pick up a prop violin for the MFF variety show, and then down to Brooklyn to attend a meeting of the Save Coney Island coalition.
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