Reason Writers Around Town: Nick Gillespie on How We Got To Sesame Street in the Washington Post
Did you know that Barry Goldwater helped save taxpayer funding for Sesame Street back in the day? Or that the yellow-skinned muppet Bert was seen consorting with Bin Laden right after the 9/11 attacks? Or that the show's politically correct research director in the 1990s once declared that the part of a chicken in a make-believe play could only be played by…a make-believe chicken?
In The Washington Post, Nick Gillespie reviews Michael Davis's Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. A snippet:
Street Gang is mired in unnecessary details, endless litanies of names and prose that is several shades more purple than the skin of Count von Count, the show's obsessive-compulsive, mathematically inclined vampire. "Jon Stone approached a typewriter in the same way that a concert pianist approached a Steinway," Davis writes in a typical flourish, describing a co-producer of the show. Elsewhere, he intones that when Cooney decided to wean her production company off federal assistance, "she had unwittingly made a kind of Sophie's Choice. Sesame Street would survive, The Electric Company would not."