Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Sesame Street


K & I love Sesame Street. I love Bert & Ernie and K loves Cookie Monster. I also love Grover, especially Super Grover, and Oscar of course. We used to watch it when we were in college and grad school, and if I'm home sick, I'll still watch it, but it's just not the same as when we were kids. For one thing, I can't stand Elmo, and he gets 20 minutes just to himself. And everything is so manufactured - this segment and then that segment - the same every day. What happened to the community feel - you had all of these people in a neighborhood talking to each other.

What I miss the most is the Bert & Ernie segments. Rarely do you see them together anymore, and when I was in grad school there was this horrible segment every day called Journey to Ernie which was just Big Bird and Ernie. Ernie is nothing without Bert - they need each other.

In college A, K, and I used to volunteer at the local Head Start program. A and I would go in really early in the morning and read to the kids and sometimes I would go in the afternoon with K. Sometimes we would buy books at the dollar store and bring them to share. K & I would always buy Sesame Street books. Before giving them to the kids, I would usually read K to sleep with them (this was back when we were still 'just friends'... yeah, right!). We always said she was Bert and I was Ernie because she was always trying to take a nap and I was always waking her up - Hey, Bert!

Last weekend we spend a long time on YouTube looking up Sesame Street segments. It started out innocent enough - she was showing me music videos for the band Oppenheimer. Then we saw that there was a Bert & Ernie segment that used They Might Be Giants music (Ernie cleans to the Famous Polka - it's great!). Then we just watched more and more. Lots of classic Bert & Ernie, Cookie Monster on NPR, Cookie Monster on Martha Stewart, Cookie Monster and the Count. It was so much fun. By watching this, we realized something. We have now switched rolls - K is now Ernie and I'm Bert. When did that happen? Sometime in the past 7 years we switched rolls?

We can't wait to watch Sesame Street with our kids. They've released to box sets called Sesame Street Old School, so the kids can see what Sesame Street was for us, and fall in love with it the way that we did. K says that will be the first thing we register for.

No comments: