When Henson was ready to begin his career, all this giddy Americana would flow into the medium of television like chocolate syrup. His indulgent father was a soybean expert posted to an experiment station on the Mississippi State University campus, but Henson’s real ally in mischief was his mother, Betty, who famously told Jim’s friends to say “when” as she poured them a glass of milk and, if they didn’t, kept pouring till the glass overflowed. Henson spent his childhood as “a Mississippi Tom Sawyer,” in his own words, shooting at water moccasins with his BB gun and devoting his Saturdays to the movies, spending the entire day soaking up serials, newsreels, cartoons and cowboy films later, he and his buddies assembled props and makeshift weapons and acted out the dramas they’d just seen. Not to worry: If the life of the man who created the Muppets had been any cornier or more wholesome, he would have been sued by Norman Rockwell’s lawyers for plagiarism. Jim Henson was such a beloved and tragic figure (he died at 53 of a strep infection) that I hesitated to open Brian Jay Jones’s book for fear that it would be yet another “pathography,” a term coined by Joyce Carol Oates to describe the account of a person who may be saintly on the surface but whose story is mainly one of dysfunction, disaster and outrageous conduct. Lawton distinguished professor of English at Florida State University.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |