Watching the Muppet Show

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College, I spent most of my free time in a little bookstore off the Student Union lobby. It stocked some bestsellers and miscellaneous nonfiction, including The Little Prince and Dag Hammarskjold's Markings,  but mostly science fiction and fantasy, with some underground comics under the counter.

It provided a bright belonging place for "head cases," boy who were majoring in English or philosophy or music, who wanted something greater and nobler from life than carrying briefcases into skyscrapers.  We called ourselves the Bookstore Gang.

During any hour of the afternoon and early evening, half a dozen members of the Bookstore Gang could be found standing by the counter, or sitting on it, or browsing through the shelves, or reading in the armchairs or green couch that blazed with western sunlight.  We discussed classes, comic books, movies, ghosts, and politics, but for some reason never girls.  When the bookstore closed, we adjourned to the Rathskeller or to the TV Lounge, to argue and advise and review, discussing The Wizard of Id or Saturday Night Live, yelling "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!" while stuck-up Business Majors stared.

Everything we watched or listened to or read was hip, anarchic, iconoclastic, but my favorite was The Muppet Show (1976-81), with Kermit the Frog from Sesame Street hosting a comedy-variety show, juxtaposing parodies of medical dramas or Star Trek ("Pigs....in space")  with musical numbers, while the elderly gay couple Statler and Waldorf heckled everything (except for the famous guest stars, of course).

And what a cast of guest stars!  Everybody who was anybody stopped by:
Joan Baez
Milton Berle
Bert and Ernie
Joel Grey
Arlo Guthrie
Vincent Price
Tony Randall
Sylvester Stallone

Other hip, anarchic, iconoclastic tv programs and movies -- Monte Python, Mary Hartman, Saturday Night Live, WKRP in Cincinnati, Blazing Saddles, The Cheap Detective, Silent Movie -- were loaded down with fag jokes and hetero-horniness, but The Muppet Show had neither.

Only Miss Piggy regularly displayed heterosexual interest -- at Kermit and various male guest stars -- and she was always rejected. And instead of constantly ridiculing gender transgressions, same-sex contact, and "fags," like most venues in the 1970s, The Muppet Show offered a pleasant nonchalance about diversity in size, shape, affect, and affection (who knew what Gonzo the Great was into?).

Muppet creator Jim Henson was a gay ally, as is his daughter Lisa, now CEO of Jim Henson Enterprises. In 2012, the company severed ties with Chick-Fil-A due to its homophobic bias, and donated existing proceeds to GLAAD.

I always knew that the Muppets were gay-friendly.

NBC Experiment in Television: The Cube

February 23, 1969.  NBC Experiment in Television: The Cube

A Man (Richard Schaal, a regular guest star on tv sitcoms) awakens in a square white room covered in a four-by-four grid.  He doesn't remember how he got there, or much about his life before.

People keep popping in to threaten or insult him or dredge up painful memories of his past: his friend Arnie, a Monk, a Black Militant, a Guitarist (Ralph Endersby, above and left). Sometimes they transform into different people before his eyes.

A Priest gives him an orb that is supposed to tell the Man the meaning of the Cube, but it doesn't work; it contains strawberry jelly.  A Professor tells him that he's acting in a play.

His visitors can all get out through hidden panels in the walls, but the Man is stuck.  A child on a tricycle pops in, singing "You're never going to get out of here, out of here, out of here."  A rock band comes in and reprises the song.  Many people come in at once, filling up the cube with witty cocktail-party conversations about the Man's shortcomings and how he'll never get out.

Finally the Man has had enough.  He yells at his captors: whatever else they do to confuse his sense of reality, he knows that he is real.

A panel opens, and a psychiatrist invites the Man out.  He's won!

He walks down the hall to the psychiatrist's office to sign some papers.  "I'm here!" he exclaims.  "I'm real!  If I cut myself, I bleed."

The Man actually does cut himself on a letter opener, and puts his finger to his mouth, and tastes strawberry jelly, not blood.  And he's back in the Cube again.

The IMDB classifies The Cube as a comedy, but I found it terrifying, as an 8-year old, on a cold Sunday night in the spring of 3rd grade.  The gay symbolism was obvious: we're trapped in a cage of heterosexist lies, told again and again that we don't exist, or we're insane.  And there's no escape.

The Cube was written and directed by Jim Henson of Muppet fame.  It has never been rerun, or released on video, but you can see clips on youtube.