Postcard Plot #3 and Abbie the Thief

No sooner did I set the grocery bag down than Abbie knocks it over, sticks his furry face in, and chews through the plastic breadbag to get at the loaf of bread inside. Elapsed time of thievery: 90 seconds. All I was doing was removing my boots and he went right for the bread product and took out a chunk of two pieces.

Swear to god, cat. One of these days they're gonna find you floating head-over-tail down the Charles. Or the Mystic, if I'm feeling particularly vindictive.

I received a third mystery postcard in the mail today, unsigned, of course, and postmarked Seattle. This makes me think someone's either very well-travelled, or enlisting the aid of accomplices. This one is intriguing, and has caused me to reconsider my "complete group effort" theory, because the picture is of a street sign that says "LOVE" and the recipe on the back is for a "Love Passion" cocktail involving gin, champagne, and passion fruit liqueur. That's a message you don't send to just anybody.

So! I am pleasantly intrigued. This little caper is the right blend of whimsy and mystery and I wanted to let whoever's behind it that I'm quite enjoying it so far. I may have to owe you dinner once all is said and done.

"How do I get out of Elmo's World?"

Good question, Bert. (He wandered into Elmo's pad looking for Ernie, and then didn't know how to get back out again.)

There's some prime-time Sesame Street 35th anniversary special going on right now on WGBH. I thought "Oh, neat, it'll be fun, probably some nifty retrospective documentary or something."

But it seems to be just like a regular modern episode of the show. It takes place entirely in a crayon drawing set called "Elmo's World." Elmo runs around it and gets e-mail from Big Bird and runs around some more and acts annoying and talks to his goldfish and every now and then oh hey there's Sesame Street outside what a neat place Sesame Street is, in fact it's so neat we're gonna stay in "Elmo's World" and talk about it!

Then Big Bird goes off to find Ernie in a segment that looks like it's a regular one, and they run around a greenscreen environment interacting with minimally-animated cartoon characters, like the three little kittens who've lost their mittens, or Humpty Dumpty, or Little Bo Peep. I was somewhat amused while watching until I started grousing "In the Henson heyday, they wouldn't have needed to use cartoon characters, they'd have just grabbed three cat muppets from the workshop, put them up on a wall, and..."

That's when I realized that I shouldn't be grousing so much. The show is no longer made for me. It really hasn't been for quite some time, honestly, so who am I to bitch? And I am sure a five-year-old watching Elmo dance around his computer-animated house is having a blast and isn't thinking "Gee, this show was much better when they showed the funky pinball counting animations and more Muppets." And twenty-some-odd years down the line, if Sesame Street still exists, this kid will watch and go "Gee, this show was much better when they had Elmo's World on."

Time and memories march on.

However, I do have to admit that watching Beverly Sills in full Cleopatra-esque getup singing an operatic version of "C Is For Cookie" while muppet attendants marched around her with feathers and fans was pretty hilarious and cool.