Elmo, Me, and Captain Kangaroo

I am really excited to be on the same bill with Kevin Clash (Elmo) during the first weekend in April at Teachers College, thanks to my friend Ryan Goble. (Check out Ryan's neat Ning Making Curriculum Pop.) If you're in the New York neighborhood, I hope you'll plan to stay the entire weekend at what is shaping up to be a fascinating time.

I've been thinking a lot about children's television lately, not only because of Elmo. My students have been creating their Multigenre Autobiographies, and I've been struck by how powerful such kids' television programming as what they call "Old School" Nickelodeon and Pokemon have been in their lives, not to mention such stand-bys as Barney and Sesame Street.

It occurred to me that Elmo will be the second major kids' celebrity I will have met (not counting Cleveland's Captain Penny). Around 1990, I was playing the piano at the old Cascade Club in downtown Akron, and Bob Keeshan who played Captain Kangaroo was there one evening for an event with Akron Children's Hospital. I heard that he was going to be coming into the room where I was playing, so I started trying to remember the theme from the old show. After about an hour of trying it out, interspersing it with "Memory" from Cats and "As Time Goes By," Mr. Keeshan appeared at the door. I stumbled through his theme at the piano as he entered the room. He came over to me after a few minutes and practically dwarfed me as he shook my hand hard--he was as big as a linebacker. "You've almost got it!" he smiled. "You've almost got it!"