“Megan’s sheer talent as a singer, actress, writer and performer is incredible on its own, but I was instantly inspired by her loving heart, strength of character, humor, humanity and what an energetic creative force she is.”Īlthough Piphus Peace submitted her first video audition to “Sesame Street” in 2017, she didn’t hear back until 2020, when Matt Vogel, the puppet captain of the show, reached out to her, reports Ebony’s Rashad Grove. “To say that I was intrigued by Megan would be an understatement,” says Carrara-Rudolph. One of Piphus Peace’s mentors, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, who debuted the “Sesame Street” character Abby Cadabby in 2006, tells the Washington Post that Piphus Peace is a gifted storyteller and natural leader. When she was a high school senior in Cincinnati, students knew her as the “Ventriloquist Valedictorian.” At Vanderbilt University, where she studied economics, she was known as the “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist.” She even appeared on “The Tonight Show” in 2012 and “America’s Got Talent” in 2013. She has been pursuing puppeteering since then. Piphus Peace, now 29, grew up watching “Sesame Street.” As a young child, she considered the puppets to be her friends, not realizing until she was older that they weren’t real, she tells the Washington Post’s Sydney Page. “I always dreamed of working in television, but I never imagined myself being at ‘Sesame Street,’” she tells NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe and Michael Radcliffe. ![]() Last month, she celebrated her one-year anniversary as a member of the team-and officially left her real estate career, which she had been pursuing as she tried to establish herself as a puppeteer. Megan Piphus Peace is one of them: In late 2021, she became the show’s first full-time Black woman puppeteer, playing a 6-year-old Black girl named Gabrielle. But 30 years on, the perils here are overwhelming: their hair is in their eyes! They're playing electrical instruments! And, my God, one is playing the drums without any protective clothing! Frankly, it's astonishing I managed to grow up unscathed.Over more than 50 years, “ Sesame Street” has been introducing children to a diverse ensemble of characters, cast members and puppeteers. My favourite segment was the 1979 one when the Muppet band the Beetles, suitably mop-topped, if a little fuzzier of face than the originals, sang their poignant ballad Letter B (sample lyric: "When I find I can't remember/What comes after A and before C/ My mother always whispers, 'Letter B'," and yes, I am quoting from memory). The clearly depressed Oscar the Grouch is another problem: "We might not be able to create a character like Oscar today," said Parente, which is possibly one of the most depressing sentences I have read in my life.įor those of us reared on Sesame Street, the degree to which the show is embedded in our psyche is hard to overstate. His alter ego, Alistair Cookie, used to smoke a pipe before eating it, which, Sesame Street producer Carol-Lynn Parente explained to the New York Times, "modelled the wrong behaviour", and so Alistair was, tragically, dropped, and he now probably munches down on pipes in bitterness in illegal pipe dens. ![]() ![]() Children dancing in the street! Grown men reading storybooks to kids - for no apparent reason!Ĭookie Monster is the number one problem, not because he is a monster, but because he eats cookies (encourages obesity), and when his addiction takes a special stranglehold, the plate (might hurt). It's not the psychedelic nature of the programme in its 70s incarnation that worries, but the behaviour it might encourage.
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