From the Bookshelf: Jim Henson the Biography

Not that long ago, I was in the local remaindered bookstore when I saw a copy of a book I'd been aware of elsewhere for years without ever quite reading. This time, I bought Michael Davis's Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. I could have been motivated by the thought there might not be another chance to find the book, but I suppose my previous diffidence did have something to do with half-overheard grumbles under familiar rocks about the show "being more for little kids now" than when the people grumbling were little kids, a particular twist on a too-familiar attitude that's long seemed especially monstrous to me (and not in a Cookie or Grover way).

Reading the book, though, just seemed to put me in what I was soon calling "a Muppet mood," unpacking something that had long been there. I began paging through the "Muppet Wiki" again and making a few searches for video clips, but perhaps something about what I mentioned just above soon got me thinking to keep some of my oldest memories packed away by taking in the Muppets as a whole. In the process of that, I got around at last to watching a video biography of Jim Henson I'd recorded off of PBS quite a while ago. The pledge breaks happened to mention a recent biography of him, and when dropping into the local large bookstore with the thought of searching for the book on the computer kiosks there I glanced at the biography section first to see paperback copies of Brian Jay Jones's Jim Henson: The Biography, and I went right ahead and bought one.
( An outline filled in further )