I grew up on the Muppets, and Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street. Jim Henson's characters actively lived in my subconscious, and peppered my dreams. Fast forward 20 years to present day, and my friend Jeff Miller comes to town and tells me about this amazing event happening in Toronto: a presentation on a gay muppeteer: Richard Hunt, by writer Max Stein.
I love the muppets, and I love queer things. I was so pumped to hear about this event, but I couldn't make it last minute into Toronto to see the presentation so I got in touch with Max, and asked if I could interview her about her writing and research about Richard Hunt (Gay Muppeteer) for this show.
Jessica MAX Stein is a friendly, smart, and dynamic freelance writer and teacher. She's written a whole bunch of exciting things (check out http://jessicamaxstein.com/) . We talked to about the Rainbow Connection, her zine about Richard Hunt, who was a gay Muppeteer. Max kept making changes to the zine, additions and corrections until she realized the zine was growing into a book. I'm excited for this project.
We talked about the Sensibility and Humor of the muppets, Richard Hunt's charisma, courage, Richard's overwhelming generosity, the assimilation of gay marriage, and assimilation of gay people (acceptable gays), puppet work as acting, the enthusiastic response of all kinds of people to this project (because the muppets spoke to so many people), how truth is so often more surprising and awesome than fiction.
check out (and buy) her work at microcosm.com
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