(courtesy Sesame Workshop)
Grover, sweet, loveable, funny, silly, thoughtful blue-furred Grover has been my favourite Muppet since I can remember loving any Muppets.
I can’t remember when I first encountered him, but it would’ve been in the early Seventies when my family and I had just returned to Australia from living in what is now Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and I properly got to know thing called TV.
My first meeting with the medium hadn’t been auspicious when, as a two-year-old I saw a women screaming out her lungs – for context, it was an opera and she was singing, something my growing brain didn’t quite comprehend – in a box in a guesthouse in Malaysia and ran to my mother, blubbering about the scary lady in the room.
But back in Australia, I began what has been a lifelong love affair with TV, and now, of course, streaming, and one of the first shows I was Sesame Street, itself a new program that had first screen only in 1969 and which had only just made it was to Australia.
Grover, or as he was known in his first year on Sesame Street, “Fuzzyface” or “The Hairy One” – he wasn’t officially christened as Grover until 1 May, 1970, grabbed my attention from the word go, courtesy mostly of very silly and funny sequences he did in a segment called “Charlie’s Restaurant” where, as an eager but bumbling waiter, Grover fouled every bit of service to a customer named Mr. Johnson.
The endearing part, and this is why I think I love Grover so much, is that he thought he was being super helpful and he couldn’t understand why Mr. Johnson got so angry so often; it was an hilarious sequence which found itself reborn in succeeding years with Grover as a telegram deliverer or as home remodeler (think Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) who makes over Mr. Johnson’s house even when he expressly asks Grover not to.
Not from the special itself but it shows how special Grover is …
All that and more is showcased in an adorable 2004 direct-to-video special, A Celebration of Me, Grover, where MC Big Bird and other Sesame Street luminaries such as Bert & Ernie, Elmo, Zoe and Oscar the Grouch (who struggles to say anything nice about dear sweet Grover … but hey, you didn’t expect him to, right?) get together to celebrate their lovely friend at a Flyer’s Club Roost (not a roast; here you only saw nice things … oh, and don’t say “roast” around chickens – they hate that as one feather-shedding chicken demonstrates hilariously whenever Oscar mentions the word around them).
Super Grover is to be awarded the Golden Flyer Award, but before that happens, Grover has to work at his own function as a waiter, to Mr. Johnson’s characteristic dismay, and then find a telephone box, one not occupied by a stuck elephant (ain’t it always the way?) to change into his guide as Super Grover who, you may remember, is never able to stick the landing or help anyone quite as he thinks he is.
The delightful part of A Celebration of Me, Grover, is that we’re shown a succession of clips from Grover’s time on Sesame Street, both as a Super Grover and as his street day self – we see him singing with Lena Horne in 1973, hugging all kinds of kids who love their pal Grover, acting in Monsterpiece Theatre (his take on The King and I shows him dancing, naturally enough, with a lower case “i”) and getting comedically exhausted demonstrating concepts like “Over, Under, Around and Through”.
Even if it’s not a trip down memory lane for you, and it was such a joyous nostalgia rush for this well and truly grown up kid, the clips all show how utterly delightful and wonderful and kind and charming Grover and having them all packaged up in one program is such a gift.
Watching this all-too-short program, which is full of whimsy and heart and some lovely teaching moments, I appreciated all over again why I love Grover so much and why Dad finding my early 1970s Grover puppet (a gift in the pillowcase at the end of my bed one Christmas) decades later when I thought him lost was such a precious moment.
Grover is the best, and while having A Celebration of Me, Grover to remind us of this is one of life’s very precious things, I have never forgotten how Grover made me feel happy and like I belonged even from the other side of the TV screen and how his companionship has stayed with me ever since because in the end everything good in life comes from Grover.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way …
Another Grover classic