Notes on TPfest
June 25-27, 2004 : NYC
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SATURDAY, part 1
Scott and I were a bit late getting started
on Saturday.
Even though we got to bed late, I was up and humming pretty early, but poor Scotland was out of it. I played Muppet Monster Adventure on the Playstation while he showered and got dressed. (Weird ass game, which as far as I can tell mostly consists of Robin running around in circles while Pepe says "hola.") We got down to the lobby half an hour late. Tom, apparently, had "just left" before we got there, which naturally means that he was a mythical creature.
Everybody was hungry, so we decided to go ride on a subway for half an hour before having breakfast. We're dumb. We went down to Union Square -- or at least as close to Union Square as you can get if you're not on the subway line that actually, like, *goes* directly to Union Square.
Walking down the street together, we experienced one of those great moments that only happens when Muppet fans are moving in herds. We were kind of cranky and hungry, still really waking up, and as we passed a store, someone caught sight of a Sesame T-shirt. They said, Oooh it's BIG BIRD IT'S BIG BIRD LOOK IT'S BIG BIRD!!!
And then we all RUSH over to the window like seeing an image of Big Bird
in a store window is a MAJOR FUCKING EVENT. We all look at the cool
t-shirt with the neo-retro 35th Big Bird picture on it. And then we see
the other two Sesame 35th shirts in the window, and we all coo over them
for a couple minutes as if there's no such thing as breakfast. It was
AWESOME.
That's the great thing about getting together in a big group. We all just reinforce and encourage the quirky way we experience the world. There's nothing like it.
Anyway, we go to Cosi's for breakfast, but Cosi's wasn't going to serve food for another 20 minutes -- so we walked around in the unnecessary pre-fab street fair that apparently sprouts up around Union Square like mushrooms after a spring rain. There were smoothies and a booth offering Interesting Items, and multiple tents with eager middle-aged Asian men offering us massages.
There was a stand selling home-made magnets, and darn it if once again
somebody didn't zero right in on the Muppet magnets they were selling.
There was a Kermit, a Miss Piggy, an Ernie/Bert, a nice group Sesame
scene. They were cheap knockoffs, but I bought a few, just because I was
enjoying the feeling that there were little Muppety surprises around every
corner.
We went back to Cosi's and got sandwiches and whatnot. I'd told Craig last night that I would call him so we could meet up again, so I called him on my cell phone. And who should answer the phone but the Tony-nominated Ms Stephanie D'Abruzzo. Oh, hi Stephanie, I said. This is Danny Horn. How're you doing? And there I am, chatting with Steph. Tra la. We couldn't talk long, of course -- she had a show to get to -- so she handed me off to Craig. We arranged to meet him at Toy Tokyo at 1:00, and that's the end of that dull story.
Walking down the street, just happy to be together in New York. I started a little riff song, based on one I'd started the night before. I clapped in rhythm, and got some other people to clap and hum too. Part of the lyrics went like this:
We got puppets on our hands
And
Sesame socks on our feet
And in between are the foxiest people
You could ever want to meet
The Tough Pigs are in town
Everybody get down, now
We talk to Broadway stars on the phone
We ain't ne-ver goin' home
The Tough Pigs are in town...
Pretty awesome feeling. We were a posse.
So where were we? Oh, shopping in New York, of course. What follows is a great deal of shopping stories.
We stop in at Claire's Accessories, on account of we are tiny little baby girl people. It is a testament to the strength of character of the boys in the posse that none of the guys blinks an eye as we pile on into the purple palace to coo over doll merchandise.
The first thing we see are the Fraggle Rock wallets -- groovy looking
wallets adorned with Fraggle faces and signatures. There's one for Gobo
and one for Red, so obviously that means that one is a boy wallet and one
is a girl wallet. Right? It's hard to avoid those kinds of thoughts when
you're in Claire's. They also have adorable little kid shoes with Zoe on
them; Scott picks up a pair for Gillian.
They might have had other stuff too, but at that point I was personally too fascinated with the Celebrity Stalker Jewelery Collection to notice. If you haven't seen this stuff yet, you owe it to yourself to go visit Claire's. It's madness. There are necklaces, charm bracelets, all the usual paraphenalia, all adorned with I HEART BRAD and I HEART JUSTIN and I HEART ASHTON. We're baffled by a couple: I LOVE SHANE? Shane who? But we don't ask that too loud for fear of being set upon by a pack of Shane-iacs. I'm also stunned by the leather wristbands that say MRS KUTCHER. I mean, it's kind of, y'know? Isn't it?
I almost bought an I LOVE BRAD necklace, but I tried it on and it near choked me to death. So Brad will have to settle for being loved in my heart.
Next up is Barnes and Noble, cause we have to pee, and B&N has open bathrooms. Now we get to the big scandalous moment of the whole weekend. We're messing around in the kids' books section, as naturally we would be, and they have a small but eye-catching display of Sesame Street books. I helpfully point out the display to Martha: "There's some Sesame books over there, if you're interested."
"Nah," Martha says. "I don't really like Sesame."
! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
I will never let that go.
That's pretty much all we talk about, all the way down St Marks Place. (Well, that and also me spitting in Scott's cream soda, which I apologize for and replace later.)
Martha points out, reasonably, that she was wearing a Bert and Ernie t-shirt yesterday, and Bert and Ernie socks. Which is true.
And which makes it all the more mysterious.
"I don't really like Sesame."
What a thing to say!
Anyway, we make our way down St Mark's Place, stopping at the predictable spots -- the comics store, a CD store. Mostly what we're doing is head counting. Every time we go anyplace, we spend half the time looking around saying, okay, who's still inside? Kellie, Jog, Martha... they're still in there? Okay. It's not a problem, it's just that there's eleven of us, so we're a bit hard to keep track of.
We're early at Toy Tokyo, so we kill some time at Love Saves the Day, the
pop-culture thrift store that you would really think would go out of
business in the age of Ebay. But Jog does his best to keep them in
business, buying a Fisher Price Kermit hand puppet which is actually
fairly reasonably priced. Isha and I happen to be over at a glass case of
My Little Pony toys when she busts out with a detailed, in-depth knowledge
of My Little Pony. I didn't think it was actually possible to know things
about My Little Pony; I didn't even realize they had individual names.
"I had Blossom, and Minty, and Butterscotch," she says, or
something like that. "And Lickety-Split, and that's North Star...
ooh, I always wanted a Cherries Jubilee..." These are actual MLP
names that I'm looking up on a website; I can't remember what the hell she
said at the time. All I know is that I made a note in my notebook:
"Isha used to be a little girl."
Anyway, it's 1:00 now, so we head into Toy Tokyo. Ah, Toy Tokyo! The very name suggests that it is a wonderful place, full of toys and full of Tokyo. It's an incredible store, chock full of character toys imported from around the world. There's lots of Japanese stuff, obviously, but also lots of stuff from Europe. There's one wall that's half Kubricks and half nutty wind-up toys. Going to Toy Tokyo is where I first "got" the whole Kubricks concept, because I got to see that there's all these little boxes full of Disney characters, Gumby, Peanuts, Planet of the Apes, Kelloggs cereal mascots, stuff I don't recognize... There's plastic Kubricks that are made to look like tiny wooden Disney toys.
And that's just one wall. It's a smallish store, but packed high to the
ceiling with shelves and glass cases, and they're all full of stuff.
Simpsons figures from German McDonald's meals. Barbapapa wind-up toys.
Godzilla shit out the ying-yang. Astroboy, Star Wars, Nightmare Before
Christmas. Bobble heads and Pez dispensers stand shoulder to shoulder,
Transformers and Smurfs live in harmony. And the stuff is affordable, too
-- at least, compared to what you'd get it for anywhere else. Can you tell
that I love Toy Tokyo? I LOVE TOY TOKYO!
(So if you haven't been there yourself, here's the address: 121 Second Avenue, between 7th St and St Marks Place. It's on the second floor, look for the big wooden Godzilla to lead you up the stairs. Open 1pm-9pm Tues to Sunday. 212-673-5424. If you're in New York: Go.)
Anyway, the collectors among us are having a good time, looking at all the nonsense. Unfortunately, there aren't any Muppet or Sesame Kubricks there, and the Muppet stuff that is there is pretty played out for us. (It hasn't been the same Muppetwise at Toy Tokyo since Igel stopped making Muppet toys.)
Kellie and I are delighted to find little sets of Moomintroll toys, we
both squeal and we each end up buying the entire set of five. Moomins, in
case you don't know, are from a Finnish children's book series by Tove
Jansson. The first book is Finn
Family Moomintroll, and it goes on and on from there. (If anyone is
still reading this paragraph, you can check out the Moomins at this great Moomin
fan site.) I read Moomin books when I was a kid, and Kellie discovered
them more recently because of some Moomin comic strips reprinted in the
Comics Journal. Anyway, we're both enchanted out the ying yang by these
tiny little Moomin toys, and we can't wait to go home and play with them.
Basically, for me and Kellie, everything else that happens the rest of the
day is just a barrier to playing with our Moomin toys.
While we're freaking out at the display, Isha gasps and says that she had
a dream just like this -- being in a toy store like this with her friends,
a display like this. I tell her that she's a fan; fans dream about stores
like this all the time. I must dream about toy stores three or four times
a week.
The one other thing that I'm drawn to are these nice Japanese Disney kits; you can assemble a really beautiful little scene of Cinderella running down the stairs after the ball, Peter Pan fighting Captain Hook, or Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti. They're only five dollars each. The problem is that they're blind-boxed, so you don't know which one you're going to get -- and one of them is Aladdin and the Genie, which leaves me entirely cold. But I decide to bite the bullet, and be a Japanese child for the day. I buy two.
When we get outside, I'm horrified to discover that I've bought two Genies. I shake my fist: DAMN you, Japan! I want to curse Japan, but the only Japanese phrases that I learned from Big Bird in Japan are ohayo and ichi - ni - san, neither of which make good curses.
Craig shows up at this point, happy to see everybody again. He talks me into buying another Disney kit -- after all, what are the odds of getting a third Genie? -- and I foolishly go back into the store with him. Craig buys a set of mini Pez dispensers with the heads of Pingu characters, which shows you how much sense he has. I get my third Disney set. I'm relieved to find that it's not a Genie, but the Peter Pan set that I get is still third choice. Ah well, that's the life of the Japanese child.
Anyway, now we're hungry. A few people get Belgian fries at the fries
stand next to Toy Tokyo, and then we walk around the corner to the New
York Milkshake Company so everybody else can get milkshakes. We hang
around chatting in the milkshake place for a while, and Guillermo takes
advantage of the opportunity to log on to a public computer. (In New York,
even milkshake places have internet access.) So we're all just chatting
away like everything is normal, and then somebody looks over and says OH
MY GOD GUILLERMO'S READING MUPPET CENTRAL!!! And we all turn and there he
is, on the Muppet Central forum. This is a major scandal, even worse than
Martha hating on Sesame Street. To his credit, Guillermo is
guilt-stricken, and he immediately logs off MC and pretends he was looking
at something else anyway.
Meanwhile, Cathy has completely given in on the crullers issue. Craig made some kind of sexual joke last night at the pizza place about crullers, and by now it's become an in-joke -- donuts get a lot of play while we're hanging out with Craig today.
Craig takes us up the street to Kim's Video, a really cool DVD store that I'd never been to before. They carry a lot of neat stuff -- TV stuff, cult stuff, horror and sci-fi. Some European and Japanese stuff. They even sell some bootleg DVD's, like the entire run of Square Pegs. Scott is excited because they have the Wonder Woman first season on the shelves a few days before the official street date; he also buys the European Fraggle Rock set, which he can play on his Region 2 player.
Some of us love Kim's Video -- me, Scott, Craig, Cathy, maybe Jog. We love
it so much that we circle around and around, looking at everything three
times over, showing stuff to each other and generally paying no attention
to the fact that we've spent over an hour there. We are reminded of that
fact by the rest of the crew, who have been fruitlessly standing by the
door and tapping their feet for an eternity. We are herded out of the
store.
On the way to the subway, there's some more cruller talk, and we see some belly dancers shimmying away at Astor Place. New York is just Wonderland, you really never know what you're going to see on a sunny Saturday in June.
Craig drops us off; we're sad to say goodbye. He's super, the most honorary of honorary Pigs.
On the subway back to the hotel, I start talking (as always) in the Danny Monster voice, and I discover that the Danny M voice will make Alaina crack up, no matter what I say. I test it out, she laughs. I do it so many times that I start training her to laugh even without using the voice. After a while, I can just look her in the eye, and she laughs. It's an awesome responsibility.
We get back to the hotel. About half the people go inside to change for
tonight. The other half go to K-Mart, where we need to buy art supplies so
we can make pictures for our forum friends who couldn't be with us. When
we're there, we find a whole display of new Sesame 35th anniversary
greeting cards, which we just go nuts over.
I'm a huge fan of the Japanese anime-style cards, other people are into the neo-vintage Roosevelt Franklin and Guy Smiley ones. We basically swarm the display like mad things. We're a terribly bad influence on each other; we end up spending more than we should.
But once again, you get that feeling that there's Muppety treasures everywhere we look, that somehow us being together as a group is bringing these new things into existence. That's a good feeling; I'd say that's worth paying a few extra bucks for.
Well, even if it's not, I'm paying it anyway. Nice cards.
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