Good morning. It's Monday. We'll visit the workshop where more than the "Sesame Street" Muppets takes shape. We'll also look at how one center for runaway and homeless young people reacted when the city said teenagers and young adults could not sleep there. |
 | | James Estrin/The New York Times |
|
In the world of fleece, foam and feathers in Jim Henson's Creature Shop in Queens, they make more than the "Sesame Street" Muppets. Sometimes they make birds other than that big yellow one, like a whooping crane that Heather Henson was standing next to. |
She is the daughter of Jim and Jane Henson, whose puppets have been more than daily television buddies to generations of youngsters. The whooping crane is about to go on a national tour, along with the bison across the table and a coyote puppet that was not far away. |
Henson said she had set out to tell stories of nature and animals "and also our relationship to our landscape" using puppets made in the workshop, in a wedge-shaped industrial building less than a mile from the Queensboro Bridge. It's one part prop shop, one part wardrobe department: She walked the coyote in a space where fabrics were stored before moving to a room with tall windows where the walls were filled with hand tools and boxes that had labels like "clippers," "rivets" and "sandpaper." Elsewhere there were also racks stuffed with rolls of fabric dyed to look good on monsters — the next Cookie or Elmo? |
In "Ajijaak," the story centers on a young whooping crane on her first solo migration from Canada across the Great Plains to coastal Texas. Henson said the show incorporates Native American traditions that "reflect our connectedness with creation." |
She discovered whooping cranes when she had an intern-level job at a zoo in Providence, R.I., where she had gone to college. "They would start dancing at sunrise and sunset," she said. |
Her infatuation deepened a few years later when she moved to Orlando, Fla. The Gulf Coast was a destination for ultralight pilots who were leading cranes south for the winter. "I got caught up in it," she said. "They do not migrate naturally. If their parents or their cousins don't teach them, they won't. They're in big groups, but somebody has to teach them." |
In "Ajijaak" (pronounced Ah-JEE-jock), there is more to worry about than learning to navigate an environment that is changing for the worse. The young crane has been separated from her parents. "Cranes need their parents to teach them how to fly," said Henson. "Ajijaak has to learn from other animals and from Native Americans on the flyway who understand the seasons and the way the land works and help that bird on its journey." |
"Our challenge had been to use organic materials as much as possible and try not to use synthetics," he said. "We used bamboo. We used reeds. The unfortunate thing was, they didn't hold up as well with the stress of travel touring and night on, night off performances." |
The result? "The feet were breaking — the legs," he said. "We needed to move to something we could cast to look like bamboo." They found a plastic that he said was "definitely going to hold up and not dry and crack." |
Along the way, the fabric for parts of the crane's body was switched to nylon, from crepe de Chine silk, because nylon is less likely to wear thin. "But we kept with the silk on the wings because nothing moves like silk," he said. |
The coyote, too, has a synthetic body. "I couldn't use corn husks because they would obviously not hold up over any length of time," said Rollie Krewson, an Emmy Award-winning master puppet designer and builder who has worked on Henson puppets since the 1970s, "so I was using Tyvek." She said it "had the look and feel and sound of a corn husk" — once she had sprayed it the color of a corn husk, a more subdued color than the Sesame Street palette. |
"Sesame Street puppets are not as based in reality," she said. "I mean, you've got Abby Cadabby." |
Expect clear skies early, then a chance of snow starting in the afternoon, with a high around 40. It will be windy at night with snow or rain and temps in the upper 30s. |
In effect until March 7 (Purim). |
 | | Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times |
|
- Maimonides Medical Center: A group called Save Maimonides has financed a relentless, monthslong campaign to disparage a struggling Brooklyn medical center. Can you save a hospital by attacking it?
- A through line between two remarkable events: Thirty years ago, Tim Lang was injured in the first attack on the World Trade Center, an ominous but often overlooked prelude to 9/11. He does not forget.
|
- Lived lives: Ward B. Stone, New York State's maverick wildlife pathologist, died in Troy, N.Y. He was 84.
|
The city banned sleeping at homeless youth shelters. One center is resisting. |
 | | James Estrin/The New York Times |
|
The number of runaway and homeless young people in overnight drop-in centers has surged. Last month, city officials delivered an unexpected message: The centers had to "discontinue the practice of allowing youth and young adults to sleep overnight." |
At least one center is pushing back. Alexander Roque, who runs Ali Forney, a Manhattan center for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, said "they would have to shut us down and put me in handcuffs" before he would comply — even if the city took away Ali Forney's funding. |
The drop-in centers, operated by city-funded nonprofits and serving young people from ages 14 to 24, are not homeless shelters, though many have had cots or other places where young people could sleep. The city's Department of Youth and Community Development said the no-sleeping directive was intended to see that the centers complied with state law and were not operating as "unlicensed shelters." The directive said people at the centers could still "rest" there. |
Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat whose district includes Hell's Kitchen and much of the Upper West Side, called the edict "impossibly cruel." |
"The city needs to do more to pave the way for housing these people," she said. "Getting rid of cots is not a housing plan." |
It was a warm August day in New York in 1969. I was 21 and just back from Vietnam. |
I had been drafted into the Army two years earlier, and my second year in Southeast Asia had been the longest in my life. It ended with me returning to the World — Brooklyn — in one piece as one of the lucky ones. |
I took a cab from Port Authority to Bensonhurst. I was in my khaki uniform. The cabdriver, a middle-age man, kept looking at me through the rearview mirror. There was no conversation between us. I was lost in a swirl of emotions. |
When we got to my block, I could see all of my neighbors sitting out on their porch steps. Someone had strung up a large banner: "Welcome Home, Lenny!" They were all cheering. |
Through my tears, I could make out my parents, my sisters and my girlfriend. I was overcome, completely surprised by the reception I was receiving from the people who had watched me grow up. |
What moved me the most, though, was when I reached for my wallet to pay the substantial sum of money showing on the taxi meter. |
"Put your money away, son," the cabby said. "You've paid enough. This ride's on me." |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Walker Clermont and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
|
