(ABOVE) Muppeteer Pam Arciero performs as Grundgetta Grouch, inamorata to Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street. Arciero, an Oahu native, is among the first generation of female characters to join the long-running children’s educational television show. PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD TERMINE.
(BELOW) Arciero assists Muppeteer Megan Piphus for a Sesame Street episode based on the life of Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman and first Native American to earn a pilot’s license. PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACH HYMAN.
What is Hawaii?" A pink puppet asks. It's a question that often gets asked-with glee when planes land, achingly when they take off and muttered in a kind of giddy, low hum the whole time visitors are in the Islands. What exactly is this place?
"Hawaii is a state, over there," Big Bird says, using simple words.
The eight-foot-tall bird, who is also a six-year-old child, as well as a guy in a yellow-feathered mechanical puppet suit, shows his friends a map with Hawaii on the lower left corner and Sesame Street on the northeast coast of North America. "All the way over here."
There's a flapping of wings, a crescendo of flutes and a shock of orange drops from the big, blue sky: Auntie Nani, a native Hawaiian bird, has just flown in to visit her beloved Manu Nui, which means Great Bird. Nani is also Pam Arciero, a 41-year veteran Muppeteer who, like her character, is of both places: Sesame Street and Hawai'i.
Pam joined the cast of Sesame Street in 1982. Much like her colleagues, the Muppets, she is ageless, nimble and all smiles. She greets me with a happy hug, and there are pupu awaiting my arrival at her home, which is surrounded by flowering trees and overlooks a waterfall-just like Hawai'i, even if it is in Connecticut.
For the generation of children who learned to read with Bert, Ernie, Oscar and Cookie Monster-a generation that began in 1969-it was hard to believe that Sesame Street was anything but a real place, though at some point we learned it is also a television studio. It is the one place for which I myself might consider leaving Hawaii, which is exactly what Pam did.
The odyssey started when Big Bird came to the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1980. Pam was a junior in college and a dance major when she had the sad realization that her career was nearly over before it had even begun; at 21, professional dancers are practically middle-age. While teaching modern dance to kids that summer, she took the puppetry workshop at UH with Kermit Love, who'd designed Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus.
"I like the performing arts, but it never felt like enough," she says of her career crisis. She loved visual arts, sculpture, sewing, painting, so puppetry was a revelation. It wasn't just creating the characters; she designed, built and then performed them, too. "And I also like to sing. It was like, 'Oh wait, I found it. This is what I am supposed to do.' Like a bell going off in my head."
Carol Spinney, Big Bird's Muppeteer, joined the class in Hawaii, too. Pam discovered her metier and was hanging out with puppetry legends when Kermit Love (no relation to the frog, who was named for a childhood friend of Jim Henson) and Big Bird gave her the push she needed. "You're really good at this," Pam recalls Love telling her. "You should come to New York and try out for Sesame Street. You know, they need female puppeteers who can sing."
Arciero, seen here performing as a clock with Abby Cadabby and Elmo, has taught millions of children to read, count and tell time. PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD TERMINE. (BELOW) Auntie Nani Bird, one of Arciero’s signature Sesame Street characters, is the first exposure many children around the world have to Island culture.
Times were changing on Sesame Street. The titans who pioneered the show were itching for other projects: Jim Henson was working on The Dark Crystal, Frank Oz was voicing Yoda in the Star Wars trilogy. One decade in, the Children's Television Workshop was aiming for racial and gender diversity in its human cast, but it was still all dudes under the fleece and feathers. Sesame Street needed more women.
"I'm a local girl," Pam recalls thinking. "What are you talking about? Move to New York?" It is a question that hits many Hawai'i kids at some point: What happens when your dreams get bigger than your home? What if those dreams come true?
The following summer, Love returned to Hawai'i. Pam took the workshop again, and this time she also took his suggestion: Upon graduating, she enrolled in the puppetry master's degree program at the University of Connecticut, studying full time, bouncing in and out of New York City to see Love, discovering the small but thrilling universe of puppetry and the grand, world-changing experiment that was early childhood educational television.
Pam auditioned for Sesame Street in 1981 with one hundred other people and was rejected. She nevertheless found work on The Great Space Coaster, a puppet-centric television show designed by Love, and she joined the Broadway cast of Little Shop of Horrors. At once, Pam was a professional puppeteer performing regularly with the elite, as well as one of the very few women in the gang.
The next year, Pam tried out for Sesame Street again. After four months of weekly auditions that winnowed down another sea of three hundred hopefuls, Pam made it to the final round. The executive producers would be there. Henson would be there.
She was nervous, rushing to the studio and feeling insecure about the way she looked, when a homeless man randomly called after her on the street. "Hey, Miss Piggy," he said, "you lose your hairbrush?"
Maybe it was random and maybe it was kismet: Pam got the job in 1982. She has been on Sesame Street ever since.
That was a golden moment on the Street. Sunny days chased clouds away. Pam got married, had babies, traveled the world directing Sesame Street productions. But then, in 1990, the unthinkable happened: Henson died suddenly of pneumonia at 53 years old.
Part Native Hawaiian, Arciero created Nani Bird as part of a larger effort to expand inclusivity and representation in children’s programming. “I remember there were no brown Barbies when I was growing up,” Arciero says. Nani is Big Bird’s auntie, who flies in from Hawai‘i to teach hula, oli (chant) and, here, lei making to Abby Cadabby, Nina (Suki Lopez), Elmo and Big Bird. COURTESY SESAME STREET.
For the early generations of Muppet fans, Gen-Xers and older Millennials (including me), Henson's death was a rip in the universe, an exile from paradise, a death in the family. "Kermit lost his human partner," says Pam.
Our world is divided into subjects and objects, thinkers and things. Puppetry is a kind of witchcraft that bridges the two realms: A sock is only a sock until you put your hand inside, then it is a sock with ideas, feelings and something to say. This is what makes puppetry such a powerful teacher for young children, who are already trying to order a confusing place. A creature from the land between categories can speak with a unique and powerful voice.
What would happen to Kermit now that his voice was gone? What would become of American puppetry, which had been so shaped and supported by Henson? To ensure the craft would continue, Pam, along with the Henson and Sesame Street families, held a conference on Muppeteering at the O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, in 1991. It was the first of what would become an annual puppetry symposium, featuring artists and methods from around the globe.
Puppetry is taught by apprenticeship; knowledge gets passed from master to novice, and Pam was the last generation of Muppeteers to be trained by Henson himself. Once an aspirant from 'Aina Haina, Oahu, she was named artistic director of the O'Neill's puppetry program in 2002 and is now a puppetry elder. The O'Neill itself occupies a storied, exuberant place in the pantheon of American theater, "as if they combined the Garden of Eden with summer camp," says one theater composer and alumnus. The puppetry conference is a two-week intensive where students, expert craftsmen and emerging artists gather to build a show, learn skills, drink and perform on a beach. The Broadway hit Avenue Q was workshopped at the O'Neill and later won a Tony Award.
Arciero is among the last cohort of Muppeteers trained by Jim Henson, who died in 1990. Now, she’s a mentor to younger puppeteers. Here, Arciero works on a puppet made from sticks and spools of thread with student Andy Manjuck for his show, Parched, during the 2023 O’Neill National Puppetry Conference. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZIELLO.
"The O'Neill is my legacy," Pam says, "knowing that the art form will continue to develop and be much more than it is." It is far from her only one: She's performed on Blue's Clues, Allegra's Window and Between the Lions. She's worked with the Honolulu Theatre for Youth. Pam will soon make her Broadway directorial debut, Aanika's Elephants, at the New Victory Theater in March 2024; it is the story of a young African girl who befriends an orphaned baby elephant.
The upstairs studio in Pam's house is full of puppets, craft supplies, tools and toys. The first thing I see is a full-length mirror in front of a yoga mat, a sign of the dancer she was and remains at 68, but also of the physical stamina and agility puppetry demands. She stretches every day, she explains, to work with her hands above her head for hours at a time. Then she rolls out the type of scooter Muppeteers use, which is all of two inches off the ground-nothing but a barstool seat on casters. Sesame Street characters have to be eye level with the children who are their castmates and friends.
Pam's entire home is filled with a vast and joyous toy collection, including an animatronic Baby Yoda, whose on-screen mix of puppetry, robotics and computer-generated imagery fills her with delight, a new frontier in the art she loves. There is a dark-skinned "Island fun" Barbie wearing a lei and an aloha-print dress. "I remember there were no brown Barbies when I was growing up," she says.
While filming this past year, a little girl came up to Pam and said, "I see myself in you." Part Japanese, Italian and a little Native Hawaiian, Pam is alert to conversations about identity and representation in children's education. She has performed with kids who have Down syndrome, deafness and kids in wheelchairs. Muppet diversity has increased, too: There is a regular character whose parents are divorced and who has a step-sibling; a character whose family experienced homelessness; one whose father went to prison; another in foster care after her parent became addicted to opiates; in 2015 a character with autism joined the regular cast. Sesame Street wants to look like Main Street.
Marionettes hang in a workshop at the O’Neill Puppetry Conference. The conference began in 1991 following Henson’s death to ensure that the craft would continue. Now the annual symposium at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, brings together artists like Arciero and aspiring puppeteers from around the world. “The O’Neill is my legacy,” Arciero says, “knowing that the art form will continue to develop and be much more than it is.” PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZIELLO.
The nonprofit Sesame Workshop is one of the most exhaustively researched early childhood interventions ever, a data bonanza for sociologists and anthropologists. It is also measurably successful. Watching the show is worth as much as a year of learning, which is to say that in large studies, "four-year-olds at post-broadcast were performing at the same levels as the five-year-olds prior to Sesame Street," according to the book The Sesame Effect: The Global Impact of the Longest Street in the World. The results hold even for kids from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Pam and her colleagues have taught millions of children to read and count, including this writer.
Though the job is under the cloak of a puppet, the impact of telling stories based on "mutual respect and understanding" is global, researchers say. There have been Sesame Street co-productions in 170 countries: Sesame Tree in Northern Ireland, Ulitsa Sezam in Russia, Rechov Sumsum and Shara'a Simsim, in Hebrew and Arabic for Israeli and Palestinian children. To bring Sisimpur to Bangladesh, the set was built as a rural stretch of road with a banyan and tea shop; rickshaws outfitted with television monitors and generators brought the episodes to remote villages. Many will criticize international Sesame Streets as cultural colonialism, as they are often funded by USAID, yet Takalani Sesame in South Africa was effective in encouraging people to get tested for HIV at a time when testing numbers were low. (Pam went to South Africa in 2019 to teach, direct and help refresh the show.) Ahlan Sisim, an Arabic-language Sesame, seeks to teach 31 million refugee kids.
The O’Neill Puppetry Conference is in part a showcase for new works in puppetry, like Fabrizio Montecchi’s Into the Shadows (seen above). Arciero performed her own directorial debut, Aanika’s Elephants, about a young African girl who befriends an orphaned baby elephant, at the conference. The show makes its Broadway premiere at the New Victory Theater in March 2024. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZIELLO.
"Lately, I've been asked to 'identify out,'" says Pam, that is, to talk openly about her multiethnic, hapa-Hawaiian background. Which brings us back to Auntie Nani. In one of Nani Bird's first appearances, she performs a hula lullaby for a baby Big Bird. "In Hawaii, sometimes when we sing, we use our hands to tell a story," Auntie says, seeking to soothe the restless chick. With a crystalline voice, she croons "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in English and in Hawaiian. Nani does the hula hand gestures Pam learned growing up, only now with orange puppet bird wings.
It's not unreasonable to ask about retirement after over forty years on the job, even if the job is playing with toys on Sesame Street. With siblings and cousins still on Oahu and a whole lifetime of memories in Hawaii, I cannot fathom choosing the Northeast instead, and in winter, which is when Sesame Street films. But in the most wondrous way, Pam never left home. She has only made more of it everywhere, for everyone.
"I love it, you know, so it's very easy to keep going," she says. "Why would I stop?"
