Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. I'm welcome to stuff
I never told you a protection of iHeartRadio, and welcome
to another edition of Fictional Women Around the World. And
thanks to Samantha for this suggestion, because I asked you.
(00:27):
I was like, you know, we should start the new
year with a bang. Is there somebody you think we
should talk about? Is there someone I missed? And you said,
Maria from Sesame Street.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We have to give owe to Sesame Street.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, for sure, yes, So I would love for you
to have share your thoughts on this one. One of
the reasons I actually didn't want Sesame Street as a kid.
I don't know why my older brother did. But as
an adult, I've come to really enjoy it, which sounds strange,
(01:01):
like I just see clips of it and I'm like,
this is so wholesome, it's so nice. Their social media
presence is great.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, I think that that's really kind of brought them back.
I will say, I'm not sure why. I remember watching
it as a kid. When I came to the US again,
it was one of the three channels we had in
the mountains of LJ, Georgia with no VCR all the things,
So I remember watching PBS. I think I probably learned
English through watching I can't put that to the test.
(01:34):
I can't really tell you when or specifics, but I
know I watched TV enough that I probably learned a
lot of my English through TV. In Sesme Street would
have been something that my parents would have put on.
I know they would have, So with that in mind,
I will say Sesme Street also just kind of trends
when I was a teenager in high school. I have
a picture of me on my sixteenth birthday blowing out
(01:57):
candles of my cheesecake because I was that girl who
did not like cake, so my mother spoiled me with cheesecakes.
But like, I had a shirt on with Cookie Monster
and it was cool to wear Sesame Street characters as
a teenager. So that has come back round again, I believe.
But I remember that as being a thing. So they
(02:18):
they come back, they're trendsetting like constantly, and they circulate
as the being relevant. Yeah, and I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah. And here in Atlanta we have the Center for
Puppetry Arts, which is really cool and they have a
lot of the original muppets and stuff you can cook see.
I love it. But yeah, one of the other reasons.
I was like, you know, this would be a good
thing to talk about as we're recording this, because things
are moving. It is January seventeenth, twenty twenty five. Warner
(02:49):
Brothers Discovery did not renew Sesame Street's contract, so they're
looking for a new distributing partner. I keep seeing things
that feel like they've already found one, but I couldn't
pin it down. But this has raised a lot of
concern around the decline in children's TV shows like this,
and I remember when it was first sold to HBO
slash Max. You had to pay for that. It didn't
(03:12):
used to be that way, and there being a lot
of concern around that as well, So that might be
a topic we should come back and revisit. Also, the
timing with the inauguration coming up, with Martin Luther King
Day coming up. The actress who played Maria has been
very outspoken and has given a speech on Mlkday previously,
(03:36):
so feels like the timing the timing is right. Also,
just remember when Elmo asked if we were okay and
we broke the Internet?
Speaker 2 (03:47):
No, I mean, there was so many things between Rocco
and his disdain for Rocco, as well as as that
that Elmo has really kind of centered himself as the
main one of the main characters. Yeah that's me sweet,
But yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I forgot about Rockco.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Don't forget about Rocco.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Essin now did a whole thing about that, Oh my gosh.
So also, I just had to put it in here.
I was reading a lot from the actresses experience, and
she did talk about a lot of Star Wars stuff,
the Frank Awe and James old Jones and Mark Hampbell.
(04:27):
So I loved that. That was fun for me. I
also wanted to do a quick shout out to the
Muppet Wiki, who had an entry on Maria that was
really helpful for this, because again I haven't seen the show,
so it was really helpful to kind of get the
history of the character through them, because a lot of
people haven't done a long history on a character. Necessarily,
(04:53):
a lot of stuff has been written about her, but
not like the kind of timeline that we like to
do in these So just yes, thank you, all right,
So here we go. Sesame Street is an educational children's
show about the people and muppets that live on the
fictional Sesame Street. It debuted in nineteen sixty nine and
just wrapped its fifty fifth season. Celebrity guest often stopped by,
(05:17):
and the show has tackled some pretty big topics. It's
hugely nostalgic for a lot of people. It's won over
one hundred and fifty Emmys and is broadcast around the world.
One of the main stays of Sesame Street for many
was the character Maria Figuera later Rodriguez, played by Sonia Manzano,
who debuted in nineteen seventy one and stayed until twenty fifteen.
(05:40):
Maria was a Puerto Rican teenager who got a job
at the library, which later became the fix It Shop.
She eventually became a full time partner at the shop,
which the shop has gone through a lot of changes.
I have to say I was trying to keep track
of it, but she was generally involved in that. Over
the years, she has been involved in a lot of
Sesame Street segments, earning the nickname Skinny from Oscar the Grouch.
(06:05):
She frequently acted as the mediator between the muppets. She
was the quote street man, as it's often called for
their antics. For several years, she played the role of
the tramp in the Charlie Chaplin pantomime skits. In nineteen
seventy nine, she and the other characters of Sesame Street
visited Puerto Rico for a few episodes. Though she was
(06:28):
romantically involved with David in the nineteen seventy she went
on to Mary Louise. In nineteen eighty eight, her mother
came from Puerto Rico for the wedding. I tried to
figure out if Big Bird officiated it, because the picture
implied that he did. But I don't know.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Saying that little top tux, I remember this, I remember this.
This is what I had to ask.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Okay, keep quiet. Yeah. But Maria soon became pregnant and
gave birth to her daughter, Gabby in nineteen eighty nine.
Maria Louise ran The Fixed Chop and its various iteration
as the mail At Shop the laundromat four years. In
twenty eleven, she was hired as the superintendent of one,
two three Sesame Street. She retired in twenty fifteen, though
(07:11):
Manzano reprised the role in twenty nineteen for Sesame Street's
fiftieth anniversary celebration and in twenty twenty for Cian Inn's
town hall, coming together, standing up to racism, and this
(07:33):
character has a huge legacy. She was one of the
first Latina characters on national television, and the actress who
portrayed her, Manzano, was also a first generation Puerto Rican
who grew up in the Bronx, and she was really
like pivotal. She later became writer for the show, and
she would write in like, no, this is not the
(07:53):
fruit that would be in the stand in this neighborhood
or in Puerto Rico or She was really passionate about
making the Bronx look like the Bronx, and that kind
of that stayed. She won fifteen Emmys for her work
as part of the writing staff. In twenty sixteen, she
got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Daytime Emmys quote
(08:14):
in recognition as a pioneer and the representation of Latinos
on television and for forty four years of portraying Maria
on Sesame Street while positively impacting the lives of generation
of children and their families. And she has so many
awards and honorary degrees. She's also done a ton of stuff,
(08:35):
so definitely go and check her out. She's written books,
she's written young adult books, she's she helped, she helped
create a PBS animated children's show called Alma's Way. So
just a ton of stuff, and she's she's spoken a
lot about this character and how it impacted her and
how she learned more about herself through the role. She
(08:55):
wrote a memoir called Becoming Maria, Love and Chaos in
the South World, and she's really open about a lot
of stuff in there. And here's a quote from a
radio interview. It was revolutionary. I have very strong feelings
about it because I was born and raised in the
South Bronx, and I watched a lot of television in
the fifties, shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It
(09:17):
to Beaver and shows like that. I never saw any
Latin people, and you never saw people of color. So
when I saw Susan on Sesame Street, I was a
college student at Carnegie Mellon University, and I said, oh
my goodness. I mean, there's this beautiful black woman with
his gorgeous husband, Matt Robinson, Susan and Gordon. I said,
this is really too much. So then I became Maria
(09:37):
on the show. And by the way, because Latin activists
demanded it so on the West Coast, and they said,
if you have these role models for African American children,
what about Latinos And they went okay, great, and it
was so new that yeah, So then I got cast
and then I became what I needed to see as
a kid. And she's really talked about it and like
the stress she felt about it, about being a good representation,
(10:02):
but also how at least it sounded like from the
interviews I read, the creators were very like, we want
you to be you, we don't want you to be
like she tells the story of one day they put
like way too much makeup on her and the costume
was bad, and they were like, no, that's not who
she is, Like don't cast her for her, don't do this,
(10:24):
and then her really coming into that her own as
the writer and making those like no, we shouldn't, it
should be this, that's not how we would do it,
and then having that impact on millions of people who
watched and saw this. So it's really amazing, an amazing
(10:44):
story now long like she was there for a long time.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I mean, it's one of the first people that I
think of. That's why I mentioned her, and I knew
her name immediately, Like I forget so many things. We
know this and I've talked about it by that I
didn't watch a lot of children's shows because I was
a little older, as well as the fact that I
didn't know English, so it was a little more difficult.
But I can't quite remember all the things. And this
(11:10):
was one of the shows of course, Like I said that,
I did as I'm pretty sure my parents put on
for me, and remembering Maria, remembering her specifically again because
feeling that connection as a brown person obviously, but also
her motherly nature or sisterly nature I guess probably when
I saw her, No, she was a lot older than me,
(11:32):
but just having her as a representation and genuinely kind
and I think that's one of the things that seesme
Street continues to grow and learn, is to represent people well,
like if not just throwing in a token like many
of the other things, or bringing in a person that
kind of looks like it could be, they actually bring
people in to represent these characters really well because they
(11:56):
understand these characters really well and then open it up
really hard dialogue through puppets, Like it's such an amazing thing,
but they actually mesh well with human characters as well,
so you know, it's really fantastic. I feel like it
was something that I didn't necessarily connect it to but wanted,
(12:16):
and I think that's for a lot of people. But again, yeah,
I remember Gordon and Susan looked so well in that
they were such kind like parental figures as well. That
was guiding Sesame Street in its way and opening up
this diversity as well as like, yeah, it felt like
New York with puppets. Yeah, it did such a good job.
(12:37):
But Maria was a seminal character with me finding a
marginalized woman, a minority, I guess at that point in
these characters fulfilling roles of caretaker and loving friend and
seeing that was something that significantly I remember. I might
not remember all the things that she went through. I
(12:59):
forgot that they did wedding, but I remember, I remember,
like I remember this, but all of those things, and
I didn't realize she had like the character had a child,
like what was pregnant. I'm like, they did the thing,
they went through the gamut of raising the children through
Sesame Street, and I remember that vividly and loving that
(13:21):
the human characters is what I remember more as a
children than I do, even like the puppets to a
certain degree. So when I say like Elmo has become
a main character, he wasn't at that point.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Cookie Monster was the of course Cookie Monster, and all
of them were present, but they weren't the seminal characters
that I felt like I was watching the humans interacting
with the puppets, you know what, does that make sense?
And the puppets were not puppets. There were real life
characters to me, So I'm not saying that, but I
do remember at that point in time those human characters
as well, and it kind of like has changed a
(13:57):
little bit because I don't know much about T's Me
treat today, so I don't know who the characters on
there are the human characters. But I remember Maria, I
remember Gordon, I remember Luise like I remember them vividly.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, I mean those are formative when you're a kid,
formative memories, and clearly this character was so important just
so many people, and so I'm very glad that you
suggested it.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Thank you for doing the work for me.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Oh you helped me out plenty. And if I got
anything wrong, please let me know, listeners, because I really have.
I've only seen like clips. I don't know why. I
don't know what happened. Something went awrise somewhere in my child.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Maybe you were watching horror movies then, like you were
talking about X File, so it could have been No,
I wasn't scary enough for you.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, maybe well, but that's a mystery for me to
solve later. But in the meantime, listeners, if you have
any thoughts about this, this character or Sesame Street or
any suggestions, please let us know. You can email us
at Stephania mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com or Hello
at stuff I'll Never Told You dot com. You can
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(15:13):
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