“The Green in Me”
I spent the evening watching the new Muppet Movie with my best friends, and I was completely transfixed from the beginning until the end. The moment I saw a muppet on the big screen, a big tear darted from my eye and onto my hand. I had never been really that attached to this ragtag group of puppets, but in the theater, I felt a rush of cleanliness in me. I wasn’t an adult with problems, tribulations and roads-so-rocky - I was a kid. Everything I cared about was right there in the ultra-stylized, white-picket love life presented to me, and I didn’t care about anything else.
It was so beautiful to see Kermit living again, but it arrested me and brought me to think about the personal happiness figures like Kermit the Frog and Charlie Brown bring us, transcending generations! As I walked into the theater, a bald guy asked me why I was seeing the Muppets. I responded that I was a lifelong fan, and he said that I wasn’t even born when they came onto the scene. Dang, man! That’s what’s so important about them! I was born in the late 80s and adore them as ferociously as anybody who grew up with them in the 70s.
But, for as monumentally famous as both Charlie Brown and Kermit are, they are true folk heroes. Perhaps everybody may love them the same, but we all love them individually. The love we feel is individualized, unique and entirely personal; Kermit is your best friend and my best friend. I see Charlie Brown in me. I have changed so much, but at my very core, hearing Chuck deliver a heavy sigh can still reduce me to tears.
As such, seeing Kermit hold the weight of the world on his shoulders with a crooked sigh and his trademark gulp overfilled my cup of emotions, spilling malted sympathy all over the table. Damnit Kermit. There are so many things we have different, but he is still the one I am on the inside, or at the very least, the one I have always wanted to be.
And for that reason, every time I hear that frog say that it’s not easy being green, I feel that extraordinarily popular song like it was spoken only to me.
You’re right, it’s not easy. But it’s all that we can be.
