JDub Records

Last week I received a piece of fascinating Muppet news.  Sesame Street and Phish share genes.

Turns out Trey’s dad, Ernie Anastasio, worked at PBS when Sesame Street was being created and he served as the inspiration for Ernie of Ernie & Bert.  So Ernie and Trey basically share a baby daddy!

While I have found no substantiation of this online, nor any photos of Ernie A to back up the related claim that the Muppet was inspired by his facial features, its still an intriguing revelation for someone who is both a Muppet and Phish fan.

Both play important roles in the creation of JDub.  Other than working in the music industry, the only other job I ever seriously wanted was to work with the Muppets at the Jim Henson Company.  I don’t remember when the idea first took hold, but I have a strong memory of hearing of Henson’s death in 1991 and committing myself to mentioning Henson in my Bar Mitzvah speech two years later (didn’t happen). Sesame Street and The Muppet Show were great, but my interests in the creative world of talking furry creatures and the magical realism of their existence extended to pretty much all Henson projects (Labryinth!!!), perhaps with the exception of Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.  Still, when, as a sophomore in high school, I told my parents I wanted to apply to University of Connecticut, home of the only Bachelor of Fine Arts in puppeteering program, they were non-too thrilled.  Not the controlling type, instead of crushing my dream flat-out, they arranged a meeting with a full time puppeteer in New York City while there on a layover en route to the Alexander Muss High School in Israel.  It was the most depressing outing ever.  The puppeteer presented small shows in his tiny apartment near Washington Square, seemed to barely eek out a living, and, when I told him about my Henson Co dreams, told me he had once been lucky enough to wag a Muppet tail on Sesame Street.  ”Henson’s crew is a small clique,” he told me.  ”There’s almost no way to break in.”  And that was pretty much it.  Dreams crushed, I continued on to Israel, discovered The Roots, Sonic Youth, and the Pharcyde via borrowed cassettes, and spent the next two years convinced that the music industry was a much more sound career path.

In meetings with funders, I often share a very true anecdote about hearing Phish break into Avinu Malkeinu in ‘96 at a show at the Ventura County Fairground.  The pride in hearing a Jewish song (sung well, in Hebrew, by a non-Jew) played to a crowd of thousands, the awakening that Jewishness could be expressed (and lived) beyond synagogue, JCC, and Hebrew School walls, and  the awareness that  others around me seemed to be having similar thoughts all played direclty into my motivations for co-founding JDub six years later.

The Ernie revelation last week was fun to learn, pulling these two strands together for me.  Without either interest, I seriously doubt JDub would exist today.  Yesterday, the Muppet connection may have grown a tiny bit closer.  I met with a staff member at Sesame Workshop about the relaunch of Shalom Sesame, the 1987 mini-series that introduced American Jews to the Israeli version of Sesame Street, Rechov Sumsum, and served to empower positive Jewish identity in kids through overdubbed Hebrew songs by Bert & Ernie and new clips with Sarah Jessica Parker and Itzak Perlman.  Keep your fingers crossed for us, friends. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll see a JDub band or two dancing with Grover, Elmo, and Moishe Oofnik a year from now.

Which JDub band would YOU want to see on Shalom Sesame???

(watch it from 4:00)