Big Bird’s Big Gay Love Story: From Birth to the 2012 Presidential Race
Word that the first presidential debate had made Big Bird a factor in the election reached the puppet’s sole surviving creator at his new home in New Zealand. “Amazing,” says Christopher Lyall, who assisted the late Kermit Love in producing the first Big Bird, as well as the successors for decades afterward.
Lyall says of the present electoral process in general, “It’s very frustrating having to observe the political games and the lies.”
Lyall and Love were partners in work and life for half a century and in the 1980s traveled with Big Bird to the White House for the annual Easter egg roll. The most momentous results of that presidential nexus were the grass stains on Big Bird’s outsize feet. Nobody could have imagined that this puppet might someday play even the smallest role in deciding who would occupy the Oval Office.
“We’ll see,” Lyall says.
The possible political impact of this 8-foot-2 yellow plumed character takes a turn from the ridiculous to the delightfully apt when you consider this: Big Bird was the product of a profound partnership between two men that was in every way a marriage save for in the strictly legal sense that the law until very recently forbade.
“Where he was, I was,” Lyall says.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/10/big-bird-s-big-gay-love-story-from-birth-to-the-2012-presidential-race.html
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