This is from 1975, episode 0722 of Sesame Street, with the farm field background they used for several sketches in Season 6 of the show. I was nine years old, a little past the prime viewing age for Sesame, but I still watched when I was home sick or bored, and watching now brought back poi-gnant memories, as did rendering this image. “Bein’ Green” was Kermit’s (and Jim Henson’s!) signature song—Joe Raposo wrote the music and lyrics, and the song has since become a standard in “The Great American Songbook,” sung by many—perhaps most memorably, beyond Henson, Ray Charles. The music fit Henson’s personality, his differ-ence as a creator was that he was able to filter through his being as he “became” Kermit, and perfect for projecting his ideology of loving those who are other—and all others—and ultimately oneself. When performing this song on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1974, Henson brought the then-bro culture to a standstill, saying, “I got all wrapped up watching the dumb frog,” and Jack Benny exclaims, “this little louse is the hit of the show,” as Henson so clearly tran-scends the old patriarchal culture into a new era.

For this image I really got into the abstraction of the background, how the framing of the scene by real aspects of nature with tree leaves perfectly encompasses the “wild-ness” of nature—and the transformative aspects of what can’t be contained in understanding nature, to bliss out, like early American Modernists, into the spirituality of the scene. Kermit is a part of nature, just like, for me growing up as a queer gay kid, it took time to fully accept my own difference, but when I did, to do so with aplomb and quiet self-confidence, knowing in myself that I was “right,” and as long as I accepted myself, that hopefully others could accept me, too, and I could live in my future a happy existence, and that “being green” is a good thing:

When green is all there is to be

It could make you wonder why

But, why wonder? Why wonder?

I’m green and it’ll do fine

It’s beautiful, and I think it’s what I want to be