PLUME: Do you regret giving up journalism to pursue puppeteering?

OZ: Nah, I think the fourth estate is quite happy without me. Actually, I’m ashamed of what the fourth estate is doing these days. Nevertheless, I think they’re doing fine without me.

PLUME: Give me an overview of what working with the Muppets was like in the 60’s. It was just you, Jim, Jane Henson, Jerry Juhl, Don Sahlin, and Jerry Nelson, right?

OZ: Well, it was not quite that yet. I came onboard because Jane (Henson’s wife) was pregnant with Brian and she could no longer work. At that time, they had just moved from Washington, D.C. to New York, in 1963. Jane was no longer really working with the Muppets, because she already had two kids and was expecting a third. So when she had the third, she was definitely not working with the Muppets, although she helped me learn lip-sync in the studio with Jim. Other than that, she really wasn’t performing. I came in in 1963 to a real bare flat with two rooms on East 53rd Street, where Don Sahlin (Muppet designer) had his workshop in the front.

Don Sahlin did the hand puppets, and Jerry Juhl had a little desk there in the next room along with Jim’s desk. Jerry Juhl wrote for the Muppets, and I joined as a performer who really didn’t know how to perform the Muppets. I took a long time to learn… Many years.

So there was Jim, who was the head of it all and did everything, Don Sahlin, who built the puppets, Jerry Juhl, who wrote, and I performed. We all overlapped a great deal. And we had a secretary. And that’s how it was in the beginning. Then after awhile, Jerry Nelson came in.

PLUME: Jerry Nelson came in during your “military scare,” right?

OZ: Yeah. Jerry actually came in before that, when I going to go into the military, but I got a 4-F because of my heart. He was taking over the job, but then I came back.

PLUME: I can only imagine the look on his face when you came back in…

OZ: I had given up my apartment, I had given up my job to Jerry because Jim needed somebody to perform and Jerry was excellent. I had my going away party… I was supposed to be going away for two years. I went down to Whitehall Street and they rejected me, which I’m thrilled about. So I went back, and the only person in the office was Jerry. I opened the door, and he was on the telephone.
Now this is Jerry, who finally got a steady job, and now here I am, back. He thinks he doesn’t have a steady job anymore. So I open the office door and there he is on the phone, and I’ll never forget this, he looks up at me – continues talking – hangs up the phone, walks around the desk, sits down on the couch, and says, “Shit.”

So, I went off to Europe for a couple of months and bummed around, then I came back and got an apartment. I had no money whatsoever, and I got a job selling rug shampoo on 14th Street for about a day, then eventually Jim needed both of us.

PLUME: Now during this time, the primary focus of the company was on The Jimmy Dean Show…

OZ: I came in to do The Jimmy Dean Show mainly, yeah.

PLUME: …And the commercial work, which was throughout the 60’s…

OZ: That was throughout. We stopped commercials when Sesame Street came up and we didn’t need the money. Until then, the commercials were always the bread and butter. We’d take turns driving to Washington. When we’d get there, we’d flip a coin to see who was going to stay in whose room at the Marriott. Two rooms and the four of us would split up to save money. We went to Washington, D.C. because Jim came from there and he had a good deal with the studio there. A very tiny studio named Rodel. We did hundreds of commercials in that time period before Sesame Street.

PLUME: How true is the apocryphal story that being within the La Choy Dragon suit for the La Choy commercial forever turned you off to doing suit puppetry?

OZ: I hated it. I hated doing it totally. Jim knew I hated it. I think he relished it. The La Choy dragon was a bitch. I was totally blind in there. I always hated being inside characters, but I was the main performer and that was my job.

PLUME: You also had special effects to deal with….

OZ: It wasn’t that much of a special effect. It was a flame-thrower that Don Sahlin had a bottle of something attached to and squirted it and I had to be in the right position at the right time. The La Choy dragon was a bitch.

I had to do a couple of others because, again, I was the main performer, but Jim knew that it was going to be short lived after awhile because I just hated doing those things… Loathed it. I’d done enough of it.

PLUME: What was the segue like going into Sesame Street in ’69?

OZ: Because I was the main performer of the group, I really went from job to job, and all I remember was that there was a job to do. With Sesame Street, there was a little pilot that we had to do for Sesame Street before we came on to play around and talk. I don’t know who we did it for, maybe the backers or the government, I don’t know. I remember doing that, and then we had Sesame Street and I was just doing Sesame Street every day completely, and some days until 2:00 in the morning.

To me, I was a worker. I was a drone. I kind of went where the job was, so it didn’t mean a lot to me as far as it being a special program. What it meant was that I could actually work out characters, because for years prior to that I was frightened to death to do my own characters – to do my own voices. I didn’t do voices, as a matter of fact. Jim did the voices and I just did performing. So it was a blessing, almost like vaudeville, to do X number of shows a week and grow your characters and grow your craft. For me, that’s what it meant. The idea of Sesame Street being an institution, that never crossed my mind. It was another job.

PLUME: So living in it, you didn’t realize how momentous it really was?

OZ: No. All we were doing was going day by day. I was anyway.

Jim may have had grander schemes and grander visions… Which he did, because he was a visionary. Me, I was a drone who was excited to be working and learning my craft, although I got more and more frustrated only doing puppets because I really wanted to direct. Nevertheless, I was having a great time. I loved Jim, I loved Jerry Juhl and Don and Jerry Nelson.

I never really took my head out of the hole in the ground while I was working until many, many years later that I realized that gee, that was significant. But it wasn’t until many, many years later.

(continued below…)

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