Kermit helped me make artistic leap

THE MUPPETS are as inspirational as they are endearing, and their flaws reflect those of all artists

One of my favourite fictional coteries has always been the Muppets. They’re a true family of artists. People always like coteries of artists in history, from Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. All artists have coteries. They inspire one another. They cling to one another’s coat tails. And, most important, they regard one another as artists before anyone else does.

The first story I ever wrote was about a cockroach that tries to pass himself off as a cricket. I was 9, and after I was done, I was hooked. I was attracted to other children with creative bents. I had a friend who liked to spend his afternoons in a cardboard box with a square cut out of the side, pretending that he was on television. I had another friend who made thousands of drawings of a cartoon crow named Alec. We shared the obsessiveness of young artists who are completely consumed with their projects and are profoundly odd.

The Muppets, similarly, are hopelessly themselves. Their flaws are endearing and reflect those of all artists. Fozzie Bear is one of those artists who has little talent but is stuck following his calling nonetheless. Fozzie works and works at his hopeless craft. He can’t go back to living with other bears now. He wears a pork pie hat and a bow tie, for crying out loud.

Gonzo is one of those over-educated intellectual artists. He probably has an MFA from Yale. He’s dedicated to performing for his own sake, regardless of audience reaction. He makes the kind of art that gets people angry about arts funding. Here he summarizes one of his own acts:

“I shall now defuse this highly explosive bomb while simultaneously, and at the same time, reciting from the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

Miss Piggy embodies the drive to be famous at all costs. There are people you meet at art school or in creative-writing programs who don’t care what on Earth they actually make – as long as they are celebrated for it.

Kermit is the artist who understands that you have to be part businessman to succeed. Not only do you create your art, but you also have to put it out in the world. Kermit’s philosophy is not to let anything get in your way and that, if you go for it, you will indeed get what you want.

In my 20s, I decided to be like Kermit and head to New York City with my daughter to find myself a publisher. We stayed in a tiny apartment above a store that sold Russian antiques. The walls of the narrow stairwell were covered with paintings of roses that an 80-year-old tenant had done.

Greatness felt as if it were just around the corner. I’d go to the children’s library to check my email. I called agents from the pay phone in Washington Square Park.

One Friday night, my daughter and I saw a poster for an outdoor screening of The Muppets Take Manhattan. Off we went.

The sun was going down and our shadows danced about us like Fred Astaire. We began to notice there were lots of people heading in the same direction. You could tell they were artists from their manner of dress: souped-up second-hand clothes. They came out of apartments buildings and from around every corner. They came out of the subway as if a child had just destroyed an ant farm with a stick. Future rock and roll stars and heads of orchestras were probably in the crowd. The next Nobel Prize winner, wearing a pork pie hat and bow tie, was perhaps pulling up on a 10-speed bicycle.

In The Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit is down and out. In one scene, Kermit goes up to the Empire State Building.

He shouts that he is not leaving until he succeeds. He cries out: “You hear me, New York?!”

At this point, the crowd spontaneously leaped to its feet. Two thousand artists screamed, “We hear you, Kermit! We hear you!”

Kermit is the patron saint of the artist’s optimism. Van Gogh’s life is often used to convey how miserable the existence of the struggling artist is. But there’s another side to being an aspiring artist that the Muppets capture: the happy penury, the joy of creating things and the exhilarating excitement of getting better every day. They celebrate the crazy adventures you have and the wonderful oddballs you meet on the way up or down in any walk of life. One week later, I sold my first novel.