Sesame Street Refresh with David Gallo

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Show notes & links

• David Gallo Design
• Stephen Colbert’s Hot Takes: Sesame Street
• Read: Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis
• Watch: Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street
• Around the Corner in Season 25
  • 456 Sesame Street, a brownstone that houses the Day Care Center, operated by Angela.
  • The Furry Arms Hotel, a Muppet hotel owned by Sherry Netherland, with her employees Humphrey, Ingrid, Benny Rabbit, Otis the Elephant Elevator Operator, and a Dinger.
  • The Birdland jazz club, which featured live music hosted by Hoots the Owl.
  • 10 Sesame Street, a two-story building. The lower floor is occupied by Finders Keepers, a thrift shop full of objects from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, owned by Ruthie. The top floor contains a dance studio owned by dance teacher Celina.
  • A Subway Station.
  • The Park, which has a jungle gym and a pond. The Squirrelles live in a tree there.
  • A newsstand, run by Oscar.
  • Clock Tower.
  • An Electronics Store (seen only in Sesame Street Stays Up Late as a part of the 456 building)

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Episode Takeaways

1. The set was refreshed in 2015 for the 46th season.
2. The refresh aimed to modernize the set while preserving its legacy, balancing new elements with historical details rather than replacing everything entirely.
3. One of the major goals was to make the set more competitive with animated children’s programming by improving visual appeal and adding vibrant colors while maintaining a realistic, lived-in feel.
4. The refresh introduced a stronger sense of place by clarifying where key characters lived, such as relocating Elmo to the 123 apartment building and giving Cookie Monster a home above Hooper’s Store.
5. Gallo incorporated urban planning principles into the redesign, adding elements like a community garden and repurposing an underutilized building into a community center to reflect how real neighborhoods evolve.
6. The updates allowed for more dynamic storytelling, giving writers new locations and opportunities for character interactions, which they began fully utilizing in later seasons.
7. Audience reaction was mixed at first, with some resistance to change, particularly regarding the relocation of Oscar the Grouch, though the overall response was positive.
8. The refresh included small but meaningful details, such as a faded public telephone sticker alongside a new free WiFi sign outside Hooper’s Store, to illustrate the passage of time.
9. Hidden references and personal touches were woven into the set design, including Easter eggs related to the band Phish and a fictional book named after Gallo’s partner.

Guest Bio

David Gallo is an award-winning scenic designer and visual storyteller whose work has appeared in dozens of cities around the world. He has designed over 30 Broadway plays and musicals and is the recipient of the esteemed Tony Award and two Emmy Awards. He also designs media, video, and projections and directs and visually writes shows.

“Sesame Street stayed largely mired in 1968, which was great. But it didn’t reflect modern world to its audience. It was my function as the designer of the refresh to come in and add 35 years worth of history to a neighborhood, that would have evolved in a very particular way.”
-David Gallo

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Episode Transcript

Journey with Purpose: [00:00:00] David, welcome to the show. Tell us who you are, where we’re speaking to you from, and what do you do?

David Gallo: My name is David Gallo. I am speaking to you from my studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And I am a scenic designer and a media designer for live events.

Journey with Purpose: So what does that mean? What do the shows and the events ask you to do that you come in and do your magic?

David Gallo: Well, you know, usually most common is you get a script and be doing a play or a new musical. That’s probably the most common thing that I do. And so the origin of those projects. It starts out, especially a musical with a script and a score. And then it is my function to create the [00:01:00] physical environment and the method of storytelling for that particular piece of theater or live event do the same thing for plays.

And when I’m doing a rock and roll events, usually that’s a little bit more, there’s not a script usually that starts to sort of procure creative from scratch, working with a band and developing an idea, you know, directly With them,

Journey with Purpose: So what sort of training and on the job learning did you do to prepare yourself for all this?

David Gallo: to prepare myself to be a designer and a working in this field, I went to college I did four years at a college learning, the art and craft of stage design and learning theater you know, learning plays, learning art history. It’s a very broad brush. When you’re a designer, especially for the theater, you know, one day you’re in 17th century France and then the next year on the moon in the future. you don’t have any particular world that you’re in for any given period of time. You’re constantly shifting to the next. And so a broad knowledge of architecture of art of theater, of, [00:02:00]Politics,, everything goes into the mix and everything helps you attain that goal of being a designer.

Journey with Purpose: So one of the reasons why I’m talking to you today is, I’m reading Street Gang, the history of Sesame street. Sesame is on our TV almost every other day. Anytime we have TV on, we try to watch a little bit of it. Can you take us back to when you started working with Sesame and children’s television workshop on the refresh, 

David Gallo: well, the refresh was a fascinating assignment and then Preserving Sesame Street’s history was always a paramount importance to me. You know, I didn’t obliterate anything without there being a story reason why it was gone. I didn’t add anything without there being a story reason why it was there. Decisions were not made in a vacuum. They were all made in a very particular place based on many years of the existence of the show and then the wonderful scripts that were, you know, newly being created for it. I’m became a student of the history of that set. And one of the [00:03:00] joys of working on the show is just discovering new things every day that shine a light on what it was like back in the day. the perfect Sesame Street generation. My mother sat in my, me and my brother in front of the television. She was a very progressive, very hip, You know, hippie mom and she sat us in front of the TV and said, you got to watch this show. It’s really important. And we were like little, I don’t remember it, but I remember the show. I just don’t remember the first time I saw it, we watched the very first episode. And so. I have seen that episode now many times and taken the things from that episode and placed them into the environment like they scratch the two D’s into the cement in front of Hooper’s store in the very first episode, they write double D in the store and so that’s there again, you know, the, many of the details lost to time have returned.

Journey with Purpose: what was the problem they were looking to solve and get your help out with?

David Gallo: You know, it’s interesting, there was a number of very specific problems that they wanted to solve. they felt that they needed to be able to compete with the animated shows. Sesame street was unique as we all know, [00:04:00] you know, in 1968, something spectacular debuted and it was watched by millions of children.

And then some of those children grew up to create television shows. And so we were, so the show is in competition with people that grew up watching it. And so there was a desire to upgrade and upscale the production so that it was able to exist in the same world as the other shows that were becoming very popular with children. Now it’s the only live show. And so preserving that is very important.

I brought to it when I came on board, what, in terms updating it was being the sort of urban planner and the years that went by on the street, the way that things would have changed over time, things would have evolved over time. And they never did. Sesame Street stayed largely mired in 1968, which was great. But it didn’t reflect modern world to its audience. And so it was my function as the designer of the refresh was to come in and add 30, 35 years worth of history to a neighborhood that would have evolved you [00:05:00] know, in a very particular way. And so that renewal was a big part of what I was asked to do. 

Another challenge that I was specifically brought, Was that for the first time they wanted to know where people lived. We wanted to know where Elmo’s apartment was. We moved Elmo into one, two, three apartment building. We put cookie monsters home above Hooper’s store. We were able to locate characters in specific locales so that the audience could identify with place as well as character. I moved Oscar the grouch, which I got a lot of mail about, but I took Oscar from the camera right side of the neighborhood and moved him over to the left on the corner, right by the Arbor section. So he was able to comment on the goings on in the community much more clearly. those were some of the challenges that were brought to me, by the writers and the producers of the show in order to take it to the next level.

Journey with Purpose: So that’s fascinating to me. That’s like on one hand, there’s this like fast forward of 30 odd [00:06:00] years. That’s. You have to support. And then there’s this other part of creating armatures or opportunity for storytelling that wasn’t there before. And I wonder where there was ever in tension or through the design and the build process, those started to be in harmony.

David Gallo: I think it all worked in harmony. one of the things that I did was virtually bulldoze the buildings that were behind the 1 2 3 brownstone, the arbor area. I just took them out. I said, okay, let’s just get rid of this. let’s create a community garden. And so in the lot that would have been behind 123 Brownstone, I created a community garden out of the detritus of the building that was there. So it’s made out of all sorts of architectural bits and pieces put together to make that garden. you know, we built a community garden out of a space that was cleared for the street, for the community. And then when it comes to this building, there’s this carriage house that had been sitting in the back of the Arbor area since 1968 and [00:07:00] very little was ever really done with it. I mean, it had been an animal hospital for a while. It had been a number of different things, but nothing ever really took. And so I said, well, if you got a useless building in the community, you’ve got some old rusting piece of infrastructure. Let’s buy it from the city for a dollar and rebuild it. And so we rebuilt it into the community center and we built a garden on top. There’s a whole rooftop terrace, which is up there. There’s all sorts of, you know, wonderful bits and pieces that are there specifically for the community that grew out of this old decrepit building that had been just demolished. Sitting there unloved for so long. It’s almost the way that like the High Line, where you took this rusting old piece of New York City infrastructure and turned it into a beautiful, modern, you know, take. It was that kind of inspiration for the Carriage House.

Journey with Purpose: reflecting. On the pre, what, season 44 refresh, the most direct analogy I can think of my head is the buildings were in a minor key and they were desaturated and now the buildings [00:08:00] are kind of in a major key. They’re their own characters. They’re a little bit more foreground. Was that a piece of your thinking there or was that just as part of the overall vision of the refresh? 

David Gallo: one of the problems, so to speak, that they wanted to solve was color. They wanted more color in the world. And that’s tricky because you’ve got a cast that are all different colors. You know, you’ve got a lead character that’s bright red. And you’ve got a. It’s, I, I say it’s just the most wonderful place to work because all of my paints are colored you know any color could be a complexion. And so, you Changing the color scheme of the show, I wanted to up the color without overwhelming the audience. And so, if you look at, like, The Carriage House as an example, there’s an incredible amount of depth to the brick. And it’s this beautiful, rich series of reds. But the characters like Elmo specifically who is red, pops right off of it. So, guess I could say that I upped chroma on a lot of this stuff. but found a balance. And the other thing that [00:09:00] I did, which is not always, I think appreciated was that I weathered things a lot more than it had been.

I brought actually a tremendous amount of grit back to the street. 

Journey with Purpose: I was younger then and I definitely remember when the update happened and it was in the ether and the fact that you got lots of comments on it as a designer I feel like I’m a sensitive person and I’m sure that was something that you had to like deal with, but it also shows how important the street and the show is to people. So how did you, navigate that?

David Gallo: How did I navigate the response?

Journey with Purpose: yeah,

David Gallo: Well, I loved it. I didn’t feel beat up by it at all. I think that there were people that just don’t like change, and they were verbal about it, you know? I mean, they were just saying, like, we did not like moving Oscar the Grouch.

Okay, I can accept that. I can understand that. But for the most part, I thought that the reception of it was really quite good, and, People seem to really invest it in the idea that this neighborhood that everybody grew up in, I mean, everybody grew up there, you know, so everyone is invested in [00:10:00] it.

the responses I thought were tremendous, how much response we got, whether it was positive or negative. I got pilloried by Stephen Colbert, you know, but how great is that? I’m not going to complain, you know, it was awesome.

Colbert

Stephen Colbert: My first hot take tonight, Sesame Street. I’ve always been a fan of Sesame Street. It taught me so much. The alphabet, counting, how to make friends with angry men in dumpsters. But sadly, I can no longer tell you how to get, how to get to Sesame Street. And Sesame Street has changed in more than its address. It got gentrified. Oscar the Grouch has ditched the trash can for a compost bin. Big Bird has a big tree house, and there’s even Wi Fi. What’s next? Cookie Monster’s gluten free? Bert and Ernie adopt Senegalese twins? Will the Count finally seek treatment for his OCD? 

New York & A Third Place 

Journey with Purpose: And so when you hit fast forward, were you trying to reset it back in [00:11:00] New York of present day, or was it this tension between New York versus every place or give it enough quality that it becomes its third place?

David Gallo: I think that it’s New York and a third place at the same time. I think that it’s a magical environment that you can get to by the subway. I also just my own personal feeling about the place is I think it’s New York. I I just think that it was created in New York.

It was originally named after an area of New York. It is a very New York environment, but it’s also a kind of universal space as well. You know, children all over world see this and they have to identify with it on some level. And that’s one of the reasons why the very early research that I did for it was looking at children’s drawings of cities.

You know, that was the, I spent the first week just looking at sketches and crayon drawings and collages all sorts of wonderful bits of art by children from all over the world of how saw their environments. And I tried to, you know, bring some of those sensibilities to the space itself.

Journey with Purpose: That’s a really good point. as we’re writing the line [00:12:00] between reality as set in New York and this artifice, this third place, did that make your job easier? As you could pick and choose and collage it together.

David Gallo: I think that collage is a great word for both the way that I approached Sesame Street because it’s tons of bits and pieces of things put together with sorts of wonderful bits and not always neatly. You know what I mean? like a city there’s, it’s rough around the edges in a few places.

But what I was building is a fictional environment. I mean, it just is. Even though it is incredibly real to all of us. And that’s what I do. So it was never, far from my head as what it was that I was making. I was able to embrace the idea of making this Third environment, third place.

And it all flowed very readily from there. don’t think that it was too much of a challenge to remain in the reality of Sesame street, you know, whatever that is.

Journey with Purpose: I’ve interviewed a couple different historical societies where they have these, [00:13:00] period homes. And talking to them, they talk a lot about how they’re trying to get people in a certain mind frame, a certain idea. again, there’s riding the line between artificial and using the bits and pieces of reality to make that happen. To be able to film and tell a story, you have to do it this way. Did you get any push from the storytellers of like you need to move this way or you need to move things around you talk About moving oscar to sort of camera center so that he could interact a little bit more were there other examples of that where some of the more story and opportunity Really changed your thinking where things existed on the streets

David Gallo: Well, you know, in a weird way at Sesame Street, tail wags the dog and that the writers work with what they see. And so, when I initially created the season 46 redo That was with a tremendous amount of input from the writers, generalities, you know, put Oscar somewhere else. You know, make the colors more appealing.

Those things [00:14:00] we just talked about. But reality is that the writers, because they write with what they see, They weren’t able to for another season be able to write scripts for the new set. So they started exploiting the new places that they had to work with. The community center has become the focus of the neighborhood, but it wasn’t for the first year because they hadn’t written any scripts that had anything to do with the community center because they’d never heard of it.

It was a new thing. there’s an ESU, which is, a moment where everybody, we call it, everybody shows up. It actually has a different term, but the ESU is when people show up for the first time. And there was the day that all of the writers. And the producers and everybody that worked on the show, including few members of the original cast.

I mean, you know, Bob was there, the actual Bob, you know, and they all saw the place for the very first time. And there was this incredible sense of wonderment because they had this environment now that they could suddenly opened up and they were able to write all sorts of new material for, it changed the arc of the show, I think rather dramatically, the response also, I was the best endorsement that [00:15:00] I got over the course of the entire five years that I worked at Sesame Street was when Bob came to me and said when they told me that they were redoing the set, I was horrified and now that I see it, I feel like I’m home.

And I was just completely touched by that. I mean, if I could do that, then that was successful.

Journey with Purpose: That’s amazing. It’s almost like, you were able to listen to the writers, listen to, you know, all the different people who, go into this, but then you and the team created this play thing that now the writers have this new toy that they get to play with and they get to like figure out where they can break the toy or like what the toy goes together.

David Gallo: No, it’s true. I mean, forgive me. I don’t remember the artist’s name who takes the water towers and makes the stained glass and pieces of infrastructure and then does the stained glass application. I built one on top of the community center with a little cushion, It’s a place to hang out. And my envisioning for that, my idea for that, was that it was some sort of place for kids to go and read and be alone. And that has turned into Julia, the autistic [00:16:00]child’s Muppet’s safe space. That’s amazing to me. I mean, that was exactly what I intended, but it took three years for it to happen.

But now they shoot in there all the time.

Journey with Purpose: That’s awesome.

David Gallo: Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Journey with Purpose: When I do work in the city or build things that exist in real life. I keep thinking about, how I think I’m going to use it is going to be completely different than how somebody else in one day, two days, three years is going to use it. I think of it as adding affordances so that they can mess around with it. And the controlled chaos or the gentle anarchy of Sesame, it sounds like a little bit, that’s what this was. It’s like, how do we build in all these different things that people could start grabbing and playing with?

David Gallo: Yeah, the set is also just from a purely practical standpoint able to transform in order to be able to shoot Muppets, which is not the easiest thing to do. so whole sections the set come apart, move around. There’s a whole process to actually shooting an episode of Sesame Street because you have puppeteers, the people operating the [00:17:00] Muppets all over the place, and keeping them hidden and keeping the place lively. from a technical standpoint, it was a lot to learn very quickly.

In Jokes

Journey with Purpose: Maybe this is just me, but when I work on projects, oftentimes there’ll be parts of it that become like a little in joke to the design team. And we’ll put jokes into either, the design itself or to drawings or we’ll name things after people, things like that. Do you have any examples that you can share with us? 

David Gallo: Yeah, the whole set is completely covered with Phish Easter eggs. There’s the band Phish. There’s stuff all over the place. I just I do a lot of work with the band and I just started putting stuff all over the place and it gets recognized, you know what I mean?

People do see just colors or patterns that are familiar with the band or names of records or places that they played gigs. It’s just all kinds of little, you know, fun Moments that populate the area amused me anyway. And I say that to this day, people will notice things and show up.

Journey with Purpose: And there’s another one. my partner, Vivica. very first [00:18:00] episode, I made a fake book called Vivica’s Unicycle because she rides a unicycle and juggles. And so it’s a long story. But somebody just noticed that two days ago. watching the show with their son, and so all of our friend group all discovered this Easter egg, this book, Viveca’s Unicycle, just a couple of days ago, and I did that seven years ago, something, eight years ago, something like that. 

It’s always fascinating. Like just the sheer amount of stuff you have to populate a scene. a lot of times, you know, we’re constantly grabbing stuff from our lives to stuff it in there and oftentimes it’s like, okay, this is placeholder until we get something better. And then you’re like, oh, wow, this is good enough. Let’s just go. And so it just like, it gets shipped and that’s why, you know, young Randy would have like put swear words or things in there. But now it’s like, no. We don’t do that stuff because you know, it might ship.

David Gallo: Yeah, I hear you.

Mr Hoopers Store

Journey with Purpose: what was your favorite little detail that you and the team put in 

David Gallo: My favorite detail is so little, it’s nothing, but it’s, the [00:19:00] response was tremendous. Growing up, watching the show, Mr. Hooper’s store always had that little sign out front, that little round sticker that had the public telephone, and people that are younger don’t remember, but there was a time when you had a sign outside of a, maybe a candy store that said there was a public phone inside.

And so, that sticker is still there, but it’s so little. It’s very faded and worn. And then right next to it is a brand new sticker that says free wifi. So that to me kind of defined what it was that I was doing there. You know, it’s saying, okay, This 1968 detail has got to remain because it’s just such an iconic part of the show.

And even though people don’t recognize it or remember they it’s part of the visual information that’s brought in when they’re watching the television show, but we don’t have pay phones anymore. Certainly not, you know, in candy stores. So I added the wifi. That little detail has gotten a tremendous response.

That was the thing that Colbert pilloried quote me on, but obviously it’s a wonderful little thing. So, it was fun to have that [00:20:00] kind of response.

Journey with Purpose: like to connect that back to what you said earlier about the carriage house and you know You bought it from the city for a dollar and I love that idea that for each of these moves You’re sort of thinking backwards why would that happen? Well, why would that happen? Well, why would that happen? And, you know, oftentimes, you know, in my work, I do a lot of qualitative research and interview people. We talk about the five why’s, you know, ask them why five times you’ll actually get to the thing. As you were asking the set, why those many times, did you get to a point where You got a response from the set or from, you know, the anthropomorphizing the set, but did you get to a point where you’re like, wow, I never thought about it this way, or it was something that was surprising to you?

David Gallo: I don’t know, I don’t know quite how to respond to that. I mean, the set definitely feels like a living place to me and there’s thousands or tens of thousands of decisions that one has to make when you’re, creating something like, this, most of them, we don’t even think of consciously, but there’s so many decisions that one has to make.[00:21:00]

And I think that it’s easy to say that the set talks to you. I had a huge advantage in that my office, the art department’s office is the only office that’s actually in Kaufman Astoria studios. So, there’s two fold blessings of that. One is. There’s a physical distance of a river between you and the producers, so you don’t have to kind of deal with them every day, all, you know, you deal with every day, but both the email and calls and stuff like that, so there’s a nice sort of separation.

The art department has being on the other side of the river. And the other thing is that we at any point could go down and just be there. It was just down one flight of stairs, and I could walk around in the environment and really take it in. Watched a lot of old episodes, a lot of old photographs.

So I would say that the set itself talked back and helped make those decisions. that I think was one of the reasons why the redo was so successful. If I had demolished everything, which I was encouraged to do, you know, they would not have been opposed to me just taking everything away and starting from [00:22:00] scratch.

But that made no sense to me. And so working with what was there, I think, was one of the reasons why it was a success.

Journey with Purpose: Louis Kahn famous mid century architect. He would ask the brick what the brick wanted to be. And then, you know, he would build, you know, a giant library.

David Gallo: I had a for 16 years in a Louis Kahn building. It was pretty great.

Journey with Purpose: Yeah, it’s, he’s a fascinating character. I wonder that that part about that they were giving you space as you were looking back, you know, as I was doing research for this conversation and it reminded me of Around the Corner for that season where they created all the whole set that was around the corner, there was the furry arms hotel and the subway station and the park and another newsstand by Oscar, but it seemed like that only really lasted a very short amount of time. And so I wonder. If you had talked about that, about around the corner or other experiments with [00:23:00] storytelling in preparation for the refresh.

David Gallo: yeah, there was a lot of discussion about round the corner, you know and about filling in the blanks which was what that show did, you know, was said, “okay, what’s on the other side of the street.” We had blanks on our, stage as well. We had alleyways that didn’t have any purpose. We had buildings that had no purpose. We had, we brought story. 

I have seen around the corner just little bits and pieces of it. It was not a huge part of my research, but what I did get a chance to do which was interesting is I there’s a drop. There’s a ginormous backdrop of what’s on the other side of the street. I mean, people always want to know what’s on the other side. And you can tell now, and it’s Spinney Street. We named it Spinny Street. Just again, the art department just did that. And it’s just wonderful buildings and, you know, all of this stuff has a real charm to it.

But you can, certain episodes you can see the other, the opposite direction. You know, not often. It’s a pain to set up. But when you do, you have a almost 360 degree street to shoot from. And, That was one of my goals. I was only able to say five years. I [00:24:00] have a career in theater that had to get back to, but five years was enough time to put enough of an impact on the show.

Journey with Purpose: But one of my dreams was a complete 360 degree Sesame street set, which would have been, I suppose, pretty ambitious, but we were getting there, we were chipping away at it. You know, we were like pretty close. 

David, thanks for spending time with us. Can you tell us a little bit about where we can find you and your team and anything else you want to share with us?

David Gallo: So, you can find some of my work at davidgallow.com, you can see some examples of things that I’ve done, theater and television and rock and roll and all sorts of, clever things that are in there. And currently I am designing a play about the meeting of Marlon Brando and and Tennessee Williams, which is really kind of cool. And I’m doing a new musical about champagne. Which is a very big large scale musical that takes place over the French Revolution about the origin of champagne. Which is a rather interesting topic and not one that I ever expected to know anything about. And I [00:25:00] can tell you now, like, I know more about champagne than I ever thought I would for a person that doesn’t drink.

Outro

Journey with Purpose: Today’s episode was sponsored by the number 35 and the letter J.

Many thanks to David Gallo for his time in helping us reflect on how he helped update something which almost everybody will have an opinion on and how looking to the past can inspire the present and the future. If you want to learn more about the history of Sesame Street, you should really read the book Street Gang by Michael Davis.

There’s also a documentary with the same name available, I think it’s on Prime. It’s also very good to see. There’s a lot of archival footage about the street when it first opened in 1969 and some of the refreshes over the years. The book is very thorough about the beginning of Sesame Street. [00:26:00] And you get to meet one of the founders of Sesame Street, Joan Ganz Cooney, who said, quote, I want Sesame Street to jump and move fast and feel and sound like 1969 because kids are turned on visually.

You can also learn how John Stone, one of the founding producers, drew inspiration from New York and from Harlem for the original set. He said, and I quote, for preschool children in Harlem, the street is where the action is, are set, had to be an inner city street. And more particularly it had to be a brownstone.

So the cast and kids could stoop in age old New York tradition, sitting on the front step and watching the world go by end quote. I would be remiss if I don’t share that this episode drops when the Trump administration is illegally impounding congressionally appropriated funds across the federal budget for all sorts of [00:27:00] things they don’t like that they couldn’t Cut through the normal appropriations methods, the legal method, while also trying to illegally purge the federal workforce by 70 odd percent because billionaires don’t like two things, regulations and state capacity. Trump, Elon Musk, and the rest of the congressional Republican caucus should do us a favor and watch a little bit more Sesame Street where they can learn that we are in this together and that being kind to each other and talking to each other like normal. Kind people is a public good.

Call your congressperson before they try to defund Sesame Street and PBS. It is coming. Take care of each other and Elmo loves [00:28:00] you.