There's a long entry about Jerry and the roles he took for the Muppets on the Muppet Wiki, at:

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Jerry_Nelson

There is a note on Jerry's starting with the Muppets in 1965 in the Jim Henson Red Book:

http://www.henson.com/jimsredbook/2011/12/03/121-51965/

In addition to doing the Chrysler Show at the 1964 World's Fair, Jerry had also performed as a puppeteer, doing traditional puppets, at the Bill Baird theater in the Village.

Jerry, Jacquie, and Jacquie's sister Vannessa worked on the Chrysler Show at the 1964 World's Fair.  Jacquie writes:


Jerry and I worked at the 1964 World's Fair for two years. -- we were puppeteers at the Chrysler Pavilion.  We were animated "car parts" created by Bil Baird.  It was a hoot and great fun.  We wore what puppeteers call "blacks" because we were not on a bridge up above the stage, as was often the case with Bil Baird marionettes.  These were (mostly) hand puppets, so we were on stage and would have been visible to the audience. The solution --  we were covered head to toe in soft cotton black costumes.  Only the most observant could see an occasional shadow of us moving around.

At the time we lived just off Queens Boulevard in a two family house.  We lived on one side of the house and the owner (our landlady) was on the other side.  We had half of the back yard, which was divided by a grape arbor with a little walkway.  Our landlady was a nice older lady who kept her back yard neat and mowed.  We didn't have a lawn mower and we just let the grass grow.  Christine loved it and so did we.  It was a tiny wild meadow.  The grass was almost 3 feet high and it waved in the wind.  For some reason it stopped growing at 3 feet so it never got crazy high.  And to Jerry's and my surprise, our landlady never complained, never asked us to mow it, and never had it mowed herself.  Maybe she liked us.  Jerry was handsome.  I was pretty and Christine was adorable at 3 years old.  We didn't know yet that she had cystic fibrosis.  It was happy times.

There was a shiny silver diner next door to us, with red velvet booths and all that kind of fancy stuff.  They had chocolate chip cookies that were the size of a large salad plate.  We were shocked by that excess and renamed the diner The Fat People’s Diner.  We didn't see fat people, but we figured we would one day because of the cookies.

When they first moved to New York, Jerry was taking acting classes.  Jacquie was working at the Gaslight Club, which was a precursor of the Playboy Clubs that came along later.  They shared an apartment with Vaughn Maeder and his wife.  The apartment was laid out on a long hallway.  They each had one end of it.  Vaughn did a wonderful, funny impersonation of John Kennedy that was very popular.  Of course after Kennedy was killed it also killed Vaughn's act.  There is a Wikipedia entry about Vaughn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughn_Meader

The apartment was nondescript.  To liven it up they painted a skyline - profiles of buildings - on the wall of their living room.  It wasn't a replica of the New York skyline, just an interesting design.

Jacquie sent this comment about living in New York in an apartment on 89th St.

  Did he ever tell you the cockroach story?  We used to sleep on the floor on Japanese tatami mats in that funky apartment on 89th street (you'll recall he was stationed in Japan and had adopted some of their ways - for awhile).  When we realized that the feisty New York cockroaches refused to stay off the tatami mats we got a bed.  Problem solved.  You may recall that the first floor of that apartment building had a Greek diner, hence more than the usual number of roaches.  Ick.

Jacquie posted this comment on the New York Times blog after Jerry died.  Apropos of the clip from the Great Muppet Caper:

  "What a loss for children everywhere. ..little children and grown up children.   Jerry's voice could twist and turn, and COUNT and laugh, and sing and growl....He must have had a hundred voices, as did our beloved daughter Christine Elizabeth Nelson.  Jerry and I were married for 7 years  and it was sometime after she was  diagnosed with cystic fibrosis that our marriage ended.

     But Jerry and I remained good friends and we held Christine's hand together when she died in 1982.   Many of Christine's happiest times were with her father, on the Sesame Street set,  on Fire Island for many summers, in London with him making The Great Muppet Caper where she had a small speaking part with her father, and when it was time to film her scene, Christine didn't like what the wardrobe department had selected for her to wear, so  Christine and Jerry  both went to Jim Henson and Jerry said,

"Jim, Christine isn't happy with the  wardrobe department's choice for her scene with me, she wants  to wear what she has on, okay?"

Jim looked her up and down and said, "Great."  And then Jerry said, "and I'm going to wear what I have on too"....and so they did.  What a pair they were.  What wonderful imps.

     All his life,  Jerry brought joy and laugher and giggles to all who heard him.  There was only one Jerry Nelson, although the COUNT would have preferred more Jerries, so he could count them.

Good by dear Jerry.  No one is laughing today

Here's a link to a YouTube video, Philly Joe Jones, Blues for Dracula.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz3d8C6xnmU&feature=youtu.be

There's an article on Wikipedia on the evolution of the Dracula role - Dracula in popular culture.

Incidentally, Philly Joe was on his way to Las Vegas with John Hicks and Freddy Williams to receive an award for this recording but he never made it.  He died on the way out there.

More later, my dears.

  Jerry and I discovered the I Ching separately.  He learned about it from someone in New York.  Marty Siegel brought the book to us in Connecticut with the pronouncement that, “every household should have one.”  We both used it.

  It seems odd looking back on it that we never discussed the Ching explicitly, but we didn't feel the need to.  We would refer to it, saying things like, “I asked the I Ching,” or “The Ching said...,”  but we each assumed, correctly, that the other knew about it and understood the background.

  Jerry did bring me a deck of Morgan’s Tarot cards, which are a sort of zen re-working of the Tarot.  I thought it was wonderful and used them several times to give readings.  While they were still available I bought extra decks and gave them to people I thought would want to know about them.  Eventually Morgan (James Morrison Morrison, A Meager Prophet Orgznization, Boulder Crick, California) subtracted a few cards from the deck, he said to make it less confusing, but I prefer the original 88-card version.

  Here are a few cards from the deck.  In case you can't read them, the titles say: The Virgin: Sun Queen; Keep Up the Good Work; No Trips without a Tripper; The Universe: Not Unfolding the Way It Should.

  You can see it would be more fun to use, and less esoteric to interpret, than the usual tarot deck.

  If you search for “Morgan’s Tarot” you’ll find several web sites.  The deck has been republished by U.S. Games and is available from Amazon:

  http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/morgans/

One summer Jerry went back to Oklahoma to stay with his grandparents.  He might have been toying with the idea of maybe moving back there.  When he came back at the end of the summer he said the only job he'd been able to find was as a truck driver.  He was certain that was not the kind of life he wanted to lead.

Other people have noted this.  Here's a quote from Salman Rushdie, who was concerned with the situation of the migrant when he wrote Satanic Verses.

"The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief."  

The situation is complicated by a lot of other factors, but I think what Rushdie says applies, at least to some extent, to people who have been moved about as children.  Jerry was born in Oklahoma and moved several times when he was younger.  I wasn't born in Oklahoma, but I moved a lot also, as did several of our other friends.

Mike Booth's comment after the first post (August 27) describes how he became persona non grata at Claudia's mother's house.

Jerry got tickets for us to Saturday Night Live when the Muppets were on the show.  At the time, the Great God Favog was smoking craters.  (“He’s smoking craters again.”)  It wasn’t clear whether they’d be allowed to do the bit.  Finally word came from a studio executive: he could smoke the craters as long as he didn’t enjoy it.  If it made him sleepy, that was O.K.

Jerry met us outside to take us in.  On the way in we saw Jim Henson, racing through trailing a long black cape.  Jerry introduced me and started to say, “this is my friend...” then hesitated (how could you explain it?).  We both laughed and said almost at the same time, “from long ago.”  Jim smiled and nodded and went on his way.

At different times, Jerry and Marshall both drove cabs in D.C., usually on the night shift.  Each cab had a shortwave radio to communicate with the dispatcher.  One driver couldn’t hear what another driver said, but all the cabs could hear the dispatcher.  Occasionally a driver would call in for a new assignment and the dispatcher would ask, “Where are you now?”  It seemed strange, driving at night, to suddenly hear the question, “Where are you now?” burst out of the radio, like something out of a Cocteau movie.  It seemed portentious, freighted with layers of existential meaning: in life?  It became part of our conversations, a kind of greeting, “Where are you now?”  (in life?)

I don’t remember where the idea came from, but for some time we thought about painting bird footprints around the campus.  We envisioned a bird 15 or 20 feet high that might land, walk around the campus leaving footprints behind, and then fly away.  [I don’t want to mislead you.  We thought of a big bird but not Big Bird.]  Finally Jerry and I got together one afternoon and cut out a bird footprint from a 4 x 8 sheet of fiberboard - three toes pointing forward and one pointing behind.  We had a can of white paint and I got a wide paint brush that we could use to fill in each print quickly.

That night dressed in old clothes we took our stencil, paint, and paintbrush and went to campus.

Around that time the movie by Paddy Chayefsky, Marty, had been playing.  In the film, a group of bored guys get together in the evenings with nothing to do.  In several scenes they ask each other, “What do you want to do?” and another one answers, “I don’t know, Marty, what do you want to do?”  Of course we picked up on some of this dialog and used it in conversation.

Under cover of darkness, we made the bird “land” in the middle of the quad - two footprints side by side.  Then the bird walked across the quad toward the library, left, right, left, right, with about a 3 ½ to four foot stride.  We were delighted with the appearance of the footprints.  The tracks crossed the road and got to the sidewalk in front of the library.  We had turned and started down the sidewalk toward the girls’ dorm when a car turned off of Nebraska Avenue into the main gate and headed our way.  It was obvious the headlights would sweep across us when the car turned the corner and came past the library.  Jerry turned to me and said, deadpan, “What do you want to do, Marty?”  Of course I said, “I don’t know Marty, what do you want to do?”

Then we moved quickly.  We left the stencil on the sidewalk - it would lie flat and probably wouldn’t be noticed from inside the car - and picked up the paint can and paint brush and hid behind some bushes in front of the library until the car went past and we had escaped notice.  Typical of Jerry: good timing, quick insight, and most of all, someone you could count on to come through when it was important.

There were no more cars that night.   After the car went by the bird continued down the sidewalk to the girls’ dorm.  By this time the stencil was breaking across the middle.  We both had to carry it, one on each side, to the next spot, to keep it from splitting in half.  The tracks turned and the bird faced the dorm, feet side by side.  Perhaps the bird was thinking.  In those days there were “parietal hours,” the girls’ dorm was locked at 11 p.m.  Then, as if the bird had flown over the dorm, the tracks “landed” in the road behind the dorm, and walked down the road to Clendenon Hall where they stopped.

Now the denoument to our adventure.  Quite tickled with ourselves, we waited to hear what the reaction had been to the bird tracks: outrage, amusement, certainly puzzlement?  But we heard nothing.  After two days someone told us that since the tracks stopped at Clendenon Hall where the theater auditorium was housed, people thought the tracks must be an advertisement for one of the college plays.  I don't know, Marty, what do you want to do?

Don’t ask me why, but when we were in college we went through a period when we gave people names of animals.  We had Spider, Frog, and so forth.  For some reason we decided Jerry should be “Ape,” and Jerry more or less accepted the name.

He had a long drive to get home to his parents’ house in Fairfax so some nights Jerry would sleep on the “couch” in the living room.  Of course, the couch was just an army cot, one of those things with a steel frame and wire links holding up the mattress.  It had a thin mattress pad, with a cover and some pillows.  Some mornings we would get up and Jerry would still be there, other mornings he would be gone.

One afternoon I opened a desk drawer and took out a small matchbook.  Not a big box of kitchen matches but a small box with the kind of matches you’d use to light a pipe.  When I opened it, on top of the matches there was a small, folded piece of paper, about 3/4 of an inch square, that I hadn’t seen before.  I unfolded it.  Inside it said “Ape slept here.”

I thought this was a really sweet rendition:

It comes from:  http://www.g33k-e.com/tv/he-taught-us-to-count-remembering-jerry-nelson/

This is a copy of a portrait of Jerry painted by Billy Evaul.  Jerry had the painting in his small computer room in Truro, on the wall over his computer.

Here's the second statement:

TO BE READ ON THE OCCASION OF MY MEMORIAL, IN THE EVENT AFORE-MENTIONED MEMORIAL, DOES TAKE PLACE:

 If this is being read, I must be dead, and that being said, lend me your head, or at least the part you listen with.

I am above all else a Professional, so I like to be on time ( or maybe even a little early ) and prepared.

Life was all I could hope for and more; There were lots of ups and more than a few downs. If you don’t have any bad parts, how are you going to recognize the good parts?

I made lots of mistakes and tripped over my own ego here and there, but hopefully all in the aid of learning to be closer to the enlightened potential of my being. 

I thank Jan for being the true love of my life and my best friend.

I thank Ramblin' Jack Elliot for introducing me to the I Ching, one morning on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village many years ago. Joe Bones for his gift of an easier translation of the I Ching to read.

I thank everyone I have ever known for the life lessons they have tried to teach me. They each had a lesson to impart even though I did not always understand it.

I especially thank those who made me laugh. You know who you are. Yes Jan, you are on this list too.

I thank my daughters Christine and Lovisa, for trying to teach me how to be a father and I apologize for the areas where I dropped the ball.

I thank Tolin for letting me be Grandfather and opening areas of my heart that had been  sealed and scarred when I was a little boy.

I thank the yin and yang of universal pulse that allows us to experience this life.and all of its wonders. 

Jerry asked for two things he had written to be read at his memorial.  The first was called, "Puppets ben berry berry good to me."  Here's the statement:

When I was eleven years old I saw a marionette in one of the display windows of Vandever’s Department Store, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while visiting my grandparents for the Christmas Holidays. My mother noted my interest and it was one of my presents that year. It was a twelve to fourteen inch high policeman. I learned to manipulate this and the following year was given a clown marionette made by the same company. He had a barbell he could do several tricks with, provided the correct strings were pulled, in the right sequence. I played with these two puppets off and on for another year or so and  forgot about them.

My next real experience with puppets came from watching our first television set in 1950. There were lots of puppet shows on early TV. Bil Baird’s “The Whistling Wizard” and “Sparky and Heathcliff”, Burr Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and The Bunin Brother’s “Pinhead and Foudini” are the ones I recall. Little did I realize at the time that fourteen years later, while in-between acting jobs I would audition for that same Bil Baird I watched as a fifteen year old and begin a career as a puppeteer that would span forty-six years and have me working with Jim Henson, one of the most creative innovators of modern puppetry.

Bil believed that puppets touch something in our primitive ancestral memory dating back to times when we huddled around fires in caves and hunters related how they put on animal skins and fooled the herd enough to make meat for the evening meal. He could well be correct in that but whatever else puppets do, they awake and delight the child that lives still within our heart of hearts.

As we say in my country, “Puppets ben berry, berry good to me”.

Jerry Nelson

Copyright 9/17/09, Dogstar

(thanks to Jan Nelson)

One time when Jerry was in London working on one of the Muppet movies Christine was sick and was in the hospital in New York.  Jerry flew home on the SST to see her.  When he got on the plane and got to his seat he thought the person sitting next to him looked familiar, but both of them were disheveled and the other guy seemed to be asleep.  Jerry was tired and fell asleep right away.  As the plane got closer to the U.S. they both woke up.  Jerry looked again and asked, "Aren't you Al Pacino?"  Al didn't recognize Jerry (he didn't look like a Muppet), but Jerry introduced himself and they started talking.  Eventually the conversation got around to the hassles connected with being a public figure.  Pacino said he couldn't go through an airport without someone stopping him.  Jerry didn't have that problem.  After the plane landed people started getting up from their seats and moving around.  Several of them recognized Pacino and headed toward them.  Jerry got his stuff, tapped Pacino on the shoulder with his knuckles, and said, "See you Al," and walked off the plane.

Here is a copy of the program for the memorial held for Jerry in Truro last Wednesday.  I hope you can read it.  Jerry wrote out very specific instructions and selected the poems, the songs, and the readings:

The first poem he selected, by e.e. cummings, dying is fine, is at:

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/dying_is_fine_but_Death_6_by_e_e_cummings_analysis.php

The second one, finis, is at:  http://library.crisischronicles.com/2009/08/12/finis-by-ee-cummings.aspx

The third one, when god lets my body be, which ends the program, is at: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/when-god-lets-my-body-be/

There's a very brief view of Jerry walking with his daughter Christine in this You Tube clip from The Great Muppet Caper:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsr3mElftNc  She asks if that's a bear and he says, "No Christine, bears wear hats."  (with thanks to Frank Oz.)  Christine's mother, Jacquie Gordon, wrote a book about Christine called Give Me One Wish.  The book quotes extensively from Christine's journals.  Christine is mentioned on the Muppet wiki:  http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Christine_Nelson

Remembering Jerry Nelson

Some of us knew Jerry from high school and college.  After Jerry died, one memory led to another and it seemed like it would be a good idea to make a place where people could post their memories or vignettes about Jerry.

So I'll start, 

Jerry often said that Dave Alexander, who was a year ahead of us, came to his fifth grade classroom and pantomimed a recording.  Jerry realized at that point he wanted to do something like that.  When we met him in high school at W&L, he said that he could pantomime to Spike Jones recordings, but we had never seen him do it.  

One day for a school assembly Jerry said he would pantomime "I Went to Your Wedding."  The singer starts off calmly enough.  He gets through the first verse but on the second verse he begins to laugh.  "I Went to Your Wedding
                               although I was dreading
                               the thought of seeing you ...  uhoo... uhoo."  

Pretty soon it's obvious the singer isn't at all unhappy to be getting rid of this person, and thinks the idea that this person is getting married is hilarious.  The laughter outbursts get louder, longer and more out of control.  The Spike Jones version is on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB_XDUb_tG0

and here's his version of Cocktails for Two:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvt4b_qwC_Q&noredirect=1

Jerry arrived dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt and tie.  We had a brief consultation at the back of the stage about starting the record.  He went up to the microphone and announced the song in his own voice, and then we started the record.  From the back we could see he had the timing, the gestures and the postures down perfectly.  At the first sign of laughter on the record his shoulders shook slightly, then for a longer time.  Soon there was laughter from the audience.  As the record went on, he was throwing his hands out and leaning over and slapping his thigh.  He had the whole place - several hundred people - cracking up.  He would pull himself together in sync with the record (the singer would go "umhum") and start singing again, only to have another outburst.  Pretty soon he had the entire assembly - maybe 800 people - cracking up.