What Was That?

Something unexpected happened over the weekend. Something I assumed would be quite innocent turned out to be an evening-shattering event. At one point my wife and I looked at each other, each wiping streaming tears from our faces, and wondered aloud what was happening to us. One of us had to keep swallowing, her throat burning, to keep from balls-out bawling. 

It started when Walter chicken-pecked the first few notes—"It's. Time. To..."—on Kermit the Frog's dusty piano.

There was no coming back from it.

If you haven't seen The Muppets, let me tell you, that movie wasn't messing around. It lifted my wife and me over its head, cracked our backs over its knee, and left us to crawl to a payphone to call for help. The Muppets’ studio in ruins?! The Muppets no longer friends?! No longer relevant?! It took everything we valued and loved in our childhoods and set them on fire right in front of our faces. 

And then Kermit and Miss Piggy had to go and sing Rainbow Connection as a duet. You might as well have beaten a basket of puppies before our eyes the way we carried on.

When my wife asked me, “What’s wrong with us?” I tried to say something about our reactions maybe being linked to our youth being over, how we’d never feel that joyfully light again, that we’d never feel so over-the-top connected to anything like the Muppets again, but couldn't without breaking down. 

So I took a minute. 

With tears still rolling down my face, I settled on, "I'm so glad we didn't see that in the theater.”

And that's how we left it: laughing about being the two adult women in the audience who couldn't manage to detach themselves from the fuzzy friends who meant more to them than just entertaining puppets.