I recently wrote about an EVENT that is to TAKE PLACE at MY HOUSE. It is, yes, a funeral for Kermit the Frog. I have this sort of bootleg-ass Kermit that I’m going to use, but just out of curiosity I emailed my buddy Jack Fields in Florida who makes puppets, and who worked with Jim Henson’s daughter for nearly a decade. I thought, you know, maybe he had an extra Kermit lying around, or maybe he could get the Henson family to loan me one, or maybe he could even just straight up make me a custom Kermit. As it turns out, he is unaware of any stray Kermits, and a custom Kermit would be extremely time-consuming and probably expensive. Well, I guess I should have seen that coming!

He then sent me some sage-like wisdom, which I am reposting here with his permission:

The best I can do for you is share my perspective on what you are doing and urge you to look within at the nature of what you are doing. You are laying a world icon to rest and taking ownership of a cultural experience. Kermit is a figure on a world scale, and to me that means there can exist an infinite number of kermits in an infinite array of physical and spiritual variations. So what if your kermit looks like a bootleg? Half of the puppets in this world, maybe more, are muppet bootlegs. There can be a kermit who is made of grated cheese, a kermit with a laser hand, a kermit that is whatever the hell Disney came up in those last 2 movies.

What’s important is the authenticity with which you and your friends carry out your act.

Fear not, Puppet Master Jack Fields, because my esteemed colleagues and I are approaching this ritual with total sincerity. This is not a joke, even if it sounds like one! Which is not to say the whole thing must be dour and joyless. In fact it will be the opposite. Said I to Jack: I’m not yet sure what Kermit’s funeral will come to represent after we see it through, but maybe the act in itself is a farewell to something we the grieving will come to understand together on that night. Kermit represents a sort of melancholy optimism and unassailable loyalty. What does it mean for someone like that to perish from the world? He has been a good friend to us all our lives, and now he is gone. We who are still alive are tasked with the impossible, which is to sum of the huge and beautiful life of our friend, and to do justice to his memory as we see him off to the Other World. In some ways this feels like a funeral for the world as we once knew it, and it is important that we process what that means to us.

(I have just looked this up and, yes, Kermit was born the same year as my father. Whoa. I guess that’s something else to think about . . . an angle which I will explore for myself . . . alone!)

Anyway: Come on by. Or email me if you’re far away and just want a postcard. I’m getting a bunch of them made. I mean, hell, if you can’t be there to say good-bye, you may as well glance at the postcard from time to time and remember the place in your heart where a little green frog sits wondering about what lies on the other side of the rainbow.

:,-)