Street Gang (41 page)

Over time, she said, the Manzanos became bilingual, thanks, in part, to television. “TV was a big influence on my life. I saw this black-and-white world and I used to wonder where I would fit in. It was all Dick and Jane, and you never saw the inner city or immigrants, which was all I knew. I remember one teacher would tell her fourth grade class of Puerto Rican kids, ‘There are white people, there are black people, and there are yellow people.’ One kid said, ‘Well, what about brown people?’ And she said ‘There is no such thing as brown people.’ I remember thinking later,
How can we be expected to contribute to a world that doesn’t even see us?

“My parents used to take us to the beach with our neighbors. We were just so
different
from everybody else. My mother would make huge amounts of rice and beans and chicken and coffee. Everybody else at the beach was having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And you’d watch the other people and then you’d see what your parents were doing and want to fit in. I learned the difference between race and culture on one of these trips. We used to go with this Puerto Rican woman who was black. Once, when I came out of the water, I went up to a person who I thought was this neighbor, asking for a towel in Spanish. The woman turned around and said to me in an African American southern accent, ‘Child, I don’t know what you saying!’ It dawned on me that day that there’s a difference between race and culture.”

Manzano’s performing talent evidenced itself in junior high, around the time she wrote an adaptation of
Oliver Twist
for the drama club. “This particular teacher said, ‘If you stay in this neighborhood, you’ll go to the local high school and you won’t reach your potential.’

“And, of course, I didn’t know what he was talking about. He then said, ‘You should try to go to the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. You’ll meet people and broaden your horizons. He picked the monologue for me, helped me memorize it, and took me to the audition. I went from being an A student in the ghetto to a failing student in a middle-class school. Very little is expected of ghetto kids; I used to paint my nails and do my makeup in school. So when I went to Performing Arts, I had to compete with kids who knew what a noun was. I plummeted, but I recognized that my only way to get into college was on acting, something that had nothing to do with grades. So once again I studied monologues and got into Carnegie Mellon University. Society was on my side; it was the Kennedy years, a time when universities wanted to diversify. I was going to college in ’68, a great time to come of age.”

One morning, as she passed a television in the student union tuned to
Sesame Street
, she simultaneously glimpsed her past and future. “I saw Susan and Gordon on the stoop and I said, ‘Hey! That’s my street! That’s my stoop! That’s my construction doors! I know that place!’ ”

That she was momentarily stopped in her tracks adds a note of irony to the story of how a multitalented Latina got to
Sesame Street
. The door opened for her only after fellow Hispanic Americans banged and pushed on it.

At Carnegie Mellon, Manzano joined the original cast of
Godspell,
which began as a student production on that campus. When the musical, based on the gospel according to Saint Matthew, moved to New York for a two-week, ten-performance run at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Greenwich Village (also known as Café La Mama), Manzano took a leave from the university, then dropped out, to continue on as the character Sonia, the sassy, sexy, cynical urbanite.

“I was with the show for a year and a half when it was off-Broadway. Then two years later I went into the show again when it was on Broadway. I still dream about being in
Godspell,
of having to do it with a new company. It was a great time in my life. I now know the euphoric feeling of being in a creative role, when you just can’t think of anything else but what you’re doing.
Godspell
was the first time it had happened to me.”

In 1971, an agent encouraged Manzano to audition for
Sesame Street
. She immediately recalled how impressed she was that James Earl Jones had appeared in early episodes.“I walked by the student union [television] one day and he was reciting the alphabet. It was around the time he had done
The Great White Hope
on Broadway. He was thin and very bald and so compelling, and the letters were flashing on the screen as he said the ABCs. It was so in-your-face, it just grabbed me by the neck.

“Then I saw Susan and Gordon on the stoop. At that time there were no people of color on television, and if there were, they certainly weren’t nice. Susan and Gordon were so friendly and cheerful and there was Mr. Hooper, you know, nice Jewish candy store guy just like the guy in my old neighborhood. I was just thrilled by this show, and I thought it was hilarious.”

Manzano auditioned in Jon Stone’s office. “I walked in wearing a simple little dress and some cheap Indian sandals. Jon showed me a set of circles, and he asked me to explain why two things were the same and one was not, just like that song on the show ‘One of these things is not like the others, / one of these things just doesn’t belong.’ Then he asked me to tell a scary story, like somebody was following me. And then I left. Today, it could not happen that way. You would have a casting committee to audition an actress. But Jon had such vision; he knew what the show was, he didn’t have to ask anybody what they thought. He didn’t have to have data, he didn’t have to have a chart that said this is what kids want to watch. It was one guy.”

Stone, who had seen Manzano in the Broadway version of
Godspell,
gave her the part with little guidance on how to play Maria. “I wanted to know what kind of character she was, and Jon kept saying, ‘We want you to be yourself. We want the kid on the Lower East Side to look at you and say, “That’s me.”’

“One time the costume designer put me in a pleated skirt and knee socks and a little vest; I looked like a coed. And I had makeup. Jon, who was a passionate, short-tempered man, came on the set and was furious. He grabbed me, we went into the makeup room and I sat down in the makeup chair. He said to the makeup artist, ‘God damn it! I go through all this trouble to cast real people and you make her look like a Kewpie doll.’ Well, the makeup artist was very nervous and she starts taking off my makeup. And I’m looking in the mirror and I’m realizing that, this is my position on the show, to be myself, to be real, to talk the way I talk, to dress the way I dress. This is why I got cast. It was like, ‘
Ding!
Got it.’ ”

 

Perhaps the most telling statement one could make about Northern Calloway is that early in his acting career he appeared in a play entitled
The Me Nobody Knows.

The piece was a stage adaptation of a book compiled by an inner-city schoolteacher in New York, who turned samples of student prose into a powerful anthology of anguish. At age twenty-one, Calloway was the oldest cast member of the racially and ethnically mixed cast, doing six performances a week at the off-Broadway Orpheum Theatre in 1970. Calloway, who grew up on 151st Street in Harlem, beat the odds, purely on the basis of talent. He demonstrated so much promise at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts and Performing Arts, where he was Sonia Manzano’s classmate, that he was working with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company within two days of graduation in 1966. His work in
The Me Nobody Knows
provided a brief moment to look back to the conditions of his youth while he was ascending into what he hoped would be a better life and stardom.

No one seemed better destined for the bright lights than Calloway, who was the understudy to Ben Vereen in the stage musical
Pippin
. “He was ballsy,” Manzano said. “Northern was not a trained dancer, but he was a showman. I remember him saying to me, ‘The only thing that I can’t do that Ben Vereen does is three twirls at once. I can only do two.’ That took a lot of chutzpah.”

Puppeteer Marty Robinson caught a performance of
Pippin
when Calloway was playing the lead role. “This guy was flying out there, just floating on the stage with no relationship with gravity whatsoever,” Robinson said. “He was just stunning.”

After seeing him perform in
The Me Nobody Knows,
Jon Stone hired Calloway in 1971 to take on the new role of David, a kid from the neighborhood who helps out Mr. Hooper. To castmates and crew, the new arrival gave off mostly warm and positive vibes. The camera loved him.

Within weeks of working together on the show, Manzano and Calloway, as Maria and David, began gravitating to each other, as two attractive young people might. Soon, subtle signals indicated that the Latina and black characters were an item. Anyone watching at the time would have concluded that romance was blooming on
Sesame Street.

“The producers took some heat for that, but they stuck to their guns,” said Loretta Long, “just as they did with the viewers who objected to Matt and I wearing Afros.” Long found Calloway to be brimming with talent and more than once danced “The Hustle” with him at social gatherings in the early days. “He was a positive young black image that little kids related to very well,” she said. “He was like a teenager, and little kids want to stick to teenagers like gum on a shoe.”

Over time, Long said she noticed Calloway was prone to mood swings and was warned to steer clear of him. “Apparently, he had issues with black women, stemming back to problems with his sister. But performers can be nuts, all right. Our cast was like family, but when you live with people long enough you know who to leave alone and who to tease. When you walk in the makeup room you can see by the look on their face whether to mess with them or leave them alone. So, basically, I left Northern alone. And I tried never to be around him when he started in on his thing about if he was white he’d be a major star. That’s the way he felt.”

 

Emilio Delgado was down to his final unemployment check, adding gasoline to the tank twenty-five cents at a time, on the summer day in 1971 when he was to meet Jon Stone at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

“My former wife was working, but I wasn’t,” he said, “and we had a son who was a year-and-a-half old.” Delgado had already met with Dave Connell a few weeks prior about a new Hispanic character that would be added to
Sesame Street
for the upcoming season. Meeting with Stone in Beverly Hills was a callback, of sorts. Delgado has said that he was uncertain how Connell and Stone had come to be aware of him, speculating that they may have seen a tape of him on
Angie’s Garage
, a weekly children’s show in Los Angeles.

“It was a homegrown show on the local ABC affiliate,” Delagado said. “I was its cohost and I’d play a little guitar and sing. I’d started acting professionally in 1968, but for nine years before that I had been trying to knock doors down in Los Angeles to get in,” Delgado said. “In the sixties, there weren’t that many opportunities for Chicanos and Latinos in film and television, other than playing banditos, gang members, low-life characters, and sleepy Mexicans under a cactus. But I was a part of several groups of Chicanos and Latinos that came together to protest that. We were meeting with producers and directors and big honchos in Hollywood, telling them, ‘You’ve got to look at us as people. There are doctors and teachers in our community, but we are not being represented that way.’ ”

When Delgado sat down with Stone, a surprising interview ensued. “I didn’t sing for him or act or do anything but answer questions and be myself. He interviewed me for about twenty minutes and said, ‘If you want to work for us, be in New York on October eleventh.’ I said to myself,
Oh my God! They want me! I have a job! I cannot believe it!
There’s no other way to describe it, other than to say it was an ecstatic day. It was from the laps of the gods.

“Jon saw something in me. He knew that I would fit in and that I would be perfect for that show, which I was. I showed up the first day and hit the ground running with everybody that was involved in the show.”

Stone provided few clues as to what he was looking for in the new character. “Therefore, there’s a lot of Emilio in Luis,” Delgado said. “What happened is that I just went with what felt natural and right. They wanted reality, and that’s what they got from the cast. We all came in at the same time to do the same thing, and it was a perfect union of people playing up the humanity of everything.”

Delgado followed Stone’s lead. “Jon was a perfectionist in the best sense of the word,” Delgado said. “When he showed up on the set to direct, he had done his homework, with every camera angle written down on that script for that day. It was not like he made it up as he went along. He already knew what everything was going to look like, where he wanted to place the cameras, exactly what he wanted from the actors. He was completely at the helm, and he could be a very serious professional who knew exactly what he wanted. If you didn’t give it to him, he’d get frustrated. But he was respected because he had been an actor, a writer, a producer, and a director.

“Jon used to say to the actors, ‘When you are working with the Muppets, you really are the ones directing the scene.’ He guided us, but it was up to us to make the scene go. We often gave him something that wasn’t planned for the scene, and that’s what he was hoping for by setting everything up so precisely it allowed us to safely go a bit beyond, relying on the wit and creative genius of the Muppets.”

 

In 1972, Jon Stone dispatched Emily Kingsley to Great Neck, Long Island, to see a small ensemble that billed itself The Little Theater of the Deaf. “Check out this group and tell me if you think they should go on the show,” he told her.

“I drove out and was entranced,” Kingsley said. “They did a wonderful variation of
The House That Jack Built
called
This Is the Key to the City
. It went something like this: ‘In the city there is a road, and on the road there is a house, and in the house there was a room, and in the room there was a bed, and on the bed was a basket, and in the basket there are flowers.’ It was just so beautiful, so lyrical. You could almost see the room.