The Circles Of My Mind...

When I was six I got The Muppet Show book for Christmas and I quickly worked out that if I had eighty seven friends I could put it on as a play at school. I would have to hold auditions because it was going to be so popular, or so I thought, that just about everybody would want to be in it; but I would have to be Kermit as he was the main part and I couldn't expect, and didn't trust, that someone else would be able to remember all of the lines and songs.

My two favourite sketches were "I Feel Pretty" and "The Windmills of my Mind"- which I'm pretty sure were both written by the master Jim Henson himself- but I actually liked every single page in that golden covered book. I liked how the Monster was a beautiful girl at the beginning, and then as she took off her mask of a face she revealed her true ugliness. I would sit on my Grandmother's steps and pretend to be half-way up the stairs just like Robin- Kermit's nephew- did; and I loved Beaker, Gonzo and Fozzie and the two old guys sitting up in the audience. I thought Animal was crazy and what the Swedish Chef was saying was very hard to read but not impossible to understand.

I would have to rotate the book so I could read all the words of that Windmill song, but when I di I understood them perfectly, even at the age of six. The never ending cycle of thoughts, spinning and churning through your mind in a Voice that isn't mine sounds eerily familiar to me. Round like a circle in a circle like a wheel within a wheel, I think it goes, just like the circles of my mind. Pretty cool, huh?

I also had a big thing for Sesame Street characters, especially Super Grover in his little steel helmet and cape. I had a toy of him and Oscar the Grouch, and my Sisters had Ernie and Bert. I loved my little Super Grover and would take him everywhere with me and talk to him when I thought nobody was listening, but someone must have been, because how else would my Sisters and Cousin know how important he was to me?

Why else would they have thrown him up into the attic of the weekender at my Grandpa's farm? He had to stay up until the next school holidays because Mum and Dad didn't want to waste time getting him down before we left, too, which wouldn't have been very pleasant for him up there amongst all the bat shit and the dust, I would imagine.

So I cried the whole way home- while my Sister's laughed about it. I suppose I should have gotten used to their teasing me about how I believed my toys were real and could talk to me; seeing as it used to happen quite a lot. I remember when I was eight, after reading Salem's Lot, talking to my Rubik's Cube and telling him that I hoped the blue vampire wouldn't try and get into my window tonight, which my Sister's must have overheard, as they went out and began throwing little pebbles at the window so that I would think that the vampires had come to ask to be invited in. Which would have spelt the END as I was fresh out of garlic and wooden stakes...

At the time, though, I really thought it was vampires outside my window, and did so until a few years later when they came clean about it at last, and laughed at how scared I'd been.

I don't suppose I should expect them to know that I thought it would hurt Rubik if people pulled his stickers off either, but then again, I told you before that I was an odd child, so you shouldn't be surprised.