Meet Your Muppet Archetypes
The man and a woman lead you around a corner into a sort of tunnel that seems to be made by a bunch of plywood flats leaning up against the wall. “We have to show you something,” one of them tells you.
It’s dark but then you can see light up ahead. It seems warm and inviting. The three of you exit into a hallway that seems like it’s being spruced up after years of disuse. There are a couple of celebrities there who welcome you, and your guides lead you around a corner or two into a medium sized room.
There are more celebrities sitting around in small groups, most of whom turn and acknowledge you, then go back to what they were doing.
“There are a lot of blondes back here,” you say.
Several of them shrug and nod.
“Are they all from the same blonde?” you ask your guides. “I wasn’t sure if that’s how that works.”
Some of them look at each other and then nod at you.
“What are you all doing?” you ask.
“Waiting,” one of them says. Others mumble and mutter in agreement.
“Waiting for what?” you ask.
“To go on,” one of them answers.
“Go on what?” you ask.
“The show,” one of them answers. Most of the others mumble and mutter in agreement.
Everything cuts to black, as from another room you can hear it, a sound you haven’t heard for a very long time: doo DOO doo DOO doo-DOO-doo.
Into the black fades a date, and then beneath it a single word: “LIVE”.
I’d originally planned to publish this post today but then got sidetracked by blogging something else altogether, and so decided to hold off on it until tomorrow. Then this evening I stumbled upon a mention that today is the late Jim Henson’s birthday, so here it is tonight instead.
Up until that cut to black, this was a dream I had this morning sometime before a longish bout of morning insomnia. (That it turns out to be Henson’s birthday makes the dream all the weirder.) I didn’t actually hear those strains from the theme to The Muppet Show in the dream itself; my brain added that later.
Mostly what the dream did is remind me of something I didn’t get to blog because I wasn’t blogging anymore.
Around month or so ago, there was a meme going around on Bluesky suggesting that your three favorite Muppets reveal a lot about your personality, and I sort of just went with the first ones that popped into my head. Which meant that apparently you can learn something important about me from the fact that they were Animal, Kermit, and (because they together count as one) Statler and Waldorf.
We discussed this in therapy later that week, and although I didn’t have these concise words at that moment, I later decided that the archetypes for my picks likely work out to be something like this:
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Kermit is a less confrontational version of my favorite Vonnegut quote, “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”
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Animal has the same beliefs as Kermit but is my “sensorium dysphoria” in a world not built for my nervous system
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Statler and Waldorf together are my occasional judgmentalism and argumentativeness
One of the things I appreciated about this meme, and the thing that I think convinced my therapist that there’s actually some value in it that they could bring to other patients, is that unlike many other online “which X are you” memes this one was not prescriptive: it didn’t push any kind of chart that defined what each Muppet meant. Each person has to figure out for themselves why their particular choice of Muppets made sense.
Those, then are mine. What are yours? I’ll read them while wishing there really were a live edition of The Muppet Show coming.