4
Everett’s first memory was of Kermit the Frog.
He had been four years old, sitting on the corduroy sofa in his parents’ Victorian Village home, watching The Muppet Show on a VHS tape they had checked out for him at the library. His parents hadn’t cared about the quantity of television he watched, but they had distrusted the quality of modern entertainment. Too loud, they said. Too crude. Too simplistic. Too . . . well, new.
And so Everett’s first memory wasn’t of his own family but of identifying with Kermit the Frog, the sensible guy in a crew full of weirdos. Of Miss Piggy, a misunderstood diva who knew her worth, surrounded by people (or rather, puppets) who needed to get on her level. Of Fozzie Bear telling jokes that Everett would try and fail to tell his friends when he got older. Of Gonzo and his bizarre, frantic energy and semiperverse love of chickens.
The Muppet Show might have been made years before Everett was born, but he felt that it had been made for him, like Jim Henson was beaming the weirdness directly into his brain. When Everett was old enough to check out his own movies, he watched episode after episode, racking up enough overdue fines that his parents finally ponied up for the complete DVD collection when it came out. The Muppets were such a part of his life that he assumed the guest hosts of the show were current stars of the late 1990s and went to school talking about Ethel Merman, Jim Nabors, and Bernadette Peters, only to be met with blank looks from his classmates, who then changed the subject to Mark McGwire.
Everett didn’t care. He liked living in the wacky world of the Muppets, and soon he’d developed a full-blown obsession with their creator, Jim Henson. Everett learned everything he could about him, watching all of his projects, even the experimental nonpuppet films. He daydreamed about having his own show and made his first puppet (an amateurish but enthusiastic dog) the year he turned ten.
But it wasn’t the puppets themselves that held Everett’s attention. It was the way Jim Henson used them to communicate a sense of wonder. When he watched the Pigs in Space get into another scrape, Everett laughed, but he also felt a sense of raw possibility. A sense of the potential in fabric and imagination. Those puppets could communicate feelings to both children and adults in a way that never felt condescending. That’s what I want to do, Everett thought, and that desire held steady throughout his entire childhood.
After getting his degree at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Everett threw himself into designing his own show. It was initially a self-made production he put up on YouTube, just Everett and the puppets in front of the camera, with his art school friend Jeremy helping out. But eventually it got noticed, and before long, they had their own show on Saturday mornings, right after the local news.
It’s not that it was easy—it wasn’t. It had required years of work on something with no guarantee, all while Everett worked at a call center, spending his days asking people if they were happy with their cable provider and his nights pursuing what he loved. But the decision to do it . . . well, that hadn’t been hard. In fact, it hadn’t been a decision at all.
That was what he couldn’t explain to the kids who wrote to him and asked how they could make their own shows, or write their own graphic novels, or follow whatever creative dreams they had. He didn’t know what to tell them, because he’d just done it, just woken up every morning knowing exactly what he had to do to make his dream happen, without a worry of failure or rejection. He hadn’t even given it a second thought.
Now Everett sat on the floor in his living room, surrounded by pieces of felt and chunks of foam, half-finished sketches covering the rug like freshly fallen snow. He needed to shake it up on the show—things were good, yes, but he couldn’t ignore that feeling, the one that started like nausea in the pit of his stomach before turning into a tightness in his chest and finally manifesting as a full-body tingle. It was the “something is missing” feeling. The “there’s something more” feeling. The “something needs to change” feeling.
This was the way he’d felt for most of his childhood—like he was working toward something that remained elusive, a cloud on the horizon, forever moving farther away. And then he’d achieved it. A show! A career! Success!
But now, years later, the feeling was back. Something was missing. There was something more. Something needed to change.
And so a new puppet. Nothing against the llama or the bear or any of his other characters—he loved them as if they were people. But much like a long-running sitcom might mix things up by bringing in a wacky neighbor, a new girlfriend, or a previously secret child from a past relationship, he needed to bring something fresh to Everett’s Place.
“Are you okay?”
Everett jumped, dropping a piece of felt. “What the hell?”
His best friend, Natalie, stood staring at him, arms crossed, her bright orange lipstick shining against her chestnut skin. “I feel like I’ve walked into an episode of Hoarders: Weird Puppet Dude edition.”
Everett groaned. “What are you talking about?”
She gestured around. “Uh, you’re currently sitting in front of the TV in a pile of what—I’m gonna be honest here—looks like straight-up trash. Your kitchen counter is barely visible under all these empty take-out boxes. And . . . wait.” She took a dramatic sniff. “It smells in here. Like a restaurant-dumpster-scented air freshener.”
“Okay, okay, okay, I’m a mess. I get it.” Everett got off the floor and sat on the couch. At least he’d show Natalie he understood how to use furniture. “How did you get in here?”
She dangled a key in her hand and crossed the room to sit beside him on the couch. “I have a key. Doy. I left my bike helmet here, so I came over to get it. I knocked three times, and when you didn’t answer, I got worried that you’d died on the toilet, and I didn’t want your parents to have to find you like that. It would be undignified and traumatic. I didn’t know I’d walk in and find you”—she wrinkled her nose and gestured toward him—“living in filth and watching The Jerk for the hundredth time.”
Everett sighed fondly. “Thank you for making sure I wasn’t dead on a toilet.”
“You’d do the same for me.” Natalie bumped him with her shoulder. “You’ve gotta stop watching this movie. Your crush on Bernadette Peters is getting weird.”
“She has big eyes and the voice of an angel. What man could resist her? And anyway, I’m not watching the movie. It’s merely background noise while I work.”
“I think it might be nice if you found a crush from—I don’t know—this century. But whatever. You wanna get dinner with me and Lillian tonight? We’re gonna actually go to a restaurant instead of eating while hunched over the kitchen counter like some people I know.”
Lillian was Natalie’s long-term girlfriend and typically the second wheel to Everett’s third when he joined them for dinner or movie nights. Everett and Natalie had dated, way back in high school, before Natalie realized that she liked women and that her relationships could consist of much more than the content, companionable dynamic between herself and Everett.