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By Nancy McCloughlin
Your family has lived in some exotic locations. How do you compare Bedford to some of your other hometowns?
We have lived in Brooklyn, Bangkok, South Salem and then we moved to Bedford. Our family has been here six years and we absolutely love it. My wife Kim Larson and I are city people, but we like the outdoor accessibility of Bedford and the friendships we have made. It is a wonderful group of people in town. Our children have been to schools all over the world, in some of the most prestigious private schools, and we like Fox Lane the best.
What are some of the things you like to do in Bedford? Are you involved in the community?
 We love to walk at the Katonah reservoir and bike on the trails. Our favorite place to eat is the Blue Dolphin Restaurant in Katonah. It is the best Italian food West of Italy. I joined the board of the Jacob Burns Film Center this month. That is my local tie. Our high school age daughter is very involved there. My wife is connected to the Neighbors Link organization. I was proud to be the master of ceremonies for their fundraising event one year.
Sesame Street programming started in 1968. For four decades the concept has remained vital and continued to meet the needs of viewers, but under your direction, it has expanded outside the boundaries of our country (and close neighbors). Can you comment about this?
Sesame Street has always had success internationally, but what I’ve done in the last years is to make the global emphasis front and center in our mission. Through the show, and much of our programming, we are taking the world issues and discussing them with our children. We are in Egypt , Russia and China. We are fighting AIDS and HIV in S. Africa. We are working on conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. In fact, I’ve got Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein, Irish Republican party leader ) wearing a cookie monster watch. He showed it to me. We are teaching our youngsters about health and wellness and nutrition in countries where there is hunger. It is important work and we take pride in it.
Tell us about what projects you are working on in our own country. Do you find that you get involved in the creative side of things as well?
I was taking the train to work from Westchester, and there was a front page story about a returning vet from Iraq who was being evicted from his home because he could no longer pay the mortgage. Kids and all. They were all being thrown out. It made me so angry. Here we are with bumper stickers saying ‘support our troops’, and yet, things like this happen. I arrived at the office ‘ticked off.’ It was how I decided that Sesame Street needed a USO tour. We learned that there were 700,000 pre-school kids of active duty or reserve military personnel. So, we launched our “Talk-Listen-Connect” series about how to deal with a ‘new normal.’ It deals with issues surrounding soldiers (dads) that come home with injuries and about life changes. Our segment with queen Latifa and John Mayer on this topic will air on the Sesame Street segment on April 1st.
Sesame Street has been reinventing itself with essentially the same core cast of characters. Which one is your favorite and how do you account for this amazing forty year run?
Grover is my favorite. He is very smart and he drives everyone mad. He reminds me of myself--- well maybe not the smart part. Success has been in re-inventing ourselves. We like to say that we are in the 40th “experimental” season of Sesame Street. We want to be relevant to kids lives in 2009 and we don’t expect them to relate to things we did in the 1960’s. Elmo is like Elvis. His “Q-score” says he is the number one character.
Tell us more about this Elvis star Elmo. Wouldn’t Big Bird be the brand name and the most popular character of the group?
Believe it or not, there are all sorts of theories about why this is. Sesame Street is the most frequently written about subject for masters and doctorate thesis papers that talk about television shows. Elmo is supposed to be age three and Big Bird is age 6. The show has skewed younger and the thinking is that the kids view Elmo as a peer their own age. Elmo makes them laugh. They look up to Big Bird as an older sibling, but they are most comfortable with Elmo.
Does Sesame Street Get Involved in Politics?
The Muppets don’t vote. We are a bi-partisan organization, but we are always in the white house. We have had Barbara Bush, Nancy Regan, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton as guests on segments. We are hoping to get Michelle Obama on the show.
Sesame Street is a non-profit organization. You must have weathered occasional difficult economic times in past decades. Is Sesame Street recession-proof?
People will cut back on a lot of things, but not fun and learning for their children. The challenge is making the new babies, like the ones that are born at Northern Westchester Hospital engaged in what we do. Sesame Street is a rite of passage for parents that want better for their children. Our boss is a four year old child with a remote control and he or she keeps us on our toes. The statistic is that in 2007, 20 million units of Sesame Street books were sold in the U.S. That is a lot of people with our product.
You have added a 24 hour cable program called PBS Kids Sprout. Why did you think you needed programming around the clock and on demand?
There are 4,000 hours of Sesame Street programs in the library. We wanted to give access. The working mother comes home to make dinner and downloads a program for the kids to watch on her schedule, not ours. We have 18 million video-on-demand downloads a month.
What is happening now (and we can all debate if it is a good idea or not) is that our kids are digital natives. They’ll never know a world without cell phones and computers. There is no longer a computer room in the house. Its all wireless. We need to find ways to make teaching tools that engage kids where they are in technology. That is where the world is headed.
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