Or, A person can’t marry a duck.
For two years now, my #1 goal has been to get a client on Sesame Street. Fame is a fluid concept: you may have never heard of the people who are most famous to me, and people who are famous in their own industries may be nobodies to the world outside those niches. And if everything can basically be defined as a niche market if one uses broad enough strokes, then there are, what – 100? – people in history who the entire world has heard of.
That said, I think we can all agree that if you’re a guest on Sesame Street or, previously, The Muppet Show/Muppets Tonight, you’ve pretty much “made it” by any definition. At lunch today, however, when I mentioned that the new Harry Potter movie would have kept me up nights as a kid (instead, I had the utterly terrifying The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles to contend with, thank you Julie Andrews), one of my summer interns mentioned that her biggest childhood fear was a Muppet named Placido Flamingo. You heard me. Placido. Flamingo.
After lunch, naturally the most pressing order of business at First Chair Promotion was to find Placido Flamingo clips, and I’m happy to announce that the new company Life Purpose is to not just get a client on Sesame Street, but to get a reoccurring Muppet character named after a client. Shoot for the moon and you may land on a star.
Here’s what my interns and I came up with, should anyone from The Jim Henson Company be reading:
Hilary Swahn
Eric Owl’ns
Gabriel The Crane
The King’s Squakers (parrots)/The King’s Squeakers (mice)
Pélicané Grimaud
David Fang, Julia…well, Wolf, Michael “J. Fox ” Gordon (what if the three wolf-fox composers go after Hilary Swahn??)
Sonda Raccoonovsky
Well I think I earned my retainer checks today.
Epilogue: Intern Emily noticed that the “Other Entertainment Awards and Appreciation” section of Placido Domingo’s Wikipedia page does NOT include his alter-EAGLE Placido Flamingo. She’s updating the page now, and we hope it will help her work through some of those childhood fears. Placido Flamingo, however, has his own Wikipedia page as well as his own IMBD page, which we can only assume highlights his popular “Live from the Nest” series.
Epilogue to the epilogue: Placido Domingo’s Wikipedia page has been successfully updated.
I am much more impressed with Placido’s recent-ish appearance on the Simpsons. Or, as he says, “You can call me…P. Dingo.”
Does this mean that Life’s a Pitch will now be known as Kermit the Blog by Panda A-bear?
Close: Bumps on a Blog by Amanda Panda, but yes. -AA