Recalling a beloved puppeteer

By Tina Collins

“As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us, that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.”

These words by the late puppeteer Jim Henson set the stage for an immersive museum experience into his enduring entertainment legacy.

Henson’s remarkable contributions to pop culture will be showcased at “The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited” — an exhibit that runs from May 26 to December 30 at the Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC) in downtown Baltimore.

Marylanders consider Henson a native son, though he was born in Mississippi. In the late 1940s, his family moved to University Park, Maryland, where Henson, who attended Northwestern High School, first began entertaining friends and family with puppet shows.

When Henson was a student at the University of Maryland, in the early 1950s, he created his first Muppet — a hybrid marionette and puppet. His first show, Sam and Friends, aired on local television, and a career was born.

The traveling exhibition celebrates his creations, which span four decades and include The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal and other beloved works.

A puppet innovator

The exhibition features hundreds of objects from Henson’s career: sketches, storyboards and early versions of now beloved characters. A 1969 sketch of Oscar the Grouch shows the same eyes as the finished character, and some of the early puppets on display resemble future Muppets.

One part of the exhibit shows how Henson innovated the primitive technique of puppeteering. For instance, he used cloth instead of wood, which made it easier to manipulate the puppet’s eyes, nose and mouth into human expressions.

Covering 5,000 square feet, the exhibition is immersive and interactive. Screens,

See JIM HENSON, page 20

Springfield, Va.

Sunday, October 15 • Noon to 4 p.m.

Springfield Town Center

Silver Spring, Md.

Sunday, October 22 • Noon to 4 p.m.

JUNE 2023

INSIDE…

LEISURE & TRAVEL

Make time for an adventure in vast, beautiful Alaska; plus, how to get what you really want from hotel selection apps page 16

ARTS & STYLE

Artist Hal Boyd creates colorful, dreamlike paintings from his Baltimore studio page 19

FITNESS & HEALTH 4 k New drugs for weight loss k Lonely? Tips that can help

LAW & MONEY 14 k Earn higher, and safer, interest k Best book on retirement ADVERTISER

Layers of reality

Since the invention of microscopes and telescopes some four centuries ago, our view of the world around us and the universe in which we live has changed markedly.

What we used to believe about how our bodies worked, how stars and planets moved, and the very nature of reality have been repeatedly disrupted by new knowledge thanks to scientists and their steady improvement in developing technologies and experiments that uncover deeper and deeper layers of reality.

From The Publisher

By Stuart P. Rosenthal

As a result, we have come to be more in awe of our own brainpower even as we lose (or should lose) some faith in our five senses.

We used to say “seeing is believing.” Perhaps we haven’t rejected that completely, but we no longer believe that what we see with our naked eyes is all there is.

Let’s start with what we see when we look at our own skin. We now know that a trillion or more bacteria live on each person’s body, feasting on the dead cells our skin constantly sloughs off. Even if they’re friendly, it’s a good thing we can’t see those little buggers, right?

Speaking of what’s invisible to us, think about our old transistor radios and television sets, and today’s cell phones and Wi-Fi. The air all around us is filled with electromagnetic waves that are transmitting the sounds and images of millions of radio and television programs, streaming movies, personal calls and GPS instructions all at once. Imagine what our lives would be like if our eyes could see such waves or our ears could pick up all those sounds. We would be unable to function!

Sometimes I think back to my seventhgrade science class. That’s where I first encountered the periodic table and learned that all matter — living or dead, organic or inorganic — is made up of atoms, and that those consist of protons, neutrons and electrons, all of which are in constant motion. It always made me wonder how anything apparently solid exists.

I find myself even today sometimes contemplating ordinary items in my daily experience — my desk, my car, a fly on the wall, this copy of the Beacon — and trying to imagine how they can all be composed of the same, constantly moving subatomic building blocks, only in different combinations.

Speaking of the periodic table, does it make sense that one additional proton distinguishes atoms of the metal lithium from those of the gas helium, or the gas nitrogen from carbon, or mercury from gold? How do so many characteristics of different forms of matter arise from such a seemingly small change?

At the age of 12, I guess I took all this in stride, like just about everything else I learned in school. But the older I get, the more amazed I am by such facts — and by the many additional layers of understanding that physicists now have to explain what lies at the root of our daily reality.

By that, I mean much of what we were simplistically taught in grade school has been completely transformed by quantum physics and its ongoing discoveries. (These took a few decades to trickle down to school textbooks.)

We now “know” that gravity is (probably) caused by the stretching of space-time, and that electrons don’t literally orbit nuclei, but are jumping around in “clouds” that surround them (but defy observation).

We are also told that what Einstein derogatorily called “spooky action at a distance” has been proven: That when two quantum particles interact once, they continue to affect each other even when they are so far apart they can no longer have any way to communicate.

Oh, and by the way, did you know researchers have identified about 200 or so subatomic particles to date, thanks to ex-

IN FOCUS

For

PEOPLE

The Beacon is a monthly newspaper dedicated to inform, serve, and entertain the citizens of the Howard County area, and is privately owned. Other editions serve Greater Baltimore, Md. and Greater Washington, D.C. Subscriptions are available via third-class mail ($12), prepaid with order. Maryland residents add 6 percent for sales tax. Send subscription order to the office listed below. Publication of advertising contained herein does not necessarily constitute endorsement. Signed columns represent the opinions of the writers, and not necessarily the opinion of the publisher.

Publisher/Editor – Stuart P. Rosenthal

President/Associate Publisher – Judith K. Rosenthal

Executive Vice President – Gordon Hasenei

Managing Editor – Margaret Foster

Art Director – Kyle Gregory

Advertising Representatives –Steve Levin, M.K. Phillips, Alan Spiegel

Marketing & Operations Manager – Ashley Griffin

Assistant Editor – Ana Preger Hart

Client Liaison – Jaclyn Thompson

Over 50

The Beacon, P.O. Box 2227, Silver Spring, MD 20915 (410) 248-9101 • Email: info@thebeaconnewspapers.com periments in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN?

Submissions: The Beacon welcomes reader contributions. Deadline for editorial is the 1st of the month preceding the month of publication. Deadline for ads is the 1st of the month preceding the month of publication. See page 23 for classified advertising details. Please mail or email all submissions.

© Copyright 2023 The Beacon Newspapers, Inc.

Perhaps even deeper beneath these discoveries are so-called “strings,” which are hypothesized to be the vibrating energy underpinnings of subatomic particles, and hence of all nature.

One of my favorite lines from the theater is when the son Chris in Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons explains that he reads the book reviews in the newspaper because “I like to keep abreast of my ignorance.”

That’s how I feel about my occasional reading about contemporary science or the YouTube videos I often watch for the same reason.

Our understanding of the universe — like the universe itself apparently — is everexpanding and endlessly full of wonder.

I don’t pretend to really understand anything I’ve talked about in this column. But the more I learn (well, hear) about the many layers of what we call reality, the more I find myself agreeing with Trudy, Lily Tomlin’s character in Jane Wagner’s Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, when she says, “Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.”

Maybe I would amend that to say, “amongst those attempting to stay abreast of our understanding of it.” It’s challenging, mind-bending stuff. But it also continually fuels our sense of wonder and awe at the multi-level reality in which we live.