The Count on display in NYC in 2014
Austin, Texas is the home of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, which, like many presidential libraries, is sort of a half-library, half-museum. Starting tomorrow, the library will have an exhibition of great interest to fans of PBS, and Sesame Street in particular.
As seen on the library’s website, the exhibition is called “On the Air: 50 Years of Public Broadcasting,” and it includes some actual puppets from the show — Big Bird, the Count, and Oscar the Grouch — and a backdrop of 123 Sesame Street for photo-posing fun. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL. There’s also “an original painting by Bob Ross,” an autoharp used by Garrison Keillor on public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, “a copy of Julia Child’s Master the Art of French Cooking cookbook with a personal inscription to Lady Bird Johnson,” and perhaps most exciting of all, Mr. Rogers’s sweater and sneakers.
As the website reminds us, the LBJ library is an especially appropriate venue for all this, because “Fifty years ago this year, on Nov. 7, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and, eventually, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and National Public Radio (NPR).” Thanks, Lyndon!
If you’re in the Austin area, you should definitely plan to check out this exhibition — especially if you’ve never been to the library before. It’s worth the trip anyway just to see the life-size animatronic LBJ who tells jokes and folksy humorous anecdotes.
The exhibition has its official opening Saturday, June 24 — TOMORROW! — with a special appearance by an Elmo walkaround. Please note, however, that Elmo “cannot be photographed holding promotional items,” so don’t even think about asking him to pose with a sign from your real estate agency.
Click here to play the autoharp on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
