Not many people are able to capture the moment their childhood dreams were shattered. I did. It was this day in November 1994 and I was six years old. It was this very moment, at my little cousin Pat’s 4th birthday party, when I first found out my favorite anthropomorphic dinosaur, Barney, WASN’T real. Growing up glued to the set watching Barney on PBS every morning, I thought for sure Barney was real and I loved him as much as he loved me. But I was wrong.
I knew something was off when I first walked down the stairs to greet our celebrity guest and felt his meagerly rotund stomach. What was this soft and shiny material? Suede? This can’t be right. This material should be almost as coarse as the oversized brown wool sweater/potato sack I’m wearing. And I couldn’t believe how slimmed down Barney looked in person. Did he lose weight in-between seasons? Was he shedding the pounds for a movie role?
And then, it happened. Almost in slow motion, as my face moved upward to look up into the stiff black mesh of fake Barney’s immovable mouth (which was my first clue, because I knew for a fact, Barney had a flex-jaw to eat and drink his fave PB&J’s with a glass of milk) I saw A PAIR OF HUMAN EYES.
Oh the disappointment. I thought my cousin Pat was going to have the be-all-end-all of amazing birthday parties. It was to be the talk of the town. This was the royal ball, I was part of the aristocratic family, and we had a famous celeb showing for up for a guest performance of today’s top/only hit “I Love You, You Love Me.”
True to character, my thoughts didn’t turn to “Well this is an impostor, and Barney is actually on set in L.A.” I was much more logical/worst case scenario about it. My thoughts automatically turned to “Wait a minute. If this Barney’s fake, then Barney on TV must also be fake! That Barney must also have a person inside, and no one’s really bringing him to life with their imaginations!”
It seemed everyone else was either fooled or didn’t care because whenever I got on my soapbox to announce: “That’s not Barney! There’s someone inside the costume!,” I was either ignored or told to quiet down for my disruptive behavior. The other kids were lost in a trance, engulfed in pure bliss at the sight of the friendly tyrannosaurus, and the adults only saw me as an unruly dissident in this corrupt Barney-worshiping monarchy. If we were the royal family, I was amongst the Romanovs and Barney was clearly Rasputin.
Towards the closing of the party, I was clearly annoyed with the way things were going. I was being ignored as well as told to pose with this muppet. My thoughts started to wander. “Wait a minute. You don’t think the muppets?…Not them too… No, I can’t bare to think about that now.”
I’d obviously given up on my campaign to shed light on the web of deceit woven by the man in the costume bought on wholesale, who turned out to be my Uncle Danny which I just found out last week.
Stay tuned for more as the family secrets keep unraveling.
Love your post, Ashley! You were a cutie! Your photos are priceless! Keep the family secrets coming.
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