Okay, so a hitherto planned “Ten Best Meals I Ever Ate” List is not going to appear today. I’m on the fourth day of a complete fast/cleanse, i.e. no solid food and only lemon-water, honey and cayenne pepper to sustain me. Thus, my long and illustrious history of gastronomic adventure is the last thing I want to expound-upon, at the moment. Instead, we’ll opt for some HazMat pop-culture profiling. Behold, the Alligator King and his brood of seven toothy tots.
You can COUNT on this song being stuck in your head all the livelong day!
Jonathan Kieran’s HAZMAT-RETRO HALL OF FAME
TODAY’S HONOREE: “7” by the Alligator King of Sesame Street (Voiced by Bud Luckey)
RUDIMENTARY ANALYSIS: Nothing warms the sweet cockles of wistful Kiddie Heart-Land like the memory of a Sesame Street “number song” that you couldn’t get out of your head at age five if you’d even tried. Forget about the fact that you used to you drive your poor mother bananas with endless repetitions of what you had learned. Forget about your mother’s desperate prayers that you would one day employ your knowledge of figures and digits to conquer Wall Street and put her in the most posh Park Avenue spread that money could buy. Irrelevant! These “number songs” were magical, and they were the top of the Toddler Hit Parade, back in the day, before Barney and Sponge-Bob and Ninja Turtles and Tellytubbies came around to rip the innocence of youth from our tender, fluttering souls with all manner of subtle-but-wanton devilry. Okay, so Barney wasn’t all that Evil. Still, none of the others could match Sesame Street’s penchant for producing cartoon ditties that made you want to COUNT until the cows came home! The plight of the Alligator King and his Seven Sons was one of the best, made all the more immortal by the swampy New Orleans ragtime inflections of the great Bud Luckey. What are you waiting for? 7-6-5-4-3-2-1 … SING IT!
DEFINITIVE LYRIC:Said the alligator king to his seventh son, “My son, you win the crown. You didn’t give me diamonds or rubies BUT you helped me up when I was down.”
SEMI-TWISTED “ADULT HUMOR” MOMENT: When the second son gives the Alligator King “seven statues of girls with clocks where their stomachs should be.” Surely this was some sort of perverted metaphor, but our beloved Jim Henson has taken the secret to his grave. Talk amongst yourselves about it, philosophers and sociologists.
EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC: No one can swing like the ALLIGATOR KING!
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Jonathan Kieran is the author of the Rowan Blaize series of epic contemporary fantasy books, as well as the critically acclaimed (Midwestern Book Review) Confessions From The Comments Section: The Secret Lives of Internet Commenters and Other Pop-Culture Zombies. His work has also been featured on The Daily Dot.com and in a plethora of other ‘zines. Click on the book covers to the right if you want to learn more about Jonathan’s titles or spend some of your hard-earned money on his multi-formatted gifts to the human race. Jonathan is currently writing and illustrating a new novel. Drop-in once in awhile for updates; he promises to provide them … once in awhile.
Jonathan Kieran 
Oh,see now? Many millions of us wake up every day with a sense of foreboding,necesarily called for by the relentlessness of stress and fear in the US during the last 9 months.We are at a point now where an individual’s reaction to the malignancy has become a topic of interest.(“How’s Bob doing with the madman?””Well,he’s packing for New Zealand,he’s chosen the flight option”)
And here we have our dear author,whose great good sense has led him to choose a walk back to childhood as an imaginative response to the dark cloud we find ourselves under at this point in our time.
.Bravo! This was fun,wished it were little longer! In the time it was mine to read for the first time,I got a nice reprieve and an invitation to walk on the lovely memory side.
And tucked in there also is a nice little reminder—“Lighten Up!”
Right! We NEED an alligator king to straighten all this sheet out. Uh huh. Thank heaven someone else “gets it.” (I mostly just want one of those Lady-statues with a clock where her stomach should be.”) Weren’t the Henson writers geniuses in their day, or any day? Oh, where has it gone?