Embracing the Child Within
Within every successful, hard-driving, fund-raising New York adult is a smiley, giggling child, as demonstrated at the Sesame Workshop gala.
The chairman of Time Warner Inc., Richard Parsons, was in a suit and standing very tall Wednesday night, but one could see the boy within as he greeted Elmo and his Indian counterpart, Chamki, who appears on "Galli Galli Sim Sim," India's locally produced version of "Sesame Street."
Time Warner is Sesame Workshop's corporate partner in India.
The gala was both fun and serious. The serious part: It raised $1.6 million for Sesame Workshop's preschool education programs abroad.
"Most people don't know that we're a nonprofit, and that we work all over the world," Sesame Workshop's chief marketing officer, Sherrie Westin, said by telephone yesterday, adding that licensing revenue made here in America is not sufficient to fund these programs.
Sesame Workshop aims to make its productions indigenous. "It's not the U.S. 'Sesame Street' in India or Africa or Kosovo," Mrs. Westin said. "We train the puppeteers, we partner with the local ministries of education."
For a brief time at the event, the co-founder of Sesame Workshop, Joan Cooney Peterson, was without a date or muppet. Her husband, Peter Peterson, had left the event to go down the street to the New York Public Library to congratulate his business partner Stephen Schwarzman on his $100 million gift to the library.
The Schwarzman dinner had its own famous childhood character present: the original Winnie the Pooh teddy bear, purchased by A.A. Milne for his son. But he didn't cause quite as many giggles, displayed in a case next to one containing the Gutenberg Bible.
agordon@nysun.com
