UsedToHaveKarma

Have any of your students come back to visit you decades later? What did they say to you?

I also suffered brain trauma (and many other injuries) as a crime victim. It's a tough fight--all the more awful because the situation is totally not your fault--isn't it? It's been about five years since my assault and I'm just now recovering some of my lost skills (reading). I'm glad you're drawing attention to your case and the broader issue of disability through crime. It's a real service to the world for you to share your story and point of view. I hope you'll keep speaking out.

Any reading recommendations for someone terrified of old age/incapacity/dying alone?

I recommend you contact the head of the performing arts library at Cornell (his college), share your story of the experience and the materials you saw, and ask if they would consider acquiring his papers for their collection.

Here is her contact info: Bonna Boettche
Director, Music and Fine Arts Libraries 607/255-7126
[email protected]

I'd prefer to stay anonymous but PM me if you want me to read a draft of your email or something. I just happen to know a little about the world of academic library/archive/museum curation.

I don't mean the script he gave you--that's yours. But, the materials you helped pack up in his office--scripts, manuscripts, sheet music, etc. would all be pretty useful for performing arts scholarship. In this context, "papers" means "creative or historical stuff", more or less.

It's been a few years since he died, so his papers may be gone by now, or maybe they've already been picked up by some institution (I didn't look), but it does sound like great stuff from your description, and I'd really like to see his papers in a proper archive.

I suggest you try Cornell because he attended, and his school would have an extra interest in possibly acquiring the collection for the University Archives if not the performing arts library. If Cornell doesn't bite, try Vin Novara at the University of Maryland--they have the Henson papers, so maybe they'd take these as a companion collection. If not them, the Museum of Television and Radio? If not there, the performing arts department of the NYPL. I would hope that one of these places would at least investigate whether the stuff has already been collected.

So, I say just send an email. Acknowledge that it's a weird request but you know of a cool collection and some anonymous Internet stranger who used to be a museum and special collections curator told you to share your story and try to get the collection into an archive. Explain how you came to see the stuff, list whatever you can remember about specific items, tell them about your script (but say you have no intention of contributing it--it's just to represent the sort of items likely to be in the collection), include the obit as you did here, and make a case for the value of this person/his papers to that institution. For Cornell, he was an alum and tremendously important to the field of performing arts. For Maryland, he was an associate of Henson, and worked on Sesame Street X years. For MTR, he was tremendously important in television and motion pictures and Sesame Street has been on the air X years and Y children watch every day. For NYPL, Sesame Street is a key popular representation of the urban experience and produced in NY for X years.

I'm happy to advise if you want to keep me in the loop. In fact, I hope you will. I think its well worth your effort to pursue this--maybe not to you personally, exactly, but it sounds to me like a great collection that scholars can really use. I hope you can make it happen.