![]() ![]() ![]() “The words were so deliberate and the letters were flashing over his head. “There was James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet and I said, ‘My gosh. The memoir ends on the day of Manzano’s Sesame Street audition in 1971, two years after catching her first glimpse of the show as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and you’re not gonna get it back if somebody says, ‘I’m really sorry about what happened.’” “It doesn’t mean I forgive, or that it’s OK. “When I hear these horrible stories of poverty that my father and mother lived through in Puerto Rico and this harsh environment where people were so cold-hearted…you say, ‘Well, no wonder he strengthened.’ You get kind of a new perspective,” she says. He had a new wife and had stopped drinking.”She hasn’t necessarily forgiven her father, but Manzano says she understands him now more than ever before. I still love her, you know.’ He stopped drinking, which was remarkable to me. He said, ‘Oh, that was between me and your mother. “He was unaware of the effect that that life had on me. ![]() In one chapter, she watches him beat her mother with a broken table leg.Manzano and her father stayed estranged for many years during her adult life, but she visited him while writing the book to reacquaint herself with the man who shaped so much of her childhood. She describes difficult moments, like watching her father drunkenly smash all the furniture in their tiny apartment’s living room and seeing the black eyes and bruises he would leave on her mother. Much of the book focuses on her Puerto Rican parents’ turbulent-and often violent-relationship. “That’s why I segued into writing.” Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx is Manzano’s first memoir, a poignant coming-of-age chronicle of her childhood in the South Bronx in the ’50s and ’60s. But with fewer episodes and fewer human-driven segments being produced each season, along with an ever-expanding cast of Muppets, she had begun to feel that there was “less to go around” for each cast member.“I still had a lot of creative energy,” she says. Sudden as the announcement felt to us, leaving Sesame Street was a move Manzano had been planning for years-she just hadn’t gotten around to picking a date. “I just sort of fade off into the distance,” Manzano says, laughing. She had made the decision in between the show’s 45th and 46th seasons, which means there will be no onscreen goodbye to Maria. And so that’s very gratifying.”Manzano, 65, unwittingly prompted a day of mourning on social media in July when she casually broke the news of her Sesame Street retirement to a group of librarians from the American Library Association. “Then I think what they really mean is I was the first one they saw as a real human being. “I’ve heard Anglos from the Midwest say, ‘You were the first Latina I ever knew’ and I think, ‘Wait a second, there’s no Latin people out in the Midwest?’” she says. Sometimes they’re funny (“You were my girlfriend!”) and sometimes they’re sad (“I was abused as a child but when I watched you for that hour every day, I was comforted.”)And sometimes they’re mind-boggling. ![]() Great place to meet Oscar the Grouch!”Manzano played Maria for 44 years on Sesame Street, guiding generations of kids through everything from the alphabet to feminism to 9/11-so she’s used to awkwardly impassioned greetings from fans. Without thinking, I hug her “hello” like she's a relative, someone I’ve known since before I can remember-forgetting for a second that to her, I’m a stranger.She hugs me back anyway-then cracks a joke about the coffee shop where we’re sitting: “Café Grumpy, what a funny name. Sonia Manzano, the beloved writer and actress best known as Maria from Sesame Street, has a presence so familiar it’s strange to think we’ve never actually met. ![]()
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