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did. He was in my way.” Then
he asked, “Do you really talk to the puppets?”
    I told him that I did. When I drop Picklepuss, I
apologize to him.
    Jim smiled. He said, “To me, the puppets are
just tools to get the scenes done. I’m not sentimental about them.” [77]
    The difference shows up in the shape of Henson and Spinney’s
careers. They are both great artists who can channel the forces inside their
bodies, minds, and hearts into great performance. But though Henson was
famously unable to fire anyone, he could hire people, which for many of
us is just as hard.
    Henson never kicked an employee or ripped one
apart, but he had to tell Nelson there wasn’t enough work to keep him. He had
to lose good people and make hard choices so that the organization would stay afloat
and people would get paid. The curse of the boss is often losing sleep over the
responsibility that is yours alone. The beauty of being an employee is not
having to take your work home with you.
    In many ways, Spinney is truer to what we think
an artist should be . He never had to fire anyone, ask anyone to give up
a vacation or work for cheap. He has delighted children through the character
of Big Bird for forty-five years without having to run a business. Clearly,
there is a choice.
    Michael Davis noted a similar difference between
Henson and a predecessor of TV puppets, Burr Tillstrom:
    I don’t think Jim ever thought the characters were
too precious. That’s why I did so much in the book about Burr Tillstrom.…
[I]t’s because Burr created a very different model about how he felt about
those characters. He didn’t want any commercialism at all. He didn’t want a
Kukla and Ollie in the stories. He felt that there was only one Kukla and one
Ollie and those were the puppets on his hands. He felt that they had a soul and
a life of their own. Jim didn’t, he kept the puppets in a plastic bag, he
didn’t think that they were alive. He knew that the performers were the ones
giving them life.
    [Tillstrom] could have been a gazillionaire. I’m
old enough to remember Kukla, Fran and Ollie on television and they were it.
They were it for a while. They could have been in every five and dime, every
drug store, every toy store, but he didn’t want it. And then here you have Jim
who went about it carefully, cautiously, but he was interested in making money
from the characters. Why? Because it gave him the freedom to do the things he
really wanted to do like the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth . He
wanted to expand and make sure that the people who worked for him made a good
wage. It’s two different ways of looking at the world. [78]
    If one is too “precious” about one’s art, one can’t leverage
its power as well to the benefit and survival of that art. And because he was
not too “precious” about the characters, Henson was able to be a boss, to make
tough decisions, to sacrifice one thing for another. Tillstrom succeeded on his
own terms—he was the biggest thing in puppets in his lifetime. Spinney is also
amazingly successful on his own terms, not running a business or licensing
anything, but getting to create on a daily basis the work he was born to do.
    It may be better to be a Spinney. It’s harder to be a Henson. But who gave meaningful jobs to hundreds of creative artists? Spinneys
have a boss they can trust. Hensons have to wake up and be that boss every day,
rain or shine. It is difficult to say who had more of a lasting impact. I think
there are kinder people walking the planet today because of the artwork of both
these men. But every artist has a choice. You don’t have to be a Henson.
    But if you’re going to be a Spinney, you need to find a Henson. It might not be easy—he might talk quietly or ask you to
take a pay cut. But ultimately, his business could be the key to your career in
art. Even Henson, in his early years, sought out a Henson. Henson didn’t work
for Tillstrom outright, but he attached himself to Tillstrom’s