Black puppeteer Megan Piphus Peace recently shared a behind-the-scenes look at “Sesame Street’s” famous “Wash Day” episode. Peace, who is a puppeteer for the long-running television series, voices the character Gabrielle. The actress shared the BTS footage on her Instagram.
“I couldn’t help but smile while puppeteering. I’m making the content I needed as a little girl through Gabrielle.” Peace wrote in the text of the video she posted. In the video, Peace can be seen beaming with a smile as her puppet Gabrielle gets her hair washed by Auntie Kayla.
As the video continues, the camera pulls out and Peace’s followers can see another Black woman standing off set visibly excited as she watches the scene play out. Peace identifies the woman as the shows producer.
“There were so many wet eyes on set,” Peace captioned on the video. “And our producer, a Black woman, does the happy dance celebrating this moment.”
An Important Episode
Black hair, especially Black women’s hair, continues to be at the center of socio-political conversations. The “Wash Day” episode extends the long-running attempt at normalizing the nuances and needs of Black hair. Another landmark event for Black hair can be traced back to Viola Davis’s character Analise Keating who in an episode of the critically acclaimed television series, How To Get Away With Murder, takes her wig off during a night-time beauty routine.
As Davis said of that moment in an interview with the New York Times, “The TV and film business is saturated with people who think they’re writing something human when it’s really a gimmick. But if I took the wig off in a brutal, private moment and took off the makeup, it would force them to write for THAT woman.”
The full “Sesame Street” episode blurb, reads thus, “It’s Wash Day today and Gabrielle gets to spend special time with her Auntie Kayla, who combs, shampoos, conditions, and detangles her hair. Then, at the end, Gabrielle gets to pick out a new style for her hair!”
The inclusion of the steps and processes everyday Black people employ in washing their hair also helps heighten the cultural importance of that episode.
The First Black Woman Puppeteer
Along with steering a landmark episode, Peace also became “Sesame Street’s” first full-time, Black, female puppeteer in the show’s over 50 year history. Peace began puppetry at age 10 and taught herself puppetry and ventriloquism by watching VHS tapes. As she tells CNN in an interview, “I realized how you can captivate the attention of a child with a puppet. My soul was just lifted by being able to make kids anywhere from kindergarten to sixth-grade smile and laugh.”
In the Instagram post she made celebrating the “Wash Day” episode, Peace shows several clips of her children watching the episode at home when it aired. While they watch she turns the camera on her self and shows off her natural hair which she is rocking in twists.