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Tinky Winky runs into Feary JerryBy MARY JO MELONE © St. Petersburg Times, published February 14, 1999 The baby was sitting on the floor, one leg bent, one leg straight out, her long fingers resting on her doughy thighs. She giggled, high and sweet, as the music rose from the TV and that disembodied female voice could be heard through what looked like a periscope and rose out of the Astroturf on the screen. "Time for Teletubbies, time for Teletubbies," it said. Yes, I was accidentally perverting my child. Tinky Winky was without his purse, one of the signs -- along with the triangular antenna coming out of his head and his purple outfit -- that tipped off the Rev. Jerry Falwell that he was gay. But from right out of the TV in his baby-sized belly came pictures of real children talking about numbers -- particularly the number 6, which if you say over and over again, really fast, the way a kid might be inclined to do, comes out as 666, the symbol of, egad, the Antichrist! Just to alert you about how far this danger has spread, the children in the video came from a Florida public school. Turns out that the commie British producers of this show found they had a problem: American kids couldn't understand the Teletubbies at times -- not when the suspect Tinky Winky and co-conspirators Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po talked as though they were constantly taking tea with the Queen. So the producers came to America, to schools like Treasure Island Elementary in Miami Beach. Of course. Where else would those libs from London go, but a place where rock stars and models shoot themselves up with dope and grown men hold hands and the restaurants are really great? So the first thing I asked the principal of Treasure Island Elementary, Beverly Karrenbauer, was whether Madonna sent Lourdes to her school. "We're an inner-city school," Karrenbauer corrected me. "We've got the children of the service people." In other words, she has the kids of the cooks and maids in the $500-a-night Art Deco hotels. A year ago, the Teletubbies crew picked 15 kindergarteners and first-graders from Karrenbauer's school. The kids were filmed in 10 brief episodes about counting from 1 through 10, which were then cut into animated segments of Teletubbies. You know, until Jerry Falwell spoke up, I was completely confounded by Teletubbies and had decided it was a cross between Babes in Toyland and Babylon 5. How else to explain why the Teletubbies live in underground metal structures that look like space-age bomb shelters, while the scene above ground is a country idyll dotted with bunny rabbits and flowers? (Aha! There must also be a subliminal anti-nuke message in the show.) Being an educator, Beverly Karrenbauer kept trying to correct me. Teletubbies is teaching the same stuff educational shows for kids have always aimed to teach, she said -- shapes, colors, numbers, letters. "It's just very now," she said, referring to the delightfully strange context of those four co-conspiring dolls. Karrenbauer ought to know. She's been in the schools for 40 years and has been a consultant to those other threats to children's welfare, Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street. She also wanted to teach Jerry Falwell a thing or two, if not also whack him upside the head. "I guess when you can't pick on Bill Clinton anymore, you've got to pick on Teletubbies," she said. Small children have no concept of gays and lesbians and certainly don't grasp symbols associated with them, she explained. They don't understand who's supposed to carry a purse, and who's not. "The only one who's bringing the knowledge to them is him," she said of Falwell. "Here's a man of the cloth who when he sees the color purple, could think of something like Epiphany," Karrenbauer said. "I would think when he saw a triangle, he'd see a symbol of the Trinity, and when he saw a purse, he'd think of a beggar's purse, which is so much in Bible stories." To borrow a line from the Rev. Falwell, God bless this woman. God bless her a gazillion times.
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