From: www.nypost.com

If you know that “C” is for cookie and anyone living in a garbage can is likely to be grumpy, you probably know the way to Sesame Street. What’s hard to believe — even for the purple vampire who taught many of us how to count — is that the PBS kids show is turning 40. (Michelle Obama helps celebrate on Tuesday’s show.)

The concept of entertaining children through television was nothing new when “Sesame Street” made its 1969 debut. Educating them via boob tube, however, was.

Just like classroom instructors, many of the pioneering show’s major characters specialized in a subject: Big blue Cookie Monster taught kids to spell, vampire Count von Count was a numbers man, and Big Bird — with his mammoth friend Aloysius Snuffleupagus, once visible only to the yellow bird — introduced kids to intro-level existential thinking.

With man and muppet alike serving as a model for neighborly interaction, Maria, a Latina character who opened a lending library on Sesame Street, stressed the importance of reading and promoted ethnic diversity.

“It’s interesting that, as neighborhoods in America disappear, we are still a show that’s based on the old concept of a neighborhood,” says South Bronx native Sonia Manzano, who has been playing Maria for 35 years and has also won 15 Emmys as a writer on the program. Manzano calls “Sesame Street” a very “New Yorkish” thing, one with which people all over the world can still identify. “That’s another ‘Sesame Street’ magic. You ask anybody where it is, and they’ll always say it’s in their neighborhood. I can be in a cornfield in Iowa, and they’ll tell me it’s right there somewhere right around that next corn leaf.”