“Sunny day,Sweepin’ the clouds away,On my way to where the air is sweet,Can you tell me how to get …… how to get to Sesame Street?”
Flick: ‘Long and winding road’ from Bloomington-Normal to 123 Sesame Street
Get ready to dance along to User’s ABC Song because this alphabet song will have you on your feet and moving your body!
“Sunny day,
Sweepin’ the clouds away,
ContentsOn my way to where the air is sweet,
Can you tell me how to get …
… how to get to Sesame Street?”
Paul Rudolph? He can tell you how to get there — from Bloomington-Normal even, without a GPS, or road atlas, or travel itinerary.
In fact, he’s been at 123 Sesame Street for 15 years now.
“I still pinch myself walking on the set,” he says.
At age 57 is Rudolph, a 1984 Normal Community High School grad and member of the NCHS band and marching band who moved on to the University of Illinois where he became a section leader of the Marching Illini drumline.
That’s all a primer to this:
Whenever you hear music on TV’s “Sesame Street,” that’s Paul Rudolph at work.
He’s vocal music director of the iconic PBS show, now in its 54th year.
Whenever you see Abby Cadabby — she’s that wide-eyed, pink-haired waif of a puppet in ponytails and a special friend of Big Bird, Elmo, Bert and Ernie — think of Rudolph, too.
He’s married to her — more specifically, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, whose hands and voice are Abby.
The ultimate Paul Rudolph?
In a Bloomington-Normal tied often to Oscar and Emmy types thanks to its association with Illinois State and Illinois Wesleyan University alums who have moved on to Hollywood, it is none of those who have won the most Emmys.
Instead, it’s Paul Rudolph, a three-time Emmy-winning music editor, six total if you include all his group music editing.
One Emmy statuette even lives fulltime these days in Bloomington’s Westminster Village, the retirement community, on top of the piano of his folks — that’s Sally and Lee Rudolph — because as Sally puts it, “he thought we had something to do with his Emmys.”
The Rudolph success is, as is often the case, an accomplishment story quietly built l-o-n-g term off-camera, on a passion, a love, a devotion and persistence, all from a kid who grew up in Normal watching on TV his eventual vocation.
“It’s a long and winding road to Sesame Street, for sure,” says Paul.
After a music education degree at U of I, he landed a job as the assistant band director at Mahomet-Seymour High. Eventually a passion to compose led him back to U of I, to pursue a graduate education in music composition.
There, an alum told him L.A. was the place to be.
So he moved, where he knocked on the proverbial doors, eventually to connect with a composer who offered him a position as his assistant.
There, through work on a TV show in the late 1980s — the Tracey Ullman Show and various made-for-television movies — Rudolph learned to edit and score music scenes, and in 1995 he joined his boss who had just landed a job with the Jim Henson Company.
Henson, of course, is the guy who originated “Sesame Street.”
For 11 years then, that’s where Rudolph toiled, in the shadows but impressing others, until one day came a call from a co-executive producer of “Sesame Street” who wondered if he’d be interested in sending a tape, to do a version of “Sing a Song” in any style and Rudolph did, as he describes it, “in a cheesy kind of loungy bossa nova arrangement.”
Yes, success at landing a job is just that simple.
Since, while at 123 Sesame Street, he’s worked on musical scores with Prince, Bruno Mars, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis and Foo Fighters icon, Dave Grohl.
He’s orchestrated the songs you see on Thanksgiving morn in the Macy’s Parade.
Jon Batiste sang “Believe In Yourself” with Elmo, Abby and Tamir, and watching it all unfold was Rudolph.
“Simply incredible,” says Rudolph. “He (Batiste) had the lead sheet for the song, but he never looked at it, altering chords on the fly while looking at me smiling and saying a wide-eyed ‘Yeaaaahhhh!'”
Twice he’s worked with legendary English singer-songwriter Elvis Costello.
Growing up in a home in Normal filled with music compliments of his folks, while a student at Colene Hoose Elementary, Rudolph was a Singing Y’er and member of Second Presbyterian Church choir.
By age 14, he was playing in the instrumental pit at Community Players along Robinhood Lane during a rendition of “West Side Story.”
“I’m so fortunate to have grown up in a town with so many arts opportunities,” he says. “I still remember seeing Victor Borge at ISU when I was a kid, and how my sister and I — we both were taking ‘serious’ piano lessons at the time — saw hilarity on stage with an amazing classical pianist.”
And now, a few years later and even more, he works with Big Bird, and Bert and Ernie, and his wife, Abby Cadabby.
“Can you tell me how to get … to Sesame Street?”
It’s not easy, but oh so accomplishing once you get there.
Rudolf Abel: The Soviet spy who grew up in England
The arrest and trial of the “most famous Soviet spy of all time”, Rudolf Abel, is the inspiration for the latest Steven Spielberg blockbuster, Bridge of Spies. But who was Abel and what is the story behind his unlikely upbringing as a grammar school boy in the north-east of England?
“Red spy nabbed” screamed the Pathé News broadcast of October 1957 as Rudolf Abel was marched away in handcuffs.
It was the archetypal Cold War tale – an undercover operative arrested after his cover was blown.
Spared the electric chair, Abel was sentenced to three decades in prison. But just over four years later he would be handed over in return for Gary Powers, an American apprehended by the Soviets when his U-2 plane was shot down in 1960.
As an intelligence colonel, Abel was the highest-ranking Russian to face spy charges in the US. He had worked as a radio operator during World War Two before taking a role with the Foreign Intelligence Service as a translator and then joining a forerunner of the KGB.
But while Abel was what he called himself when taken into custody in the US, perhaps unsurprisingly for a secret services emissary, it was not his real name.
Image source, Dreamworks
Image caption,
Mark Rylance, centre, plays Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies alongside Tom Hanks as his American lawyer, James Donovan
“He was born William Fisher on 11 July 1903 in Benwell, in Newcastle’s West End,” says David Saunders, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University, who has been instrumental in uncovering the full story of the spy’s childhood.
Spotting a review of a Russian language book by former spy Kirill Khenkin in The Times Literary Supplement in 1983, he was amazed to read of Abel’s English childhood and set about obtaining a copy of his birth certificate.
“Abel was familiar to me,” says the professor. “I remembered the exchange of 1962. He’s the most famous Soviet spy of all time.
“We make a lot in this country about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, but those British spies didn’t have any rank in the KGB. Abel is the only British-born ranking officer in Soviet external security services that we know of.
“He was born at 140 Clara Street, a property which is no longer there, and his family lived at a number of other addresses – Greenhow Place, Hampstead Road, Armstrong Road – from 1901.”
Image source, Fisher family
Image caption,
William Fisher (top left) pictured in a family photograph as a schoolboy
Image caption,
Fisher’s birth certificate shows he was born in Newcastle on 11 July 1903
In 1908, William’s parents would move their two sons out of the city for the fresher air of the nearby coast.
“William sketched and was artistic. He was also musically talented. It was a middle-class life of a kind,” says Prof Saunders, who describes a gifted youngster who – to the outside world at least – enjoyed an ordinary existence.
But the future spy’s father was no ordinary man. A Bolshevik revolutionary, Heinrich Fisher was a “staunch socialist” and had been imprisoned in his home country by the Tsarist authorities.
He and his wife Lyubov emigrated from Russia in 1901, making their way across Germany.
