Big Bird met his new neighbor on 60 Minutes last night: Julia, a yellow puppet with orange hair who didn't greet him back. Julia is autistic, and shyness is a trait of autism, as are flapping hands, a sensitivity to noise, and a slowness to understand—all of which Julia also demonstrated during the Sesame Street segment. She joins a sparse collection of autistic characters on television, especially in children's programming.
Like all Sesame Street characters, Julia was brought to life by a mix of storywriters, educators, and psychologists, and her puppeteer, Stacey Gordon, who has a son with autism. "Had my son's friends been exposed to his behaviors through something that they had seen on TV before they experienced them in the classroom, they might not have been frightened," Gordon told Lesley Stahl. "And [they] would have known that he plays in a different way, and that that's okay."
In her first episode, Julia demonstrates that all it takes is understanding to make friends with someone on the autism spectrum. And even then, every kid is different. As writer Christine Ferraro told Stahl of creating Julia's personality, "It's tricky because autism is not one thing, because it is different for every single person who has autism. There is an expression that goes, "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism."
Julia's addition to the neighborhood proves that early 50 years after it first premiered on public broadcasting television, Sesame Street continues to be one of the most important, and awesome, kids shows out there.
