USO tour targets children

Sesame Street characters Elmo, Rosita, Grover, Zoe, and Cookie Monster sang and danced their way through two shows performing for hundreds of enthusiastic children and parents during two performances of the Sesame Street Experience at the Naval Air Station, Whidbey Island theater on Saturday.

This free show was part of a traveling USO tour that is produced by VEE Corporation in co-partnership with Sesame Street.

According to Glenn Taylor, performance director, this is the first time the USO has put together a tour that targets the children of our military forces and they have been very well received.

He said he was amazed at the turnout for each show and the way that word of the shows has been passed from family to family. There was one family in California that drove to Las Vegas for the show because the wife’s husband, who is serving in Iraq, told her about the Sesame Street Experience and that she should take their child and go to the performance. This tour will have performances at 43 bases. Taylor said NAS Whidbey Island was their eighth or ninth stop on the long tour.

Each Whidbey performance was a big hit with the children. They had the opportunity to get up close to the stage and dance along with the Sesame Street characters and some lucky fans got to talk with and touch Elmo, Rosita, Grover, Zoe, or Cookie Monster as they moved on and off the stage.

When asked about which of the characters they liked the best, Jackson Gilson, 3, shouted out, “Elmo – fantastic!” and Emily Buchta, 8, replied, “Elmo!” But Tyler Dorchek had other ideas, as he liked dancing with Cookie Monster.

Though each of the children had their favorite character, the one thing that they all agreed upon was that they all had a wonderful time. The final audience tally for the two shows turned out to be a little over 1,400 and Taylor said that if the tour did not have to catch the ferry to Bremerton they would have liked to have put on another show.