Travel Agent

Before anything else, did you know that, aside from Oscar the Grouch, there are other grouches in Sesame Street? And according to this source, other grouches are named Grizzly the Grouch, Grundgetta Grunge and Osvaldo the Grouch. But, so far, in the entirety of my childish existence, I have only seen Oscar the Grouch – the most celebrated grouch of all time – and his grouch girlfriend, Grundgetta Grunge. Yes, knowing those two grouches are highly essential for your human existence lest you’ve been deprived of your childhood or simply getting a kick from aging – memory loss.

Here’s a YouTube video for a refresher. It features Oscar, Grundgetta and Spill O’Reilly. Although I must admit that I’ve also never heard of Spill O’Reilly until this.

Now back to the main story…

Once, I went to Divisoria to buy shirts for a print project when I came upon a store selling moderately-cute school supplies and other kiddie stuff. I saw a case of Winnie the Pooh crayons and colored pens being sold for P50.00 so I bought one for my kid (see photo above). One day, I saw her drawing shapes and other not-so-recognizable-images such as this…

I asked her what she was drawing because one of her sketches looked liked a potato (see the one next to the cat. Yeah, I drew that cat and good luck finding it. HAHAHA!). She told me that was a man.

The next day, she came up with another masterpiece and when asked what she drew that time, she came up with the following explanation…

According to Tifa, the stick figure in the bottom center is Daddy (that’s me) and the black arch above the head is my hair. The yellow figure on the left is Tito AJ, his five-year old uncle. The one on the right is her, she was sleeping while drinking milk – that explain the figure’s position. The “square-ish” figure on the bottom left is a television. Above it, the continuous broken lines, is a car. It has already left so you could only see the tracks. HAHAHA!!!

So why what’s the relation of this post to the Sesame Street grouches? Simple, remember a Sesame Street episode where a black woman shows her daugther Maria’s doodles to Oscar the Grouch (or was it Grundgetta?)? In that episode, the grouch wanted to buy Maria’s artwork because the grouch think it was a perfect work of art (int the grouch way).

That all! I kind of remembered that episode when I saw Tifa’s own doodles.

But come to think of it, Tifa’s human sketches (a.k.a. stick figures) are just so consistent. And she’s just 3 years old.