When Sonia Manzano announced last year that she was leaving "Sesame Street," the news hit home for many people. For so many years, on our televisions, in our homes, she's almost been like a member of the family. NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile.
Sonia Manzano, known around the world as Maria, has spent more than 40 years in our homes. But now, she's left the family...the Sesame Street family.
"I just think that 44 years is long enough to wait for Oscar the Grouch to propose, don't you?" she says.
Sonia Manzano joined the show as the character Maria in 1971. But with fewer episodes, more characters and less airtime, she made the decision to leave Sesame Street. She casually mentioned the news at the 2015 American Library Association Conference in San Francisco.
"The teachers and librarians tweeted it," Manzano says. "By the time I got to the east coast, it was national news."
At her Manhattan apartment, Manzano now focuses her plentiful energy on writing. She has penned a memoir, "Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx."
She has plenty of writing experience. The 15 Emmy Awards in her apartment are for segments she wrote for Sesame Street.
"It's easier to hide behind a character when you're acting than to be yourself, and they kept saying, 'No, we just want you to be yourself,'" Manzano says. "They were really into showing, which was unheard of at that time, real people of color on television."
Manzano's character became a fixture on American television.
Her TV life reflected her real life. She got married, and Maria got married on TV. She gave birth to her daughter Gabriela, who, for a time, played Maria's daughter on Sesame Street.
It was one acting job over 44 years that created many special moments.
Like the time the other Sonia from the Bronx, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, visited Sesame Street. The justice adjudicated whether Goldilocks had the right to slip into the baby bear's house and sit in his chair.
Was it one of the tougher cases that's come before the justice? "As a matter of fact, at the end of the bit, she says, "I wish they were all like this," Manzano says.
Manzano's memoir concludes just before she starts working on Sesame Street. She recalls growing up near Crotona Park, with painful memories watching her father, at times drunk and violent to her mother.
"I don't think you that you ever really put the bad things that happen to you away," she says. "They're like shards in your heart."
Manzano says the years, and research on the Puerto Rico of her parents' youth, have given her, if not a sense of forgiveness, perspective.
"The poverty that my parents were raised in during the depression makes Oliver Twist sound like a walk in the park. I mean, it's awful when kids are drowning in sewage. There's nothing to eat," Manzano says.
"To them, we were living the Life of Riley, because of what they came from. When I confronted my parents when they were old, my father said, 'What does this have to do with you? Nothing.'"
On one night at NYU, Manzano shared the stage with Hamilton sensation Lin-Manuel Miranda.
"We grew up with you. It is so impossible to overstate how important this woman is," Miranda said.
But growing up, when she watched television to find comfort and order, she says, "We were invisible. There were no Latinos on television. There were no people of color on television in those days, and you used to wonder, how was I going to contribute to a society that was blind to me, that didn't see me."
Manzano vividly recalls one episode from her youth when her people and neighborhood were depicted with respect, thanks to a trip organized by her fourth-grade teacher, Shirley Pelman.
"She took me and some girls to see 'West Side Story,' and that was such an epiphany for me. I started crying in the theater," Manzano says. "Poor woman. She was doing a nice thing for me, and I was having a nervous breakdown."
Manzano attended the old High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, then studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she landed a role in the original production of "Godspell," which soon came to New York.
"If I managed to survive my childhood, all of this other stuff was gravy," Manzano says. "So other actors would say, 'Oh, I have to get this part. It's just going to be awful.' And I was thinking, 'Whatever happens next is good.'"
Her early professional trajectory was a lot better than good. It was remarkable. Only a few years out of high school, she was on Broadway. Then, she was asked to audition for "Sesame Street" and promptly got the part.
"In the beginning, I struggled a lot," she says. "I would compete with the puppets. Not a good thing to do," she laughs. "They're going to be more interesting to look at because they can fly across the room.
She never experienced the rite of passage of young actors: unemployment.
"It was so easy that I'd say, 'What is all this stuff about how hard show business is? It's another lie they tell people to keep us out,'" she says.
She eventually felt the sting of rejection when she didn't get movie roles.
There was some early interest from other television shows.
"Those shows they wanted me to have you know they wanted me to talk like this," Manzano says, speaking in an accent. "They were like that. And/or, and I always felt self-conscious doing that."
The steady Sesame Street gig allowed Manzano to have that rarity in show business: a fulfilling professional job and a relatively normal home schedule with her husband, conservationist Richard Reagan, and their daughter. But especially early on, the success of the show and its impact didn't mask the memories of her experiences growing up in the South Bronx.
"I found that i was angry all the time, and only the people on Sesame Street seemed to like me anyway," she says. "But my anger was getting in the way of relationships, and I went and got therapy and I got help."
Manzano is looking forward to more writing. Her retirement from Sesame Street has elicited an outpouring of affection, 44 years worth of goodwill.
"I got an email from somebody who said, 'My mother was schizophrenic, and I, but the only good thing she did was put me in front of the television, and when I saw you, I'd make believe you were in my life and you were like me," Manzano says.
"I knew that I could be for little kids what I needed to see when I was a kid and didn't have it. And they were obvious. They wanted me to be a real person and they wanted me to be a role model. I said, 'Well, what's a role model?' 'We just want you to be yourself, a real human Latina person on television.'"