It’s weird to me to think that Sesame Street is 40 years old today, especially since I’m almost 30. It’s weird that in my lifetime I’ve gone from being raised on PBS shows like Sesame Street, The Electric Company and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to cable, to internet, to … now. Because I remember when we had five channels and only rich people had VCRs. BEHOLD MY ADVANCED AGE.

That aside, I am, like many people raised from the 1970s onward, indebted to and grateful for the crazy experiment that is Sesame Street. Latter-day hippie Jim Henson created something truly unique and transformative. Who hasn’t seen Stevie Wonder’s performance of "Superstitious" from the fictional New York neighborhood:

Possibly my favorite Sesame Street memory, however, is a personal one. Jim Henson died just before I started the fifth grade, and for our spring concert near the one-year anniversary of his death, our elementary school music teacher thought it would be the BEST IDEA EVER to have a Sesame Street-themed concert, with 150 or so fifth graders singing songs from the show.

Now. As adults you might think "Oh how sweet!" Let me tell you something: as ten-year-olds, we were MORTIFIED. We were super-serious TEN YEAR OLDS, HELLO, and if we were still watching that show (which, cut the crap, some of us were), or any children’s programming at all, we were doing it in SECRET, thankyouverymuch, and most likely we had long since abandoned it for super-important adult shows like 90210, The Simpsons, and Fifteen on Nickelodeon (holla if you remember that one!) 

We were FIFTH GRADERS, fergodsake, and far too old and important and grown up to be singing baby songs from a baby show. We were HORRIFIED. Our rehearsals were a string of unmitigated disasters. Our parents cooed and teared up to think how adoringly cute we were going to be. Our siblings taunted us endlessly. Our music teacher all but had to attach us to a cart and whip us like Iditarod dogs. We were like Sam I Am – we would not sing it in the rain, on a train, not on a boat, not in a moat.

I don’t remember any group of ten-year-olds ever being less invested in something, but come the day of the concert, we all showed up, sang as well as we could, had our photos taken, were told we were "cute" about a zillion times, and then breathed a sigh of relief that it was finally, finally over and we could get on with our super important adult fifth-grader business.

All that is to say, when I found this clip on YouTube, I got a tinge of nostalgia that has yet to go away: