Learning Day: Lenny the Crack-Smoking Lion 🌭

You all remember Curt Hiss, the Drug-Free Beatboxing Snake. If you don’t, you need to click away right now. You’ve built a Puppet Week mental block and you can’t tear down that dam, or trauma will flood your soul like that village in China it’s illegal to remember.

Curt Hiss may be the simple tale of a drug-free beatboxing snake, but the tale behind Curt Hiss is one of unchecked ambition and hubris. It started when producer Wayne Owens had an idea. That idea? A green sock puppet is already a snake, you don’t have to do anything to it! Then he had part of a second idea: Something about drugs. He put together a grade school assembly puppet show starring a stoned snake and the grim reaper. Nobody watched it. He decided to go completely mad with fame anyway.

The tragedy of genius is that often the accolades go to your head, and your sophomore effort balloons out of control. For Wayne Owens, those accolades never existed, but again, it didn’t stop him. He took the characters from his 4th grade morality play and put them in The Departed. He went from a gymnasium puppet show to a movie about sock vigilantes taking down a drug cartel. It had courtroom drama, it had corrupt police officers, it had explosions, it still had the grim reaper. Once again, nobody watched it. Wayne Owens died, probably. Who gives a shit. This is not about Wayne Owens. This is about his creative legacy.

Because against all odds, he fucking had one!

Curt Hiss’ … hand actor? It sounds better than finger thespian. Curt Hiss’ finger thespian, Dwayne Stevens, was so inspired by Wayne Owens’ journey from sock owner to bankrupt puppet lunatic, he decided to try it himself. Now both writing and directing, Dwayne made 1989’s Welcome to the Streets with Lenny the Lion. But where Wayne Owens went insane trying to make a Michael Mann movie with socks, Dwayne Stevens lost his mind trying to make Boyz N The Hood. Also with socks.

In the opening scene, Lenny the Lion has just left his comfortable farm for fast-paced city life. These are his very first lines.

He made it one sentence into the big city before losing all faith in himself. This was filmed in Tupelo, Mississippi. So the “big city” they’re referring to here is Jackson, population around 100,000. They barely have a three story building. Let me explain: In a game of Civilization, you could build Jackson after researching plumbing, but before radio.

The one thing we know about this character is that he’s a lion. Why the eagle metaphor? Young lions are also forced to leave the pride and seek a place of their own. That’s zoologically accurate, plus there’s probably a pride pun in there! Let me explain: In a game of Comedy, you can make puns after researching farts, but before slapstick. That should be enough to dominate the Tupelo puppet scene.

Let’s try this again. The bird metaphor was a rookie mistake.

We’ll have to restart the game. Tupelo is fartlocked.

Dwayne Stevens has just discovered the narrative time jump. We can leap ahead in Lenny’s journey, after he’s been here a few years and grown disillusioned with the bright light of Jackson, Mississippi. They have a light now!

Why would we time jump two hours? It’s been half an afternoon. What could possibly have changed with Lenny the Lion, who just arrived in the big city and already finds its parking meters overstimulating?

Oh. Nothing. Nothing changed. No new developments.

This is like cutting away from a Batman fistfight to a MEANWHILE card and then cutting right back to that same fistfight. It achieves nothing, but in a more complicated way than doing nothing.

Lenny the Lion gave up the second he got off the bus, and continued giving up all afternoon, until he was so tired from giving up he gave up on it. He’s right, though: His friends would absolutely laugh at him. If he packed his bags to seek fortune in the big city and came back defeated in time for dinner, they would assume his bus broke down at the station. 8 year olds run away to the garage for longer than this. It’s the only time anyone has ever said this, but Lenny the Lion? Jackson, Mississippi is going to eat you alive.

And that’s when Sneaky Snake shows up.

Was he an eagle in the first draft? Could they not get hand insurance for beak damage, what the fuck is going on with the bird language? Somebody teach a metaphor class in Tupelo, it’ll be like that scene where color comes to Pleasantville.

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but Sneaky Snake is black coded. Coded is generous. He slides onto screen already talkin’ jive, then within a few sentences breaks into a song about dealing crack.

Right away you see where this is going. Every “naive kid in the big city” cautionary tale shares the same structure. Lenny the Lion has been here for two hours, so he’s still hanging onto his simple country morals. He’s going to tell Sneaky Snake off now, but someday he’ll be so beat down by city life he’ll take Sneaky up on the crack offer…

Oh, he’s already dancing to the crack song. He joined in on the first chorus. The one about getting children to smoke crack.

It’s been 97 minutes since he got to the big city. Bewildered German tourists who meant to fly into Jacksonville are still trying to decide which truckstop breakfast will give them the least diarrhea, meanwhile Lenny’s already harmonizing about crack babies. Where can we possibly go from here? Lenny won’t survive the next time jump. He’ll be dead in twenty minutes. His family will have to wait six hours for the evening return bus just to pick up his pine box.

Fucking!! Time jumps can be any length of time! They’re not a sex hotline or a coastal elite parking meter – they don’t charge by the minute. Go nuts and give it a week before you have your main character start dealing crack. Makes it relatable.

So where does the next day find Lenny?

Dealing crack!

Lenny meets crack dealers Ruff the Dog and Cool Cat who, I don’t have to tell you – real black coded. Yes, there’s a Tupelo primary school teacher doing “the accent.” But it’s somehow more offensive when Lenny drops that hard g and two hard z’s. If there’s enough hate in someone’s heart, they can turn anything into a slur.

Anyway, let’s meet Mr. Crack.

He’s a black coded inner city grim reaper. What every southern youth pastor struggles not to draw when they get “the devil” in Bible Pictionary. He is wearing a hoodie that simply says “CRACK,” as though it’s his alma mater. And yet he can’t figure out why the cops keep arresting him. Here’s a hint, it’s on your body and it rhymes with “wack.”*

*(It’s because he’s black.)

Sneaky is falling behind on his crack quota like a desperate furniture salesman after Labor Day. Mr. Crack doesn’t care, he just wants results. Sneaky Snake tells him not to worry – he’s got this new dealer named Lenny the Lion who’s gonna turn this whole failing drug empire around. Lenny gets scared of the streetsweeper. He thinks it’s a monster trying to eat the road. You cannot hang a drug empire on his abilities. That’s asking SpongeBob to negotiate with Hamas. That’s hiring Mr. Bean to kill your wife. That’s giving Curious George the nuclear codes. You can’t blame him when he slaps the big red button – he thinks it’s a baboon ass, and you were the one who was supposed to vet for monkeys.

Luckily, Ruff the Dog jumps in to distract us with his rap about selling crack. Specifically, how selling crack rules and there are no downsides. There are more polished artists, but Ruff’s got something special. He pairs the jaded honesty of a Kendrick lyric with the bumbling flow of a kooky HR rep, creating a savage dichotomy that lays bare the hypocrisy of corporatized hip hop:

Sneaky Snake sang about crack dealing in abstract terms, without consequences. Ruff the Dog is out here talking about killing kids, so obviously Lenny is-

Already dancing to it.

We’re supposed to believe Lenny doesn’t understand what he’s being drawn into, but when you’re on tape breakdancing to two puppets rhyming ‘ballistic’ with ‘child mortality statistic,’ the ignorance defense doesn’t cut it. This isn’t Tupelo, where the judge is a weather-predicting rooster. This is Jackson, their roosters went to college.

Anyway, here’s a puppet holding a bag of crack.

That’s Sneaky’s actual line. He loves this brand of crack. He delivers it like crack is part of a healthy balanced breakfast.

I think that bag of crack is actually real, by the way – we’ll get to that later.

Now it’s time to meet Sheriff Goodie, who accidentally stumbles into the story while trying to solicit underage prostitutes. I’m barely reading into it. Lenny the Lion is waiting for Sneaky Snake in an alley in the middle of the night when a middle-aged southern man wanders up to a fresh-faced young punk and offers him a place to stay and “some money.”

His exact phrasing:

I’ve never seen a cop trying so hard not to say “suck you,” and I’ve seen Joe Arpaio karaoke “Sussudio.”

Maybe that’s a natural flub, but nobody else fucks up their lines. It’s weird to leave only that one mistake, unless we’re trying to establish that Sheriff Goodie gets nervous around hot young uncut superpredators. Lenny does not pick up the vibe. He isn’t hip to 1980s Jackson hooker slang, or he’d know a “wrong crowd” is when three or more lions jack off on a sheriff.

Goodie eventually leaves disappointed, and Sneaky slides in to hand Lenny a crack pipe.

Oh right, here’s a puppet with a crack pipe.

Despite participating in two song and dance numbers about smoking crack, collecting crack profits, and reinvesting those crack profits into the youth community to ensure a future customer base for crack and crack-adjacent products, Lenny has no idea what crack might be. It makes sense, there are limits to how hard an educational sock puppet show for second graders can go. They can’t show a puppet actually smoking-

Lenny the Lion smokes crack.

Dwayne Stevens is a coward. He wants plausible deniability. He says Lenny the Lion ALMOST smoked crack, but he put the pipe in the puppet’s mouth, reared back like it was inhaling, then turned it to the camera with its mouth shut like it’s holding a hit.

I’ve seen puppets smoke crack before. I’m from Portland. That’s how shy junkies deal with an addiction they’re not willing to confront face to face. But whatever, Welcome to the Streets wants us to think Ruff ran up just in time to interrupt the process with dire news about Cool Cat, who just overdosed from a single hit of this new crack.

Did… did Lenny the Lion predict the fentanyl epidemic?

We should have listened to the puppets. God, how many times have I said that?

Lenny is furious with Sneaky Snake, but not for the reason you think-

He’s pissed off that Sneaky would give a light-colored “good” cat the same poor quality drugs as a black cat from the city. I used to work at a country club. I’ve seen this meltdown before, everytime a Kennedy tried to dump an OD’ing catalog model on the tennis courts.

Anyway, here’s a sock puppet going through crack withdrawals.

Lenny the Lion thinks the power of positive thinking can overcome any crack addiction, meanwhile Ruff the Dog is over here like “J-Jesus Christ, I will give you a wrong crowd just to lick your pipe resin.” Before things get too explicit, Sheriff Goodie breaks the fourth wall to explain that if you, watching this, are addicted to crack like Ruff, there are programs at the local hospitals that can help. This is a fucking sock puppet show cool seven year-olds would roll their eyes at. The audience tops out before puberty. The usual approach is to teach them how to say no to drugs early, not assume they’ve been on crack since pre-K and now that the big one-oh is coming up, they’re looking for a path back to normal.

Anyway, one of the puppets dies from a crack overdose.

That’s Momma Cat, who interrupts this juice-time crack intervention to wail about her dead child. It goes WAY too hard. She is shooting for an Oscar in a biopic about a promising grunge musician. I never would’ve called that Welcome to the Streets with Lenny the Lion had a fucking body count. Holy shit.

In her grief, Momma Cat demands Sheriff Goodie explain how the police let this kind of thing happen. Goodie delivers a long rant about the broken legal system letting drug dealers run free, the heavy implication being that if he had his way all black cats would die from police-issue 9s instead. Momma Cat gets it, she drops the matter before he flicks the bodycam off.

Lenny the Lion has been inspired. He’s taken the personal tragedy of a family he’s known for a few hours and spun it for his own attention.

Did… did Welcome to the Streets with Lenny the Lion predict influencer culture?

The puppets could have saved us all.

Lenny’s two days in the city are enough for him to land a lucrative anti-drug speaking gig, based on his experiences somewhat near crack for an afternoon. Sheriff Goodie once again addresses all the second graders burning glass at naptime, and promises that if they seek help from the authorities, charges will not be pressed. They don’t want you – they want the kingpins. The fourth graders.

One final time jump sees Lenny the Lion and Ruff the Dog, all cleaned up now, going on a fishing trip together. Then Ruff, taunting the universe, says this:

They hard cut to credits on that line, but I promise you there’s a deleted scene of Ruff the Dog getting his SAT results and then running down an alley in slow motion.

That’s the end, unless you count several minutes of drug talk from a hungover Tupelo police officer doing shit-shift for mouthing off to the captain. He tells the sock puppet demographic exactly what drugs are, where to find them, and how to do them. Officer Feelgood not only shows the kids a pile of cocaine, he lines up a rail and explains-

It’s a myth that one nostril gets you higher than the other, kids. Both nostrils are fine. No, there is no “gay nostril,” that’s an urban legend.

He’s very clear that this pile of cocaine is real. And presumably where Sneaky’s supply came from. I’m also pretty sure Officer Feelgood hosed that rail because he does the most coked-out thing I can imagine:

Fuck yeah! Man, ain’t no party like a Tupelo party, cuz a Tupelo party don’t stop until you make a cocaine devil and demolish it with some sock puppets.

I know that sounds like fun, kids, but remember-

A Mississippi second grader in 1989, tearfully dialing 1-800-Cocaine after learning they have a problem from a rapping sock puppet is a daydream many youth pastors have, but few dare to reach for. Bravo, Dwayne Stevens, wherever you are. Probably dead. Who gives a shit.

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