Beverly Glenn-Copeland and wife Elizabeth bring Sesame Street sensibility to Caring Cabin | Canada Voices

Please keep picturing as you read this that on our recent Zoom call, in their window, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his wife, Elizabeth, inexplicably appeared upside-down. For 40 minutes, the Mr. Dressup musician with whom you grew up (who is now 81 and goes by Glenn) and his theatre-arts-educator wife were shoulder to shoulder saying insightful things, while hovering head-down as if they’d descended from above. After a few minutes, it started feeling appropriate, because they kind of did.

We, along with producer Sean O’Neill (right side up), were discussing Caring Cabin, a children’s series the three had developed – a gentle but honest, 1970s style, host-and-homemade-puppets affair à la Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, aimed at two- to six-year-olds. Glenn, a transgender man who has a serene, soothing manner, composed music for Mr. Dressup, Sesame Street and Shining Time Station; he also has thousands of unrecorded songs “so amazing they would give Disney hits for the next 10 years,” O’Neill says. The conceit was, each episode would be built around a song.

There’s a woo-woo element to Caring Cabin’s creation — apt for people suspended upside-down. But first, some backstory. Glenn, who was born in 1944 Philadelphia and trained to sing German lieders, was one of the first Black students at McGill in 1961. Being openly lesbian did not make that easier. He dropped out, moved to Ontario, became a Buddhist and a folk musician and landed on Mr. Dressup, where he wore a lot of sweatshirts.

“I never felt like my music came from me,” Glenn says. “I was just tuned enough for what was beyond me to be able to come through me.” One morning, for example, he woke up speaking Italian, a language he’d never studied. He wrote down the lyrics that had come to him – a song he called La Vita – and had a fluent friend confirm that yes, they were in perfect Italian. “By the end of the day I no longer spoke Italian,” Glenn goes on. “It was sent to me because I was open to it.” (Maggie Dace Hollis recorded the song; you can hear it online.)

In the 1980s, living in rural Ontario and communing with nature, Glenn began making synth-folk music; in 1986, he recorded an album, Keyboard Fantasies. Because no company knew how to define or market it, he made 200 cassette tapes and distributed it himself. (This is not the only instance of Glenn being ahead of his time or perhaps outside of time.) It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that he heard the word “transgender.” In 2002, he came out publicly. He and Elizabeth became a couple in 2007 – she had a dream in which he was her mate – married in 2009, and for 12 years, ran a community-based theatre school in New Brunswick, using puppets to teach children about kindness and environmental awareness.

In 2016, a Japanese music influencer named Ryota Masuko unearthed a Keyboard Fantasies cassette, igniting global interest in then-72-year-old Glenn. The New York Times called his music “essential and centering;” the world had caught up to him. In 2019, Posy Dixon made a documentary about his resurgence, also called Keyboard Fantasies, which played myriad international festivals, was nominated for a BAFTA, and caught the attention of O’Neill. O’Neill produced an episode of the CBC series In the Making around Glenn’s first in-person meeting with Masuko and became friends with the Glenn-Copelands.

The COVID-19 pandemic scuppered Glenn’s triumphant world tour, but he performed a concert online. Watching it, Elizabeth realized, “This is his medium. It was just his face in the frame, with love and beauty pouring out. A vision for a children’s show came to me fully formed.” After the concert, she and Glenn phoned O’Neill to pitch it.

Here the woo-woo continues: To calm his COVID anxiety, O’Neill had begun meditating. That very day he’d envisioned a red dragon flying toward him, “and I knew my job was to swallow it, just let it come into me,” he says. When the Glenn-Copelands called, he told them he was sure his vision had something to do with them. Glenn wasn’t surprised: At the same moment O’Neill was meditating, Glenn told him, Glenn was – yes – playing with a red dragon puppet.

The sweet 11-minute pilot they concocted for Caring Cabin was written by Douglas Nayler Jr. and co-directed by Nayler and Chelsea McMullan (Swan Song). Glenn helps a panicked Squirrel, who can’t find his friend Birdie, learn to calm himself through deep breathing; snippets of old nature films explain migration; and the featured song, Missing Someone, might bring a tear to your eye. It’s the perfect antidote to a culture mired in instant gratification, that pushes the lie that we can get whatever we want and never hear the word “no.”

“We know that many children now, more than even five years ago, are suffering from what people call free-floating anxiety. But there’s nothing free-floating about it,” Elizabeth says. “Kids know when what is happening in their world is not right. So we sought to give them a voice for it, to help them develop resilience and joy.”

“I always felt children needed to have examples in which they’re not considered to be less intelligent or less capable,” Glenn agrees. “I want them to figure things out for themselves, not give them Pablum.”

But again, Glenn’s timing was not to be: After shooting the pilot, he was diagnosed with major cognitive disorder (MCD), leaving the show’s future … up in the air. For now, the Criterion Channel will begin airing the sole episode in July, and the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto will host a free screening on Saturday, followed by a live performance and Q & A with the Glenn-Copelands.

O’Neill once asked Glenn how he’d overcome his challenges – his being Black and trans in unkind decades, his frequent financial insecurities. “He said, ‘Who says I’ve overcome it?’” O’Neill recalls. “He taught me it’s not about ‘overcoming,’ but instead learning to live with difficulty – not letting challenges overtake or flood you. Learning how we might be able to stay calm and help each other stay calm. Glenn’s serenity is the result of practice. It’s not a performance. It’s not a result of bypassing difficulty. The pain coexists with the beauty.”

People with cognitive challenges “can be fully present in many ways,” Elizabeth adds. “Glenn’s brain is still able to learn new things. He writes music now in ways he never has. He is more present now as his essential self.” Her voice cracks a little. “The beauty of who he is is more present, not less. There’s so much life left. So don’t count those people out.”

“We all die of something,” Glenn says calmly. “This seems to be the way in which I’ll pass from the Earth. But the point for all of us is, while we were here, did we do anything of value? Did we work with our challenges? And while we were at it, were we kind?” Then Elizabeth counts him in, and floating upside down, they sing.