
"I was there, and she had this mesh thing on top of it and I didn't even notice. I didn't think anything of it, and I'm pretty sensitive to things my daughter sees and it didn't even strike me as anything. My daughter was there on set with us and she thought [Perry] looked like a Barbie doll, she thought she was beautiful and she loved to watch her. Not to say I don't see other people's point of view — I get it — but it didn't hit me at first, at all."
-"Sesame Street" head writer Joseph Mazzarino, commenting on the controversial outfit that got the segment featuring Katy Perry and Elmo taken off of a television broadcast. Mazzarino spoke to New York magazine's Vulture blog about the incident, which caught him by surprise because he didn't think there was anything controversial about it in the first place.
Mazzarino did suggest that had they not shot the segment on the west coast, they might have been able to side step these headlines. "I think we reached out to Katy and said we'd love to do something with her, and when we did, our writer Melinda Ward said, said, 'I'd love to do "Hot N Cold." ' I said, 'Great,' and she wrote a parody of it," Mazzarino explained. "In terms of costumes, if it had been shot in New York, we would have done it different and costumed her. We didn't have a costume department out there [in Los Angeles], and that's one of the reasons that happened."

· The upcoming 39th season of "Sesame Street" will rock with a drop-in from