There is something really touching about having your Wikipedia page refer to you as “Jim Henson’s right hand.” Okay, in this case, it’s fully literal—notoriously, Muppets are left-handed because their performers are right-handed, and one person works the head and left hand and another works the right hand, so the main action is all done by one person but the Muppet is fully mobile. Cheryl Wagner was the right hand for Cantus and Convincing John on Fraggle Rock; they were Jim Henson’s characters. Still, even if it’s not the metaphor in this case, it’s hard to work much closer with him than that, and after all she was chosen for the job.

The fact is, for a lot of women in puppetry, the best you can do is fuzzy images where you’re half-sure it’s the right person. If you do a Google search for Cheryl Wagner, what you get as a primary suggestion is “obituary,” meaning there’s presumably a different Cheryl Wagner that more people are interested in. And if you don’t think I had a brief freak-out, thinking she’d become ineligible for the column after being added to the schedule, you don’t know me very well. Limiting my image search by “Muppet” gave me less than half a page of results.

However, the childhood of Gen-X wouldn’t have been the same without her. Beyond her hand work, she was also Ma Gorg. She spent five years on the show and did ninety episodes. Beyond that, she was in the body suit for Miss Finch, the social worker in Follow That Bird who thought that Big Bird needed to be with his own kind to be happy. (The voice was provided by Sally Kellerman.) For Millennials, there’s always The Big Comfy Couch, which she created and was the show-runner on. My kids are familiar with Bo on the Go, which they . . . like a lot more than I do.

I’ve long divided Muppet performers by tier—Jim and Frank are Tier One, for example; even people who don’t know a lot about the Muppets have definitely heard of Jim and probably Frank. Cheryl Wagner is definitely Tier Three. She’s not a name the average person is terribly familiar with, not even a name the average Muppet fan is terribly familiar with. But that has never, in my ranking, been intended to disparage people’s abilities. Just that “she was Ma Gorg” puts her in a tier below “he was Janice,” when you’re listing people’s best-known characters.

I suppose it’s also worth noting that a Tier Three Muppet performer is still a heck of a lot better known than most people. Even if you don’t know her name or face, the odds are pretty good that you’ve been entertained somewhere in your life by Cheryl Wagner. If you haven’t, maybe check out an episode or two of Fraggle Rock or watch the incredibly depressing but ultimately heartwarming experience that is Follow That Bird. (I first saw it as an adult and was gutted.) Neither of those would have been the same without her work, and not just because she was Jim’s right hand.

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