From 1976 up until 1979, Grovski Carbunkle hardly knew a sober moment. "I have gone over this so many times with my therapist," said Grover in his famous Playboy interview from 1979, only weeks after drying out. "Losing the Muppet Show gig was like some kind of affirmation for me of all of my worst insecurities at once. It was as if the whole world was telling me 'You are not good enough, Grover. You are only a children's show character, Grover. Go back to Queens and die a slow death, Grover."

And to his friends and co-workers on the set of "Sesame Street", it seemed that Grover was dying a slow death, by his own hand. "He'd come in looking like hell," said Ernie in a recent interview. "Sometimes with a drink still in hand or a hooker draped around his neck, snapping at everybody. It would take make-up 2 hours to get him looking halfway decent, during which time he invariably fell asleep." But despite this, Grover's work didn't suffer- intead he worked harder than ever and came up with some of the most brilliant material of his career. This was the time during which "Super Grover" was born. An album was released in 1976 called "Grover Sings the Blues" which was well-received, and another in 1978, "Sesame Street Fever" featured a disco-dancing Grover on the cover and shot to the top of the charts.

But even as Grover's star was rising higher than ever before, he was too drunk to notice it. "All I can say now when people talk about those days is "I wish that I was there.' I honestly remember very little of that 3 year period. I had some vague idea that things were going well for me, and I continued to enjoy performing for the little children, but all I could think was 'That is nice, but it is no Muppet Show.' What a fool I was." By 1979, the hard-partying and late nights were starting to take its toll on poor Grover. Always rather skinny and weak, he didn't really have the constitution for nights of mixed drinks, fevered dancing at Studio 54 and the occasional snort of the choice drug of the seventies, cocaine (this is something that Grover has refused to confirm or deny). Grover felt like he wanted to get off the merry-go-round but couldn't. By now he had surrounded himself with a group of yes-men and hangers-on that relied on his generosity to keep the party going and weren't in any hurry to tell him that he might in fact be killing himself. It would be up to his surrogate family, the friends and loved ones of "Sesame Street", to bring Grover back down to reality to face up to the consequences of his destructive lifestyle. Late in September of 1979, an intervention was planned.

"It was a typical day on set," says Ernie now, looking back on that fateful day. "Brought to you by the letter E and the number 9 as I recall. We were getting wrapped up and I saw Grove heading for his dressing room, his head hanging low and his feet dragging. I knew he'd be going straight to his mini-bar and pulling out his little spoon for a quick pick-me-up before heading out on the town again. That's when I signalled to Bert, Cookie, Bird and Oscar that it was time to make our move. We went to Grover's door and knocked, and naturally he tried to stall us as he was hiding his drink and paraphenalia. But then he let us in. I think he knew what was going on."