'Magic Garden' Long Island show brings 3 generations of fans together 

“Can you hold a minute?” Carole Demas asks while setting up an interview about her and her former “Magic Garden” co-star Paula Janis' Oct. 15 visit to Long Island. “I’m looking out my window, and there is a massive blue heron about to eat the fish in my pond. You’ll laugh — if I yell at it, it doesn’t go, but if I bark at it, it leaves.”

And so Demas woofs. Then she explains how she lives in a wooded area near the Tappan Zee Bridge — she corrects herself, the now Mario Cuomo Bridge — that is her real-life magical garden paradise. Janis also lives in Westchester, on a property on a lake with a willow tree that is so captivating that her step-granddaughter has asked to hold her upcoming wedding there.

But the two women, now each 83 years old, turn back the clock to their onstage garden during live shows that they are still performing more than 50 years after “The Magic Garden” first aired on television’s WPIX Channel 11. During "Carole & Paula in the Magic Garden: Friends Forever," they bring clips from the episodes, which ran from 1972 to 1984, when they wore their long, straight hair in pigtails and interacted with a hot-pink squirrel puppet named Sherlock and a colorful bird named Flapper. They sing their signature songs, and they marvel at their three-generation audiences that still know all the words and warble along with them.

“We have the grandmother, who was the original mother, the mother who was the original child, and now a new child. And that child doesn’t understand how come my mother and my grandmother know the words to all these songs,” Janis says. “When we do what we call an action song, they jump up and down with us. I mean, it’s not as easy for us to jump up and down as it used to be, but we still do it. We still do it, and they do it with us, absolutely.”

STAYING POWER

"The Magic Garden" so appeals to fans even decades later that the duo says they expect 800 people to attend their show at the Patchogue Theatre and hundreds to stay afterward to have the women sign merchandise. The women promise to stay as long as it takes to sign everyone’s purchases.

Patricia Raffloer, 53, a medical biller from West Hempstead, will be sitting in the third row with her husband, Frederick, 57, who is self-employed. “I got the closest seat all the way to the stage,” Patricia says. “As a child, I loved the both of them. They were bubbly and cheery and told different stories. It made a child feel good in their heart to see them with their positive ways. I could listen to ‘The Hello Song’ about ten times a day.” At the end of “The Hello Song,” Demas and Janis would shout out some children’s first names; fans often say they would eagerly wait for theirs to be mentioned.

Rick Antonio, 46, of Southampton, an electrician who works on MTA trains, echoes Raffloer. “The sound of the theme song, that just brings back memories of when I was a little kid,” he says. Growing up in Jamaica, Queens, a “little old lady” in his apartment building babysat for him and a group of children. “As soon as ‘The Magic Garden’ came on, all the kids were glued to the TV. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

A LITTLE HISTORY

But it wasn’t yesterday. Demas and Janis met in chorus in 1954, when they were 14 years old and in Midwood High School in Brooklyn. Both attended graduate school to study education at New York University, and became kindergarten teachers together in Brooklyn.

Demas was also pursuing an acting career and originated the role of Sandy in the Broadway production of “Grease.” In the early 1970s, when Demas was tapped to audition for a children’s program on WPIX, she suggested that Janis, who plays guitar, do it with her.

They were both 32. They would sit on swings or on giant mushrooms and perform duets, such as the theme song with its opening lyrics “Open up the window, listen to the wind blow.” They’d interact with Sherlock and Flapper. The magic tree would send down surprises from its branches. A story box would open and the women would withdraw costumes and props and use them to tell stories. Two sunflowers with faces hovered in the background.

Everything happened right on the garden set. “Our show was done in real time,” Demas says. “There was no editing, no quick cuts, nothing dropped in that was taped another day. It was exactly the way we would have been had they been in the room with us.”

The women taped 52 episodes primarily during 1972, which then ran repeatedly over 12 years, reaching the New York tristate area primarily but also some cable stations in other parts of the country. That’s the one thing Demas says she wishes could have been different in retrospect — that the show could have had a more national reach. The duo was inducted into the Long island Music Hall of Fame in 2010. 

THE YEARS SINCE

The pigtails that the women wore during the show have become a trademark, they say. “We would do live performances, and we would look out at an audience full of little girls wearing pigtails," Demas says.

“When we finally did get haircuts and we were going out to do a show, the whole audience would gasp,” Janis says.

“They would look at us like, ‘That’s not really them,’” Demas says.

Will they be wearing pigtails at the Oct. 15 show? Both women laugh.

“I think 83-year-olds in pigtails would be a little odd, don’t you?” Demas says. Pipes in Janis: “Honest to God, if I had all that hair I might consider it. But I don’t.”

The 70-minute show, which has no intermission, has a Halloween theme, the women say. “We are encouraging people to wear costumes if they like. 'Magic Garden' related costumes even better,” Demas says.

The women will also talk about what it’s like to still be recognized in 2023. “If you’re recognized in the supermarket, now people have phones, and they want to do a selfie. So, you cannot haul yourself out the door to the supermarket not looking like you would like to show up on Facebook,” Demas jokes.

A NEW SHOW?

A crowdfunding campaign has raised money to do an animated remake of “The Magic Garden.” It would be a prequel, featuring a cartoon Demas and Janis as little girls in the garden. Demas and Janis would have a role as the voices of the sunflowers, able to talk and sing. “It’s still in the works,” Janis says, though it’s not happening as quickly as they originally thought.

A husband-and-wife filmmaker team is also working on a documentary about "The Magic Garden," Demas says.

Meanwhile, the duo will keep on doing live shows as long as their fans are interested, they say.

“We never looked at each other and said, ‘Time to quit,’ ” Demas says. “The truth is, the ‘Magic Garden’ legacy is very important to us. It’s something we never imagined, and we never expected to have it go on for so long, and we never knew that our fans who are now adults with children of their own treasured it too so much. We feel it’s our responsibility, as well as our joy, to keep 'The Magic Garden' alive.”

By Beth Whitehouse

beth.whitehouse@newsday.comBethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.