Holly Robinson Peete was 4 years old when her father went to work on a brand-new children’s show. Matt Robinson was the original Gordon on “Sesame Street,” and he played him from 1969 until 1972.
For a little girl in the audience at home, that took some getting used to. “So when I looked on TV and I saw my dad, you know, walking down the street talking to a muppet in a trash can, it was a little confusing,” she told TV Guide in 2003.
She even got a part of her own. “I had one line on Sesame Street, and I blew my one line,” she said in that same interview. “It was, ‘Hello, Gordon.’ And I just kept saying, ‘Hello, Daddy!’ They took my line away.”
Her dad went on to write for “The Cosby Show,” but Gordon is the role she leads with. “My dad was the original Gordon on Sesame Street,” she wrote in a tribute in May 2025. “He introduced the world to Big Bird.”
Years later, the girl who blew her line became a TV star herself, in “21 Jump Street” and “Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper.” On Tuesday, May 9, 2023, she sat down on “The Jennifer Hudson Show.” She was there to promote “Queens Court,” her Peacock reality show, but the talk turned to her childhood.
Being Gordon’s daughter meant famous people sometimes came by to say hello to her dad. In the 1970s, Holly told Jennifer, “one group of celebrities that went to meet him was the Jackson Five.”
The Jackson 5 were already stars, and Holly was a little girl with a big crush on the youngest member of the group, the one singing lead. She has never forgotten what she did to get ready. Listen for what she did the night before at about 1:22 and for what happened when the Jacksons were finally standing in front of her.
Holly Robinson Peete tells Jennifer Hudson about the day she met the Jackson 5
This is the show’s own upload from that 2023 episode. Holly talks about her dad and her one line at the start. She brings in the Jackson 5 at about 1:05 and tells what happened on the big day from about 1:33.
So what does a little girl do when Michael Jackson is coming to meet her dad?
She takes the scissors to her own hair. “The night before I met Michael, I cut my pigtails off so I could have a fro like him,” Holly told Jennifer. “That’s how in love I was with him.”
She wanted a look just like his. She knew every brother in the group, but for her there was only one. “They all knew, but it was Mike,” she said. “I had to have a fro like him.”
Then the big day came. The Jacksons arrived, and Gordon himself was there with her. “My dad’s behind us,” she remembered. “They wanted to meet Gordon.” The little girl with the brand-new fro had planned for this moment, and now that it was here, she couldn’t move. “I was frozen,” she said. She compared herself to Cindy Brady on “The Brady Bunch,” the youngest Brady girl, freezing up when the red light came on.
About 20 years after that meeting, Holly stepped into the Jackson story again, this time on screen. In “The Jacksons: An American Dream,” the 1992 ABC miniseries about the family, she played Diana Ross.
She looked back on it this spring. “I really love how folks still appreciate and remember The Jacksons: An American Dream 34 years later!” she wrote on X on April 25, 2026. Then she added one more thing: “Michael was still here then and had final say about casting.”