Local singer selling monster Cookie Monster collection to pay recording costs

SEATTLE – It’s a monster collection and it could be your monster collection for $4,500.

Local singer/songwriter Lisa Craze is selling her vintage Cookie Monster collection in an effort to record and release her latest work.

Craze posted photos and a heartfelt ‘love letter’ about her collection and her art to Craigslist this week.

In the letter Craze says she has loved the Sesame Street favorite for years

“There was a time in my life when nothing made me happier than to sit in my room, surrounded by my many Cookie Monsters, and smile,” wrote Craze.  “I would lovingly gaze into their googley eyes and all my troubles would melt away.”

As time passed and Craze grew so did her collection.

“As I got older, I started to collect these blue bundles of love, and have kept many in their original boxes, un-loved,” she wrote.  “That's kind of sad, really. They need your love now. Or, at least, your determination to sell them to the highest bidder.”

The collection includes all kinds, stuffed Cookie Monsters, a Cookie Monster cookie jar, hand puppets, mugs, salt and pepper shakers.

The collection even includes an item Craze describes as “impossible to get.”

" Monsterpiece Theater boxed Allister Cookie, complete with smoking jacket-still anchored in his pristine easy chair,” wrote Craze in her Craigslist ad.

Other items include Cookie Monster penvils, straws, a grooming set and even a Chicken Dancing Cookie Monster.

“Squeeze the hand and yes, it plays the ever-popular ‘Chicken Dance’ while Cookie Monster thrashes about,” wrote Craze.

Many items in the collection are more than 30 years old and dear to Craze’s heart.

But she says her art has come to mean more than a collection left in boxes.  Today she is putting together a CD of self-written tracks.  She says she wants to use the money raised by the sale of her collection to hire other musicians and a studio engineer to help record her songs.

“I've already recorded three of them and you're gonna love them,” wrote Craze.  “Help a girl out, why don't you? You're just sitting on that cash anyway. Time to do something meaningful with it.”

Potential buyers can read Craze's entire letter, see all her photos and contact her to make an offer on her collection through Craigslist.