Oh! I know! She’s trying to tell us that her first owner Steve isn’t dead, he’s just busy reinventing himself as an indie rocker instead of a preschool hero. We just figured out Blue’s Clues!

(Everybody dance!)

Those of you who are new to Blue’s Clues may only know Joe, who is—to old people such as myself—but a pale imitation of the show’s original star, Steve. My kids were perplexed when Steve “left to go to college.” And although we all liked Joe, he just wasn’t the same. Honestly, though, it’s not like I was losing sleep over it or anything. I save that for important things, like whether or not we have any Oreos.

But some people really do lose sleep over these things, and so to them I say: Steve Burns is alive and well and rockin’ out:

“It’s starting to concern me,” Burns said, when reached at his Brooklyn, New York, home Friday. “I’m starting to think that maybe there’s something that people know that I don’t know … like that I’m dead! But I feel fantastic. I think I’m going to just make a Web site and actually affirm the rumor, and see if that helps. That way, I can at least die of something better than a drug overdose. I want to die in a whaling accident in Nova Scotia or something more interesting.”

[...]

What Burns has been doing is working on a children’s album, Deep Sea Recovery Efforts, with his band Steve Burns and the Struggle. The group, which also features Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd and A Million Billion frontman Ryan Smith, has no firm plans yet to release the almost-finished album, and they’re currently deciding whether to release it through a label, or on their own. He’s also building a home in Brooklyn, and is planning a trip to India — all things patently impossible for a dead dude.

I think that’s pretty impressive for a guy who made a name for himself by dancing with a cartoon dog. Plus, all of my mom friends who had secret little crushes on Steve back when I thought he was just a giant goober feel vindicated, now.

Anyway. Just thought you might like to know. As the saying goes, rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Heh.