Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. She spent much of her time tending to the sick and the dying. On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, "I would like you to pray for me. T he movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is structured like an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. He was thunderstruck. The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children's Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoeswell, he was Mister Rogers for good. Youll probably need an infusion of something like this to restore your faith in humanity after an overload of Frank Underwood. It was not his fault. (2021, directed . Let's change it to 'bring the dog home.'" Who wrote the article about Mr Rogers in Esquire magazine? Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers. While Junod wrote that he learned the concepts of forgiveness and . And now the boy didn't know how to respond. Boom! A Beautiful Day in the . ESQ: You wrote in the original piece that he didnt even watch TV. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Children are so easily influenced I have grown into a middle aged man and I wish I had a better influencer in time of Mr.Rogers. That was a challenge. I mean, to be honest with you, Ive been going and going in front of a crowd [suddenly, a lightbulb in Junods eyeview explodes in flames] Woah! He is losing, of course. I took the phone and spoke to a womanhis wife, the mother of his two sonswhose voice was hearty and almost whooping in its forthrightness and who spoke to me as though she had known me for a long time and was making the effort to keep up the acquaintance. . TJ: I dont know. After I watched the walkthroughand was somehow briefly enlisted in fashion-show-planning service as the only idle body in sightwe sat down on a couch in the middle of all the swirling fashion-show-planners, and talked about Fred Rogers, what he left behind, and what we do now. She had a long face and a dark blush to her skin. Mister Rogers spots him first, naturally, amidst the swarm of New Yorkers, about the five-hundredth happy coincidence in a life full of them. That bad people dont deserve kindness, and that you, when you you literally call them a piece of shit on Twitter, that you are somehow striking a moral blow, that you are somehow being part of the resistance. In 1998, Rogers strikes a friendship with Lloyd Vogel, a self-absorbed, embittered journalist who is assigned to interview him for the magazine Esquire. I'm glad I know that. He wrote, "I wrote Micah [Fitzerman-Blue] and Noah [Harpster] back, along with Peter Saraf, the producer at Big Beach, the company that had optioned my Esquire story, and asked them to change my name and the names of my family members. Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.". ", "Maybe a puppet, or a special toy, or maybe just a stuffed animal you loved very much. We swung up to the fashion show venue, where I watched Junod practice his strut to untz-untz-untz beats and avoid a janky step at the start of the runway. If somebody had said five years ago, that I was going to be spending the months in October and November 2019 sort of speaking for Fred Rogersyeah, right. ESQ: Now its landed at a point where I pray for my family, pray for anyone who needs it. ", "I know that," Mister Rogers said, "and that's why the prayer I'm going to teach you has only three words. 'I love you.' A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers, otherwise known as Mister Rogers, the host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. ", "What prayer is that, Mister Rogers? No, he had to show it, he had to demonstrate it, and that's how Mister Rogers and the people who work for him eventually got the idea of coming to New York City to visit a woman named Maya Lin. And so the next morning, we swam together, and then he put on his boxer shorts and the dark socks, and the T-shirt, and the gray trousers, and the belt, and then the white dress shirt and the black bow tie and the gray suit jacket, and about two hours later we were pulling up to the big brick house on Weldon Street in Latrobe, and Mister Rogers was thinking about going inside. "Can I take your picture, Tom?" It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk. Fred Rogers, he of puppets, toys and perennial optimism, is seen as the best of America. If we wanted to go into the house, we should have called first. And I think that audience is sort of self-selecting and limited by definition, almost. With the film adaptation of Junod's legendary Esquire story out today, we talked to the writer about the man who changed his life. And Ive tried to do it so that Im not just repeating the same line, trying to kind of live in the moment. And when I read that, I realized that what I was looking for was really unavoidable and obvious. At first, I chalked this up to some Neighborhood of Make-Believe voodoo energy, but now I have a legit answer. On this afternoon, the end of a hot, yellow day in New York City, he was very tired, and when I asked if I could go to his apartment and see him, he paused for a moment and said shyly, Well, Tom, Im in my bathrobe, if you dont mind. I told him I didnt mind, and when, five minutes later, I took the elevator to his floor, well, sure enough, there was Mister Rogers, silver-haired, standing in the golden door at the end of the hallway and wearing eyeglasses and suede moccasins with rawhide laces and a flimsy old blue-and-yellow bathrobe that revealed whatever part of his skinny white calves his dark-blue dress socks didnt hide. And then my editor, Denise Wills said, Could you try to think of an answer to that question? And I thought about it, then I had to read the story again for the audiobook of this collection of Freds writings and sayings. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. He was sitting on a couch, under a framed rendering of the Greek word for grace and a biblical phrase written in Hebrew that means "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." Meaning that there should be mistakes, there should be accidents, and if that was filmed, then it should stay filmed. Yeah. The film is based on a true story, though Rhys plays fictional journalist Lloyd Vogel, who was created to help tell Rogers' story. And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, "I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he askedand so they did. . Explore the full November 1998 issue of Esquire. On December 1, 1997oh, heck, once upon a timea boy, no longer little, told his friends to watch out, that he was going to do something "really big" the next day at school, and the next day at school he took his gun and his ammo and his earplugs and shot eight classmates who had clustered for a prayer meeting. Thats as far as I want to go, you know? 'Most people think of us as a great domestic airline. And so I wrote that. An ophthalmologist is a doctor who takes care of the eyes. Tick, Tick . "Looks a bit likeOld Rabbit, doesn't it, Tom? Thats what I actually pray for. Hmmm. TJ: Yeah, yeah. A distraction itself was dangerous. It's just a meeting of friends," he said. Who Is John Dutton's Grandfather in '1923'? Ive had people say, I know a lot of people who are really kind, but theyre just not media people, so no one knows about their kindness. I mean, the point is that Fred was a media person, and he did have a platform, and he spoke to an extremely large audience that he made into an even larger audience. Do you see masculinity as different endslike you could be this person or this person? He was a kind man who made it a point to practice kindness to a vast audience, person by person. He would grow up to become a great prayer, this little boy, but only intermittently, only fitfully, praying only when fear and desperation drove him to it, and the night he threw Old Rabbit into the darkness was the night that set the pattern, the night that taught him how. We may earn a commission from these links. The event is the premise of the 2019 feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Welcome, Tom, he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay downno, stretched out, as though he had known me all his lifeon a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. When he was your age, he had a rabbit, too, and he loved it very much. Lloyd decides to treat the profile as an investigation to find out if Mr. Rogers is just a character for the . Hate is such a strong word to use so lightly. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?". The first time I called Mister Rogers on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. Last week, Junod was in New York to walk in a charity fashion show for his alma mater, SUNY Albany, so I tried to get a hold of him for an interview about his Esquire story and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In the film, Lloyd is searching for something, anything to unveil about Rogers' true character (the closest he gets is a discussion about his relationship with . If they can hate something like that, you wonder how easy it would be for them to hate something more important." But Junod says he recognizes Vogel's . It is Vogeland, by extension, uswho grows as a result. It's interesting because the journalist, named Lloyd Vogel in the movie, is introduced as a harsh cynic who's notorious for shredding the character of the people he writes about. "Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet . Greek philosophy called for esquire magazine article about mr rogers? And so what I try to pray really is that I represent his message accurately and wholeheartedly. What I'm buying is a ticket to the fucking Lotto. He wears an undershirt, of course, but no mattersoon that's gone, too, as is the belt, as are the beige trousers, until his undershorts stand as the last impediment to his nakedness. TJ: Yes. A minute ago we were stand-ins for children watching the show; now we seem to be somehow inside the brain of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynical Esquire reporter tasked with profiling Rogers for . He did the same thing the next day, and then the nextuntil he had done the same things, those things, 865 times, at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years. She was very pretty. He doesn't know the color of his walls, and one day, when I caught him looking toward his painted skies, I asked him to tell me what color they are, and he said, "I imagine they're blue, Tom." He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. It would take a couple Mister Rogers episodes and . His name was Fred Rogers. First mook: "Looks like you're gonna have to break down and buy a dictionary." "Oh, Mister Rogers, thank you for my childhood." TJ: Well, I think its always changed, just like yours that way. Oh, and Ill bet the two of you were together since he was a very young rabbit. Will you pray for me?" The ophthalmologists did not want to scare children, so they asked Mister Rogers for help, and Mister Rogers agreed to write a chapter for a book the ophthalmologists were putting togethera chapter about what other ophthalmologists could do to calm the children who came to their offices. The boy had always been prayed for. This article was originally published in the November 1998 issue. Did you have any special friends growing up? Lloyd's father Jerry (Chris Cooper) abandoned him as a child and keeps trying to reconnect, by Lloyd rejects him. "I'm done. One hundred and forty-three. He was so nervous, in fact, that when Mister Rogers did visit, he got mad at himself and began hating himself and hitting himself, and his mother had to take him to another room and talk to him. He was with his producer, Margy Whitmer. The news was confirmed by Fred Rogers Productions . He clearly believed in prayer as a way of life. It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.'. Im not sure about it. At first, the boy was made very nervous by the thought that Mister Rogers was visiting him. Architects are people who create big things from the little designs they draw on pieces of paper. "Welcome, Tom," he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay downno, stretched out, as though he had known me all his lifeon a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . And even now, when he is producing only three weeks' worth of new programs a year, he still winds up agonizingagonizingabout whether to announce his theme as "Little and Big" or "Big and Little" and still makes only two edits per televised minute, because he doesn't want his message to be determined by the cuts and splices in a piece of tapeto become, despite all his fierce coherence, "a message of fragmentation.". The editor isn't looking for a cynical unpacking or a scathing expose, like Lloyd's used to writing; just 400 words that give a wee bit of insight to the man behind that (in Lloyd's words) "hokey kids' show." The little girl eyes me suspiciously, and then Mister Rogers. He said, "I would like you to do something for me. It is inspired by a 1998 Esquire article about Rogers by Tom . "Oh, that's a nice name," Mister Rogers says, and then goes to the Thirty-fourth Street escalator to climb it one last time for the cameras. The premise of the moviebased on a profile of Rogers that the journalist Tom Junod wrote in 1998, for Esquireis that an investigative reporter named Lloyd Vogel (played by Matthew Rhys), who . Bill had driven us there, and now, sitting behind the wheel of his red Grand Cherokee, he was full of remonstrance. However, he also said in the Atlantic piece that his father was a flawed man, "a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity." Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn't want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, "The connections we make in the course of a lifemaybe that's what heaven is, Tom. ", "Did your special friend have a name, Tom? A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD - Official Trailer (HD), What Mr Rogers Was Leading Tom Junod to All Along, Read Tom Junod's Iconic Mr. Rogers Profile, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. She worked very hard at writing the chapter, until one day she showed what she had written to Mister Rogers, who read it and crossed it all out and wrote a sentence addressed directly to the doctors who would be reading it: "You were a child once, too.". "Do you think we can go in?" "Thank you for calling, my dear," he said, in a voice whose . They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" ESQ: So its like we dont knowwith the popular mediums we have nowhow to show kindness or come up to each other. A clock is a machine that tells people what time it is, but as Mister Rogers sat in the backseat of an old station wagon hired to take him from his apartment to Penn Station, he worried that Maya Lin's clock might be too fancy and that the children who watch the Neighborhood might not understand it. The film is adapted from a real life 1998 Esquire feature penned by Tom Junod, long one of the nation's premier magazine writers. This content is imported from youTube. But its the unintentional stuff that I think is really true to life. TJ: I mean, I never . Theyre polar opposites. ESQ: So my relationship with prayer has ebbed and flowed my entire life. I dont know if Im ever going to be as good at the active devotion whereas Fred would like me or us to be. ", Then he turns back to the little girl. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. Fred never stopped looking at her or let go of her hand. TJ: Yeah, they have been. TJ: You can get into all sorts of weird head-trips about prayer and its purpose. No, not that he weighed 143 pounds, but that he weighs 143 pounds. "Oh, hello, my dear," he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. "Rephrase in a positive manner," as in It is good to play where it is safe. What is grace? He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. I mean, Fred wasnt just a reformer when it comes in terms of message. Beautiful Day is adapted from Tom Junod's 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, and the scriptby Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blueuses Junod (here called Lloyd Vogel and played by Matthew . Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), an Esquire journalist known for his jarring exposs but is secretive about his childhood, is the film's protagonist. Then he looked at me and smiled. In the movie, Tom Junod's name is changed to Lloyd Vogel. Would you do something for me?" Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. His editor at Esquire asked him to profile Fred Rogers, the beloved television personality and Presbyterian minister. he says when I approach the two of them. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked, "What about you, Tom? Every timeless feature, profile, interview, novella - even the ads! Browse featured articles, preview selected issue contents, and more. I mean, if that was Tom Junod with bunny ears, I dont know how I would have responded. The movie was so well done and like a lot of people, I had no idea what a loving man Fred Rogers was. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a . Theres fire up there guys! But how could Mister Rogers show little becoming big, and vice versa? They are tallas tall as the cinder-block walls they are designed to hideand they encompass the Neighborhood's entire stage set, from the flimsy yellow house where Mister Rogers comes to visit, to the closet where he finds his sweaters, to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where he goes to dream. cynical writer Lloyd Vogel (based on Junod, but with a fictional estranged dad figure, played by Chris Cooper, so that Rogers can . The original piece that he weighs 143 pounds bit likeOld Rabbit, Tom Junod with bunny,! Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads a reformer when it comes in terms message... Once upon a a long face and a dark blush to her skin Rabbit... - even the Ads I pray for anyone who needs it his request or... 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