Mister Rogers with the filmmaker Ben Wagner
I went to a documentary Monday night titled “Mister Rogers and Me” and it’s about an MTV producer (of all people) who says he received a profound message from Mister Rogers when the great man was actually the producer’s neighbor in Nantucket.
“I feel so strongly,” Mister Rogers told Ben Wagner that day, ”that deep and simple is far more essential than complex.”
As Wagner thought about it, Fred Rogers encouraged Wagner to spread the word. And now with this documentary, he has.
Like a lot of you, I haven’t thought a lot about Mister Rogers much since I was a kid but I did read a number of his obits when he died and realized then how much I had underestimated this guy who was simple yet very profound.
In an age of runaway commercialism and nasty backbiting, Rogers stood his ground with the simple message that “anything that is mentionable is manageable.” He truly did believe in communication and the idea that, if people only spoke to one another, anything was possible.
One of the documentary’s high points is watching Fred Rogers disarm Congressman John Pastore who was holding hearings to determine if a $20 million grant to PBS should be cut in half. Pastore was a tough guy who began his questioning of Mister Rogers in his usual brusque way.
But Rogers wasn’t there to engage Pastore in the usual way. The gentle man spoke to Pastore in a pointed, direct and very humble but real way that left Pastore, in his own words, with “goosebumps.” The tough congressman wound up the questioning by telling Rogers “you’ve just earned your $20 million.”
Wow. If only the Democats, Republicans and President Obama could talk to each other this way. The world would be a better place and maybe our country could even move forward. I’m not sure what the plans are to release this documentary wide but you should take a look at the website and trailer for yourself.
It left me pining for more people like Mister Rogers who truly was a great and unique man.
