It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood today, Mr. Rogers notwithstanding.  The man who gave mohair a bad name gave me the willies. I remember watching him when I was a pup, a force-fed diet of neighborhood-appropriate tropes cloying enough to strangle a kitten.

His trademark soothing voice didn’t soothe me.  His choice of songs made my fur stand on end.  Am I an outlier?

Mr. Rogers made through his entire a career without a whiff of scandal, in itself a major feat.  I suppose whenever one of his interns was caught with a joint he sat them down and explained that right now Mexican druglords were dancing around the piñata celebrating the fallen integrity of yet another gringo and how would your huddled  immigrant grandmother feel about that?

If he drank a stiff scotch in the privacy of his home, he never let on.  No dalliances with ladies whose names rhymed with Kardashian.  No B&D mavens had him in their rolodexes.  His wholesome and child-centered approach nonetheless probably damaged any number of children who took him to represent the world as it is, rather than the world as imagined by a shut-in with Gidget’s Disease.  No doubt this has contributed to the avalanche of inflict-it-yourself abuse memoirs involving Italian spa cures and reinvented dialogue from the 60s.

Mr. Rogers has made it impossible to say, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” without triggering a Pavlovian flinch response whatever the weather.  Instead, we’ll just have to say, “What a nice day,” or, “It sure is nice outside.”  They just don’t have the same ring, even if the latter refer only to the weather and the former, well, the former was talking about the weather inside.

Lurve,

Hgurl, Accredited Online Advice Columnist