by Maxwell King
Adapted for the stage as well, Spoon Mountain was presented by the Vineyard Theatre in New York in 1984.
In a 2006 interview with arts blogger Bill Madison, Betty Aberlin notes that the operas were her favorites: “Considering that I starred in all of them, I liked them the very best,” she says, tongue not far in cheek. “And because they were whimsical, they were not straitjacketed by child-development concerns.”23
She observes: “The operas were Fred at his whimsical best. The operas still focused on the beautiful themes that were pertinent to children, but Fred was allowed to be more expressive. For some reason or another, he said that PBS was not so fond of them, but I thought they were it. I loved them.”
Critic Joyce Millman noted on Salon.com in 1999: “These trippy productions about windstorms in Bubbleland and Wicked Knife and Fork Man’s tormenting of the happy Spoon people were a cross between the innocently disjointed imaginings of a preschooler and some avant-garde opus by John Adams.”24
Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, the last opera on the Neighborhood, was also the longest, occupying not the usual Friday slot but a Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, in May 1989. Fred Rogers had originally written the charming story in French, as a student at Rollins College.
It’s ironic that it took Fred Rogers so long to mount what became his last opera on the show. Years before, even before he debuted on the CBC, he was pitching Josephine, not only to Fred Rainsberry in Toronto, but also to the well-known puppeteer Bill Baird in New York City. As he sat in the waiting room at LaGuardia Airport in the spring of 1961 on his way home to Pittsburgh, Rogers wrote to answer questions that had arisen in his meeting with Baird. The puppeteer has asked about the meaning of Josephine’s sadness that her neck has not grown. She wants to look like all the other giraffes.
Fred Rogers explained: “I have come to the conclusion that Josephine’s neck is really a symbol—a symbol of growing up, and how difficult maturing really is. . . .
“Josephine and her short neck is really every child; for every child feels small beside his elders. And every child reacts in his own particular way to this temporary inferiority.”25
In the version of Josephine presented on the Neighborhood in 1989, a friend of the young giraffe, Hazel, an elephant, tries to talk her into attending a school where Hazel is learning to play the trombone. Josephine’s friends Bird, Butterfly, and Bee encourage her to make a short visit first to Sunflower, Frog (Aber), and Tree (Bob Trow). Chuck Aber recalls: “We’re trying to convince Josephine that she’s fine; we like her. But she has to figure that out from the inside out.”26
Finally, Josephine and Hazel head off for the school, where Mr. Bulldog (Don Brockett) is the dean, and the teaching staff includes a striped elephant and a spotted elephant. Among the fellow students is J. R. Giraffe (Chuck Aber), a shy giraffe. Josephine and Hazel meet all sorts of other animals, too, including a snake that doesn’t know how to hiss. Josephine attends the “Attractive Active Animals” class.
On day three of the opera, J. R. finally works up the nerve to tell Josephine that he thinks she’s pretty nice. She says, “Well, I have a short neck.” He says, “I just think you’re nice.” There’s a song about it. And Sam Snake even learns to hiss.
The themes of the operas were always cleverly foreshadowed and then reinforced in the on-set segments of the show. Back at the house, Mister Rogers feeds the fish and sings an “attractive active fishes” version of “Attractive Active Animals.” Then he wraps up by reemphasizing how we are all more than what we look like, punctuated by the song “You’re Much More.”
Thus did Fred Rogers come to demonstrate that after all these intervening years, Josephine can accept herself “just the way she is.”
Yo-Yo Ma’s son, Nicholas, was two when his famous musician father was approached to play his cello on the Neighborhood for the first time, in 1985. Yo-Yo Ma appeared on the show in a sweater and jacket, given the Pittsburgh winter. He found the television lights very hot, yet Fred Rogers was in his usual cardigan, sitting close to Ma: “He sat closer and closer and closer until his face was maybe three inches from my face, and he said, ‘It’s so nice to see you.’ The usual social distance between people was suddenly crossed into a very intimate space. Being already hot, I was totally taken aback. And I said, ‘It’s really nice to see you, too.’”27
Even this simple exchange made the thoughtful Ma reflect afterward: “One of the things that I think Mister Rogers does in such an amazingly disarming . . . way is to take away all the socialized behavior that we adopt as we become older. . . . I remember children, babies, going for your teeth, and looking really close, taking your glasses away . . . because there’s no sense of that kind of social distance. By essentially relieving himself of the years of adult social behavior, Mister Rogers becomes in the same space orientation as a child.”
Ma starts his first visit to the Neighborhood in 1985 with a warm-up rehearsal in Joe Negri’s music shop. In an unscripted moment, Mister Rogers asks Yo-Yo Ma about the kind of music the world-class cellist might perform on the Neighborhood: “What do you feel? What would you play if you were sad, or happy, or angry?”
“So,” Ma notes, “context gets to content.”28
Ma proceeds to demonstrate these emotions in some short pieces, followed by two straight minutes of gorgeous, uninterrupted Bach, for an audience of two- and three-year-olds.
Yo-Yo Ma recalls that twenty-four years after he appeared on the Neighborhood, he still retains the notion that “children have an incredible capacity to concentrate on things if they are interested. It would be awful to say, ‘Okay, now you’re going to sit there and listen to something,’ versus getting people first curious about something, and not making them come to my world, but actually going into their world. This is their show. This is what they watch. . . .
“I think that’s the genius of Fred Rogers. He’s the guide for the children into many, many different worlds and many, many different thought processes and feelings and fears. It’s all okay.
“He never talks down to kids. It’s a relationship that’s based on love and respect, with boundaries.”29
From his appearance on the Neighborhood, Ma feels he learned a great deal about what was behind outwardly very simple behavior. For instance, the time it takes Mister Rogers to take off his coat and put on his sweater and his sneakers “is actually the time and space it takes when a parent comes home, and you change your clothes, you feed the fish, you talk. It’s in slo-mo, but that’s also the time that a parent or child is open to questions and answers and familial interaction. Creating that kind of time-space relationship in the media, I thought that was really, really interesting.”
In an interview, Ma called the Neighborhood a “safe show,” in that the musical transitions provided children in the television audience with a kind of safety net: “Going from the unfamiliar, the foreign, to the familiar, is a lifelong enterprise and a lifelong sense of habits that we hopefully practice. I think Mister Rogers ‘gets it’ by creating the safe place on television, [so as] to actually make sure that the unsafe feelings that one has, well, let’s say, in exploring music or in exploring life, [are] in context of something that is supported, that is as basic as—well, the most precious thing, unconditional love. . . .
“. . . Some people are beautiful on the outside, and some people are beautiful on the inside. Somehow both the external and the internal are always part of the package and inseparable. . . . In those two simple ways, he addresses many people’s fears about ‘Well, I don’t look good’ or ‘I don’t feel good.’ But maybe if you know you’re beautiful on the inside, that actually makes you beautiful on the outside.
“I think these things are extremely basic, and yet hard to actually practice. The fact that he unabashedly is able to say these things is an incredibly important thing in our society, not just for young people, but for adults also.”30
Yo-Yo Ma appeared on the Neighborhood a second time, in 1990, with his son, Nichol
as, who joins him and Mister Rogers on piano for a spirited rendition of “The Skater’s Waltz,” composed in 1882 by Frenchman Emile Waldteufel.
In the ultimate accolade, Ma says that if someone asks him what he’s really proud of, it would be appearing on Fred Rogers’s show: “He really influenced kids to say—if music happened to be the thing that struck, so to speak, a chord in their lives, they actually would ask for it and get it. Twenty years later they’re musicians, and they trace it back to a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood show. That’s pretty amazing.”
Another lesson Ma learned on the Neighborhood: “Very little of what I think about when I work with professional orchestras is about—it’s never a hierarchical proposition. We’re all on the same level playing field trying to do something together, and I think that’s straight out of the Fred Rogers playbook.”
Yo-Yo Ma and his wife remained friends with Fred and Joanne Rogers for years. After Rogers’s death in 2003, says Ma, he remembered not the many memorials and tributes. Instead, “I remember Fred very vividly as a person that is incredibly alive. I remember palpably the words, the tone, the attitude, the gentleness.”31
Wynton Marsalis also reflects on the way his appearance on the Neighborhood made an impact that stays with him, many years later: “Going on his show, and seeing the respect in how he treated people, the way that the show operated, and the type of respect and love people had for him—it’s something that I’ve worked on throughout my career. And I definitely always think of that in terms of him. That’s the thing that stuck with me the most of everything. Wow, this guy . . . this is really how he is. To be congruent that way . . .
“There’s that gospel song, ‘I’m Gonna Live the Life I Sing About in My Songs’ . . . You know, like that.”32
A few years after Marsalis appeared on the Neighborhood, in 1992, he and Fred Rogers both received honorary doctorates from Boston University. As he recalls, “I was always the youngest person receiving a doctorate. I got a lot of honorary doctorates. I was almost always the favorite of the students, you know, if they’d heard of me. You think, okay, young, this jazz guy. But for Mister Rogers, the type of love, the spirit, the energy that those students had for him: ‘Mister Rogers, Mister Rogers . . .’ Here were all these college kids from the counterculture, trying to be hip.
“Boy, it was unabashed love everywhere he went. It was so deserved. I was part of the crowd! They all wanted to see him, get their pictures taken with him.”33
Fred Rogers was enchanted by all aspects of music and performance. On one of the very first shows, in 1968, when the Neighborhood was still in black and white, Mister Rogers hosts an experimental electronic musician and inventor named Bruce Haack and his cohort Esther Nelson, a dancer, who leads kids through exercises that echo the sounds of Haack’s homemade analog synthesizer, constructed from household objects.
Pianist André Watts, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and the cast of the off-Broadway percussion-based show STOMP also made visits to the Neighborhood. Mister Rogers made a game attempt to stomp along with the cast. He even tried a few moonwalks with young break-dancer Jermaine Vaughn, who appeared to pop and lock on the Neighborhood in 1985.
Also in 1985, Rogers devoted a week’s worth of shows to “making music,” including a visit to a factory that makes cellos and other stringed instruments; a stop into a rehearsal of the Empire Brass Ensemble, whose members demonstrate the different sounds made by a tuba and a French horn; and a look at the exotically populated studio of an instrument collector, whose pieces span the globe.
In a Neighborhood of Make-Believe sequence that spans the entire week, King Friday orders all his subjects to attend a bass violin festival—a celebration of his own instrument.
All his subjects strive to address the theme, while also remaining true to their own special skills. Several violin puppets join the fray. Lady Aberlin dances with a large bass violin, and Miss Paulifficate (Audrey Roth) tap dances wearing an elaborate costume that culminates with a bass violin on her head. A trio of girl “pages” wearing violins on their heads, too, plays a fanfare that fulfills King Friday’s desire for a most royal occasion.
Whimsical, often hilarious, the week’s story lines all circle back to a basic theme: You can be a master of “the mad that you feel” by expressing your special talent, whatever it may be. Mister Rogers wants you to know, as always, that he likes you just the way you are—bass violin specialist or not.
19.
MISTER ROGERS’S FAMILY VALUES
Throughout his long career, Fred Rogers allowed advertising only to adults. His attitude toward advertising to children had always been consistent. Commercial exploitation of children’s TV dated back to the 1950s, when Dr. Frances Horwich, Miss Frances as host of NBC’s Ding Dong School, damaged her teaching credibility in the eyes of many child development specialists with overt hucksterism of sponsored products, including Wheaties and One A Day vitamins.
Rogers’s ban on commercials sprang from the teaching of Margaret McFarland; the immorality of advertising to young children became one of his ironclad beliefs. He never allowed advertising on the Neighborhood that targeted kids, for fear that young viewers couldn’t tell the difference between product pitches and the educational content of the show.
But as Family Communications, Inc. (FCI) executive Basil Cox points out, Rogers didn’t object to the marketplace per se, given that the Neighborhood needed to subsidize the grants it received for many years from PBS and Sears-Roebuck. And Fred Rogers wanted the largest possible audience for his books, records, videos, and other materials as long as his standards were observed: “Fred was very anxious to have his products in the marketplace, very anxious to have his ideas in the marketplace, and to have his representations of his characters in the marketplace. But under very defined circumstances.”1
In fact, when Cox first joined FCI in 1974, Hoagy Carmichael Jr., then director of public relations for the Neighborhood, had initiated a newsletter called Around the Neighborhood, sold directly to subscribers. Cox notes: “Fred was very enthusiastic about it. It was aggressively advertised through direct mail . . . and Fred did not have a problem with that.” Still, it didn’t work commercially and was shut down.2
Rogers’s aversion to turning children into consumers was unique in American television. Operating in a free-market system, protected by the First Amendment, advertisers felt no constraint about going after young children who could push their parents to buy things. The Howdy Doody Show sold souvenirs and artifacts through the 1950s, including T-shirts, lunch boxes, and comic books, generating millions in revenue for NBC.
Humorist Dave Barry wrote: “They could have advertised the official Howdy Doody edition of all sixteen volumes of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust in the original French, and we would have begged our parents for it.”3
Even Jim Henson, creator of Sesame Street’s Muppets, made a deal with the Walt Disney Company to market his characters to kids. Sesame Street spun off a variety of products. As Basil Cox notes: “Nothing that Sesame Street did commercially was offensive. It was just much more successful, because it was much more widely watched, and much more widely appreciated by adults.”4
One notable exception in avoiding commercial product lures was Burr Tillstrom, creator of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, who turned down multiple offers in the 1950s to convert his beloved puppets, as real to him as people, into toys; he had no desire to see replicas on store shelves.
Though Fred Rogers later approved the sale of replicas of some of the Neighborhood puppets and other artifacts to adults—parents, grandparents, teachers—he remained adamant that they not be marketed to kids. Eliot Daley, who joined Rogers’s staff in the early 1970s, initiated a Mister Rogers Toy of the Month Club. But as he recalls, the toys “just turned out to be garbage. I don’t know whether I got seduced by the big money up front . . . and whether I needed the money for working capital. I was so grateful when it turned out to be a complete disaster, and nobody bought them [the to
ys].”5
For the most part, any product associated with Mister Rogers had to meet Fred Rogers’s usual high standards. According to Bill Isler, who joined FCI in 1984 and later became its president, “Fred was really a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval as far as companies were concerned.”6
In 1983, Fred Rogers had just donated one of the cardigans his mother made him to the collection at the Smithsonian. When Isler arrived, he teased Rogers about his newly iconic status, calling him “a franchise.” But even when “the franchise” approved a product, Rogers was a highly reluctant marketer whose promotional appearances—predictably mobbed by fans—suffered logistically from the amount of time he felt compelled to give each child.
Fred Rogers’s longtime colleague and friend David Newell notes that Rogers wasn’t comfortable going on national tours to promote his videos and books and records: “His marketing views again reflected his respect for his audience. He would rather spend his time creating another program or writing music that would directly help his audience than being out on the road.”7
Successful Mister Rogers products like the Plan and Play vacation guide for kids helped to augment the Neighborhood’s steady support from Sears and PBS, but if Fred Rogers had been a more active and enthusiastic promoter, “It would have been a different ballgame,” observes former FCI president Bill Isler.8
Interestingly, for home videos and other deals, Fred Rogers was represented by the powerhouse talent agency IMG, contacted via his old Latrobe friend and former classmate Arnold Palmer.
Still, Rogers’s integrity barred him for the rest of his life from profiting from any enterprise that involved selling directly to children. According to Joanne Rogers, even though Fred was courted several times by national television networks, the talk ended as soon as the network executives “knew how he felt about selling cereal.”9