Mister Rogers spots him first, naturally, amidst the swarm of New Yorkers, about the five-hundredth happy coincidence in a life full of them. ", Then he turns back to the little girl. TJ: Yeah, yeah. ESQ: So its like we dont knowwith the popular mediums we have nowhow to show kindness or come up to each other. And I called Joanne [Rogers] after that and said, What do you think about that? And she was like, You know, Fred would never represent that. That seems so obvious, but I think to a lot of people its not obvious because I think that the temptation of being able to think that yelling at somebody on the street, youre somehow striking a blow. Mr. Rogers, fully aware of this, still invites . Over the course of two hours, we see Fred Rogers movingly model a type of humanity for Vogel, who seems mired in anger, disconnected from his own feelings. Over 20 years after its publication, Junod, now a senior writer for ESPN, has come forward to share more about the lessons he's learned from Rogers, and how he's reconciled them with his feelings about A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Once upon a time, there was a little boy born blind, and so, defenseless in the world, he suffered the abuses of the defenseless, and when he grew up and became a man, he looked back and realized that he'd had no childhood at all, and that if he were ever to have a childhood, he would have to start having it now, in his forties. That was a challenge. He notes, "I think that my character is not just me. He was a reformer in terms of method. "I'm done. Would you lead us in prayer? esquire article. ESQ: So my relationship with prayer has ebbed and flowed my entire life. ESQ: I mean, you said that if he grew up in the age of Twitter, you can expect what he would have done. One second, two seconds, three secondsand now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, "May God be with you" to all his vanquished children. And I just think that its a trap; I think its false. This boy had a very bad case of cerebral palsy, and when he was still a little boy, some of the people entrusted to take care of him took advantage of him instead and did things to him that made him think that he was a very bad little boy, because only a bad little boy would have to live with the things he had to live with. He had makeup on his face and a dollop of black dye combed into his silver hair. And then he was on the move again, happily, quickly, for he would not leave until he showed me all the places of all those who'd loved him into being. During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . Three died, and they were still children, almost. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." The event is the premise of the 2019 feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. When I handed him back the phone, he said, Bye, my dear, and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. By Rachel E. Greenspan. He takes a nap every day in the late afternoonjust as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption. When he was your age, he had a rabbit, too, and he loved it very much. ", And now Margy comes up behind him and massages his shoulders. Browse featured articles, preview selected issue contents, and more. Theres fire up there guys! "Remind you of anyone, Tom?" He rested his head on a small pillow and kept his eyes closed while he explained that he had bought the apartment thirty years before for $11,000 and kept it for whenever he came to New York on business for the Neighborhood. Tom Hanks-starring Mister Rogers movie 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood' is loosely based off of the 'Esquire' profile Tom Junod, known as Lloyd Vogel in the film, wrote about Fred Rogers, and . That's a true thing the real-life Rogers adopted a vegetarian lifestyle back in the 1970s, when eschewing meat was a radical, "hippie" kind of thing to do. he says when I approach the two of them. "Oh, Mister Rogers, you're the father I never had." No, Mister Rogers was not a saint. The movie, which opens November 22, casts Rogers as an agent of change . Exclusive & Unlimited access to Esquire Classic - The Official Esquire Archive. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. Meaning that there should be mistakes, there should be accidents, and if that was filmed, then it should stay filmed. At first, I chalked this up to some Neighborhood of Make-Believe voodoo energy, but now I have a legit answer. "Do you think we can go in?" His grandfather, his grandmother, his uncles, his aunts, his father-in-law and mother-in-law, even his family's servantshe went to each grave, and spoke their names, and told their stories, until finally I headed back down to the Jeep and turned back around to see Mister Rogers standing high on a green dell, smiling among the stones. 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. Who wrote the article about Mr Rogers in Esquire magazine? TJ: I think you try to put it together in one person. Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), an Esquire journalist known for his jarring exposs but is secretive about his childhood, is the film's protagonist. He prayed for Old Rabbit's safe return, and when, hours later, his mother and father came home with the filthy, precious strip of rabbity roadkill, he learned not only that prayers are sometimes answered but also the kind of severe effort they entail, the kind of endless frantic summoning. In the film, Junod is represented by the character Lloyd Vogel, played by Matthew Rhys. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. And so what I try to pray really is that I represent his message accurately and wholeheartedly. He was thunderstruck. My personal favorite piece of the story: Junod describes meeting Mr. Rogers in person for the first time, THE FIRST TIME I CALLED MISTER ROGERS on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. While Junod wrote that he learned the concepts of forgiveness and . Tom Hanks channels Mister Rogers in a movie about how the legendary kids' TV host saves a magazine writer, and could maybe save all of us. Joanne Rogers, the widow of Fred Rogers of TV's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and an accomplished pianist, died Thursday. And so it was; the asphalt ended, and then we began bouncing over a road of old blond bricks, until even that road ended, and we were parked in front of the place where Mister Rogers is to be buried. 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. 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. They are boxers, egg-colored, and to rid himself of them he bends at the waist, and stands on one leg, and hops, and lifts one knee toward his chest and then the other and then Mister Rogers has no clothes on. Heres Our Review Of Cocaine Bear: Oh Hell Yes! Second mook: "Fuck that. If Mister Rogers can tell me how to read that clock, I'll watch his show every day for a year"that's what someone in the crowd said while watching Mister Rogers and Maya Lin crane their necks at Maya Lin's big fancy clock, but it didn't even matter whether Mister Rogers could read the clock or not, because every time he looked at it, with the television cameras on him, he leaned back from . ESQ: In both pieces, the original and The Atlantic piece, prayer comes up. For my father, everything that was important was visible to the eye. I mean, he was in favor of thatmedia should be human. He doesn't even know. The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. I have actually tried, since that moment, Ive tried to pray. He finds me, of course, at Penn Station. The boy had always been prayed for. This was not a bad thing, however, because he was in New York, and in New York it's not an insult to be called Mister Fucking Anything. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?". The boy had never spoken, until one day he said, "X the Owl," which is the name of one of Mister Rogers's puppets, and he had never looked his father in the eye until one day his father had said, "Let's go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe," and now the boy is speaking and reading, and the father has come to thank Mister Rogers for saving his son's life.And by this time, well, it's nine-thirty in the morning, time for Mister Rogers to take off his jacket and his shoes and put on his sweater and his sneakers and start taping another visit to the Neighborhood. Im not sure about it. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" And I dont know which take they use, but it was hard for Tom to do that. And my essay from 1998 is the intro for that. I mean, Fred wasnt just a reformer when it comes in terms of message. Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Fred was all person by person. TJ: I mean, the tents great, but the tents intentional. Lloyd Vogel (based loosely on the real life journalist Tom Junod) is the anti-heroic protagonist of the 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.An embittered, self-absorbed, antisocial Esquire journalist who holds a grudge towards his philanderous father Jerry for abandoning his family, Lloyd is assigned to profile children's television host Fred Rogers for a magazine issue about . "But Mister Rogers, I can't pray," Joybubbles said, "because every time I try to pray, I forget the words. And that always struck me as perverse. Fred Rogers loved her very much, and so, out of nowhere, he smiled and put his hand over hers. Most famous architects are famous for creating big famous buildings, but Maya Lin is more famous for creating big fancy things for people to look at, and in fact, when Mister Rogers had gone to her studio the day before, he looked at the pictures she had drawn of the clock that is now on the ceiling of a place in New York called Penn Station. Perhaps some of the answers rest in the New Testament's Fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. 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.". The movie is about Lloyd Vogel, (Matthew Rhys), an investigative journalist who receives an assignment to profile noted children's television host Fred Rogers, . 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