Making Goodness Attractive

Today I’m going down a Mr. Rogers, Tom Hanks rabbit hole, and I thought I’d take you with me. Firstly, I watched the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It was the movie I grabbed from the library shelf on my last shift after we’d closed down. Here’s the trailer if you’ve not seen it:

{if you’re reading in the newsletter, this one might be better in the browser}

It’s probably the perfect movie to see right now, IMHO. The scene where there is silence….is just one of the best scenes I’ve ever watched in a movie.

I’ve not seen the documentary on Mr. Rogers yet, but here’s the trailer:

In Canada, we didn’t really grow up with Mr. Rogers, we had Mr. Dressup, who, of course, had a connection to Mr. Rogers, and whose show began a year before. If you grew up in Canada you know what a Tickle Trunk is, and you fondly remember Casey and Finnegan. My friend Kimmy Beach was a stage manager when Mr. Dressup / Ernie Coombs did his farewell tour and wrote a poem cycle about that in her book Alarum Within. Highly recommend.

Rob, my partner, has a lot of fond memories of watching Mr. Dressup draw. He remembers drawing along with him. I can still remember the sound of the black felt pen on that nice big white paper.

There’s no Mr. Rogers / Mr. Dressup competition. (That would be wrong…haha). They’re each pretty cool in their own way.

As is Tom Hanks, amiright?

We’ve all heard or have in our memory banks some excellent quotations by Mr. Rogers, such as:

“Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.”

“In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”

“All of us, at some time or other, need help. Whether we're giving or receiving help, each one of us has something valuable to bring to this world. That's one of the things that connects us as neighbors--in our own way, each one of us is a giver and a receiver.”

Now, it seems kind of inevitable that Tom Hanks would play Mr. Rogers. Like his whole life was leading up to it or something. Which is too simplistic, but there’s always something to simplicity.

When this whole thing started up, and by thing I mean pandemic but it’s a loud scary clattery word isn’t it? — a friend of mine (Hi Angie!) sent me the link to this podcast which coincided with me having the aforementioned movie. (Here are the transcripts if you’d rather). I hadn’t watched it yet, but it really made me want to. It’s funny because Tom Hanks was one of my first celebrity crushes — saw him in Big in the theatre, which I guess super dates me. Loved him in Splash, you know, of course, and wasn’t he amazing in Philadelphia, also saw these when they first came out. I’ve always thought, love him, and then never really got past that. But he’s solid. More than solid. You don’t really notice how much you count on a guy like Tom Hanks. I loved him in California Typewriter. I love his love of typewriters.

Warning, Tom Hanks typing: very shall we say smoking hot.

The director of the Hanks/Mr. Rogers movie, a woman, Marielle Heller, and this is not an accident, said about casting Hanks: “It’s something in the energy and the essence and behind the eyes that you feel the same way looking at him as you feel looking at Mister Rogers. And that was what was important to me. I never wanted him to be doing an imitation.” Another line that I loved from the article/podcast as this: “He is an information enthusiast. He is an enthusiasm enthusiast.” Which I love about him. Shouldn’t we all be more like that.

Anyway, a while back I watched this really lovely interview with Hanks and Renee Zellweger, which made me love both of them even more:

And now, as we continue down the rabbit hole, it should come as no surprise to my regular readers that it is time for Bruce Springsteen, who just so happens to be a longtime friend of Tom Hanks.

It seems a long time ago that I wrote the post, Help Me Out, but does it remind you of Mr. R in a way? I wouldn’t have put it together then, I don’t think. And it’s a bit strange to look back at the post on being an enthusiast.

But I guess what I was hoping to find in this bit of a rabbit hole of a post is some goodness. Some beauty. The insistence on it being in the neighbourhood. Because yah, some scary shit is going down. Afterwards, and there is going to be an afterwards, maybe the most pressing question will/should be, how are we going to make goodness attractive?

If all of this is to be worth something, if we are to learn something from it, we are going to have to very insistently and loudly make goodness a priority. It’s easy to find goodness, good people right now — the grocery store workers, the health professionals…the people delivering your take-out. Those people who are checking in on their neighbours or donating cash to food banks etc.

I think we might all have to dare to be good, dare to insist on beauty. I was reading something lately that said we need to tell little girls to dare to make things that are not beautiful. Which I agree with. But I also think they need to be told to dare to make beautiful things. Dare to be kind and good. Because it’s a lot harder than it looks to constantly insist on these things, to be relentless in wanting them, being them, and knowing we deserve them. We all do. Every single one of us. (Also, there’s a beauty in making things that are not beautiful, that are perhaps harrowing and terrible and hard and painful…that can also be true). If being nice and good were a piece of cake we’d all be Mr. Rogers. And if it were so easy to make beautiful things, profoundly beautiful things, the world would be full of them. It ain’t though, and that’s why we need to keep trying.

Do I have any advice for right now? Just do what you can with what you have. Treat yourself well. Do all the things the experts tell us to do. Be kind to yourself now so you can be good to others later. Listen. Give and receive. And remember what Bruce said, “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.”

A note on my photos: my first camera — a Pentax MX, the typewriter is a Remington Cadet, and the purse is from Simon’s.