Sunshine Came Softly
In 1966 I was twelve and had just moved from Bitter cold Wisconsin to bitter cold and snowy Maine, all in the month of February. Donovan, the folk/jazz/psychedelic/rock/pop singer from Scotland was breaking into the United States music scene with his Sunshine Superman album. The strange and lilting voice of the Highlander has always struck me as the quintessential voice of the Sixties. Maybe it was the cadence or the melody. I always thought it was the lyrics, but as I read them, I realize it was the blend of all three.
Sunshine came softly through my a-window today
Could’ve tripped out easy a-but I’ve a-changed my ways
It’ll take time, I know it, but in a while,
You’re gonna be mine, I know it, we’ll do it in style
‘Cause I made my mind up you’re going to be mine…
I’ll pick up your hand and slowly, blow your little mind…
Superman or Green Lantern ain’t got a-nothin’ on me…
‘Bout all the rainbows a-you can a-have for your own
When you’ve made your mind up forever to be mine
This song embodies all the things I remember about the Sixties. There was drug-induced tripping and mind-blowing. Sexual freedom driven to the extreme. Dreaming, but doing it in a laid-back, flexible manner. It’s all there and for some reason screams Hippie to me.
Today we went to see another great SAG/AFTRA premier, this time of the Tom Hanks movie A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood. This is the film directed by Marielle Heller, who is coming on strong as a director following her work on Can You Ever Forgive Me? It tells the story of one of the great icons of American television and specifically children’s programming. Except for Sesame Street and Jim Henson’s Muppets, no one has influenced children’s TV in America more than Mr. Rogers. As a child of the Sixties I grew up on Captain Kangaroo and in the mid-Sixties, just about when I stopped watching children’s TV and moved overseas, Mr. Rogers stepped into that void and was only supplanted once Sesame Street hit its stride.
If you think Hippies and folk/jazz/psychedelic/rock/pop like Sunshine Superman and Donovan is hard to understand, try to understand Fred Rogers. This was a man who spent his whole life in the greater Pittsburgh area and focused his show of helping children get in touch with their feelings. He was more soft-spoken than probably anyone who has ever been on TV and was pleasant and kind to the point of being unbelievable.
Tom Hanks, who spoke to the audience after the film, was the perfect man of our age to play Fred Rogers. If Fred Rogers was America’s child psychologist, Tom Hanks, often called America’s Dad, was the only choice for the role. In fact, the most querulous aspect of Fred Rogers was how he could be so kind and selfless, while being as humble and admittedly imperfect as he claimed to be (we never hear or see any reason to think of him as flawed, but he shows us his belief in his imperfection). So too, Tom Hanks tells us that his kids are happy to give him up to America as its Dad if there a trade to be done. He also made sure that none of us in the audience would leave thinking he was any less self-effacing than Fred Rogers himself. He even went so far as to admit that every role changes him as an actor and that Fred Rogers has certainly changed him for the better. What could be a more perfect and more Fred Rogers-like comment than that?
Chris Cooper plays the wayward father of the protagonist (an Esquire writer named Lloyd Vogel), and he does it in typical Chris Cooper perfection. He is the antithetical father to Fred Roger’s perfect fatherly image. The most powerful scene comes when Fred Rogers whispers to the dying Chris Cooper and we learn that he has asked Cooper to pray for him. The other amazing cinematic moment comes when Fred Rogers asks Lloyd to take a minute of silence to bless all those people who have loved them and brought them to this place. No minute in movies was ever longer or more thought-filled than that sixty seconds.
Fred Rogers with his cardigan sweaters, skinny ties and house sneakers was more mindful and more complex as a spiritual being than any Hippie that Donovan could conjure up in song. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was beautiful and idyllic. It was a 1950’s train-set diorama. It was undoubtedly from Fred Roger’s own childhood, certainly not the childhood of slot cars, cowboy holsters and little green army men that I grew up with. And it was as far from the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic scene as one could get. And yet, looking back through the lens of this movie, it’s hard to imagine any Tibetan ashram with a more spiritual message than the kind acceptance message of Mr. Rogers. The closest I can think of is the scene from The Help when Viola Davis says to her little charge, “Remember, you is smart, you is kind, you is important.”
Sunshine came softly to Mr. Rogers
Neighborhood in those early years and continued to help the children of America
adjust to the changing times and the changing nature of the American family for
many years. This movie shows us how hard
it is for one man, even a saintly man like Fred Rogers to carry the burden of
working to fix all the broken children of America. It also shows us how certain
values can be timeless over fifty years and can wear cardigans, hoodies and
everything in between while still spreading comfort where it is needed the most,
with our youngest members.