After Mister Rogers

We went to see the Mister Rogers documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Everything we read and heard warned us to be ready to cry. One friend told me she had taken a box of tissues to the theater, then passed it through the crowd when everybody started sobbing. The movie is amazing – thoughtful, powerful, spiritual – but for me the heart punch didn’t happen until right at the end, when the filmmakers create a brilliant little moment that I won’t spoil here. The tears came then, and they came hard.

But I don’t want to say much more about the movie. I want to talk about after the movie.

There was a pretty good crowd – maybe 50 people on a Thursday night – and most of them left when the lights came up. But a dozen of us stayed. There were four people a couple rows behind us, and three people a row in front of us, and five of us – Alix and I, a friend we used to work with, and her parents.

And all three of our little groups just sat there and talked about the movie.

The people behind us talked about watching Mister Rogers when they were kids. A young woman in front of us got out her phone and found a YouTube clip of a moment shown during the credits. Our group got out the box of cupcakes our friends had brought – Alix and I just had our 20th anniversary, and each cupcake had icing that looked like a baseball with “20” between the seams. (Our first night out together was at a Hickory Crawdads game.)

Ushers usually come in right after every movie ends to sweep up and make sure everybody leaves. But nobody came. So the folks behind us lingered, and the ones in front of us lingered, and our group ate cupcakes in what I am sure was a flagrant violation of Regal Cinemas policy. I wish now that we would have talked to somebody in one of the other groups, but in the moment we were all deep in our own conversations.

Our group talked about what Fred Rogers would think of the way our world is now — if he would think that he had not done enough. We wondered what happened to some of the children in the movie. We agreed that the things Mister Rogers stood for – kindness, tolerance, love – are not naive or shallow but are the most profound and deepest things of all.

We all stayed for a good 20 minutes. I’ve been to hundreds of movies, but I’ve never seen that happen before.

It felt like we were sitting out on our porches on a long summer night.

It felt like we were in the place we belonged.

You know what it felt like?

A neighborhood.

– TT