Neighborhood mourns Mr. Rogers 

Stomach cancer claims children's TV father figure

Goodbye, neighbor.

For 30 years, Fred Rogers — known to millions of children simply as "Mister Rogers" — built a television neighborhood that was closed to no one.

It was a community of never-ending childhood and ceaseless acceptance that was always just big enough for one more person.

Today, the neighborhood mourns.

Rogers, the soft-spoken Presbyterian minister who made generations of young audiences his secular congregation, died Thursday after a short battle with stomach cancer. He was 74.

Like teens compelled to make fun of our parents, those of us who grew out of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" found a certain satisfaction in poking fun at him.

But not today, not for any grown-up child who truly appreciated a father figure who would put on some comfortable shoes and actually take the time to sit down and talk to you.

Latchkey kids. Kids from the projects. Kids whose soccer moms were too busy to sit down and explain that the bathtub drain won't suck you down.

Always, it was about you, the child, who was OK just the way you were.

It's a simple — some might say simplistic — notion, but it's one that makes admirers refer to "the neighborhood" in a collective sense.

"He was a good influence on us," says Jeanette Rucker, 40, of Nicholtown. She recalls first seeing Mister Rogers when she was 6.

"He was a very nice guy," she said. "It was his smile that made you smile."

And so many other things.

The trolley to the "Neighborhood of Make-Believe" always seemed to go so much further than it really did.

The delivery man would come by to dispense something so basic but yet so interesting, because, on that particular day, we were going to learn how that particular thing really worked.

Even as adults, many of us still think of Mister Rogers taking off his cardigan sweater at the precise moment when we trade our work clothes for a T-shirt.

He didn't always get the shoes tied exactly as his song ("It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood") ended with a comforting "Hi, neighbor," but it was always exciting to see if he could.

"Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," produced at Pittsburgh's WQED, near Rogers' hometown, made its debut on public television in 1968.

His original last episode aired in August 2001. He came out of retirement in 2002 to do public-service announcements to help console children after 9/11.

Rogers wasn't the first of his kind, but he was the face of the children's television genre along with "Sesame Street" for nearly 20 years.

His show reached its peak of popularity in the mid-1980s. Then the onset of children's programming outside the sphere of PBS — channels such as today's Playhouse Disney, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon — contributed to Mr. Rogers' decline.

His greatness radiated, in his greetings and his goodbyes. When it was time to go, the heart of a child hurt a little.

We had to return to our real neighborhoods, which might or might not be such comfortable places.

Now we say goodbye for good.

It hurts, more than just a little.

Terror Hangs In D.C. … Until Snowstorm Hits

Blizzard suspends fear

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The voice is flat and robotic but nonetheless pierces the discreet hum of the National Air and Space Museum: "Attention in the museum, attention in the museum …."

The pregnant pause that follows means something entirely different to the gut than it would have two years or even two weeks ago, before "Terror Alert High."

So does Virginia's interstate no-hitchhiking sign along I-95. The simple crossed-out thumbs-up hints to newcomers, "If you think everything's going to be OK, think again."

As it turns out in the museum, a high-school kid has gotten separated from his bus. There is no need for us to hold our breaths and evacuate the building or act out some other absurd scene that belongs in a doomsday action movie.

If only the speaker could add some reassuring inflection to his voice, we — the undaunted, apparently brave visitors to the heart of the nation's capital — wouldn't have to reach so deep to pull our hearts from our stomachs.

Such is the state of the American psyche in the heart of the nation's capital, a place where an orange terror alert somehow ceases to be a comfortably distant "Saturday Night Live" punch line.

Yet, for a precious few days over the President's Day weekend, the fear is smothered in white.

As the first snowflakes begin to fall, then plummet, then accumulate to near-record proportions, a more immediate concern replacs the scramble for duct tape and plastic sheeting: How in the world am I going to shovel out the car?

Perhaps the rest of our worried nation could use such a storm, a blinding white antidote to fear.

The brave few are gathered around the Washington Monument, gazing into a dreary, snowy sky, some surely wondering whether a rogue plane or an anti-aircraft missile will come into view.

Mothers endure the cold with their pink-cheeked toddlers, waiting outside the Air and Space Museum for their turn to remove their coats and submit to metal-detecting wands.

The National Mall echoes with music from a surly saxophonist, who offeres the opening notes of "Sesame Street" to elicit some change from a pregnant woman.

Meanwhile, a homeless man declares that he won't seek shelter — terrorism and impending blizzard be damned — because he "likes the outdoors."

Over the weekend, The Washington Post conducts a telephone survey of how 600 area folks are reacting to the heightened terror alert.

The survey finds that 75 percent are worried about a terrorist attack in the region and that nearly half fear they personally will be a victim.

But for those willing to come to a place that news reports suggest could become a new Ground Zero at any moment, the fear is mostly buried somewhere between denial and resignation.

At any other time, a blizzard in a densely populated metro area would be something to curse, especially one that forces the governor of Maryland to declare driving without just cause illegal.

But here, for this moment, the idea of being trapped in a home by Mother Nature — and not a dirty bomb – is somehow liberating.

Like the water rendered inert by freezing temperatures, the region's fear of terror is temporarily put on hold.

MSNBC and Fox News are unrelenting with their perpetual "Terror Alert: High" screen labels — but no one here can see it through the snowblind.

The local news heads talking about machine-gun-wielding guards on the Capitol steps disappears, suddenly, giving way to goofy weather personalities rooting for a few more tenths of an inch at Reagan National so the official snow total can be all the more historic.

The busloads of high school students visiting the Lincoln Memorial turn their attention away from the barricades and police trucks blocking passages and to the more immediate threat: the embarrassment of slipping on an icy sidewalk in front of their peers.

Then, as soon as it came, it's gone.

Skies clear, and life begins to emerge once again. Eyes squint at the first sunlight reflecting off a wholly white landscape. Blacktop emerges; customers find gas stations finally open for business.

For three days, talk of Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations and talk of movable chemical weapons labs is silent.

Then, the sun's rays compel the long thaw, lighting places people don't want to see.

A familiar, unwelcome normalcy returns.

Perchance To Dream

Young competitors find their muse in Shakespeare

The holding room is swimming with unsettled nerves and raging teen hormones.

"My first instinct is to run," says 15-year-old Jessie Griffeth, the youngest competitor in the English-Speaking Union's High School Shakespeare competition. "If I don't run, I'm OK."

They make small talk even though they don't know one another, a nervous exercise, in part, to show that one doesn't think he or she is better than anyone else.

It's also to cope with the realization that they are about to pour out their souls to an audience of discerning strangers. The winner competes nationally in New York.

If they can simply finish, well, that's success, too.

They come to the Warehouse Theatre, the proving ground for this particular evening, from different places and stations in life but with one thing in common: A poet who lived 400 years ago has changed their lives.

One, eventual winner Mary Catalanotto of Clover, is a student at the Governor's School for the Arts.

Some are aspiring actors — their "ands" sounds like "ends." This is their chance to have professionals assess their dream in an unusual, rap-battle-like competitive setting.

Others, though, are here only because their love for Shakespeare is what gets them through the maze of adolescence. Nothing more.

While most teens find their poetry in Eminem cleaning out his closet, these kids are more inspired by Hamlet's anxious indecision.

Speaking to teens

Whether it's a story of love denied or a sharp-tongued character dissing another with language that would be profane if condensed to a single word, Shakespeare speaks to what makes teens what they are: moody, idealistic, confused.

"You can feel his pain and it corresponds to your pain; that's what's so beautiful about it," says Fermnell Dowell, a junior at Riverside High, where he's a running back on the football team.

He's among the 15 local students competing this night, all of whom earned a place here by winning preliminary competitions at their own high schools.

Dowell does a goose-bump-raising rendition of "Othello," when the Moor realizes he has been tricked into killing his love and slays himself.

There is something moving, it seems, in a handsome, nervously outgoing jock suddenly transforming into a character so tragic.

"These plays are about young people," says Dr. John Crabtree, a professor emeritus of English at Furman University, who calmed and advised the students before the competition.

After all, Hamlet was a college student who came home for his dad's funeral, and the angst of the young lovers in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet" speaks to youth of any generation, Crabtree says.

To know that hormones and nerves are forcing some of them to hesitate or forget their lines makes the marriage of youth and Shakespeare all the more magnificent a thing to behold, he says.

"An actor and an athlete have a lot in common," Crabtree says. "They're saying, 'I have something here worth watching, now watch me.' It's quite frightening."

The competitors are well aware of this before they take center stage. The deep breaths they suck in hint at the buzzing that must be going on in their stomachs.

Alyssa Dimatteo, a J.L. Mann junior, shrugs it off as "performance energy." Dimatteo, who also attends the Fine Arts Center, says she wants to be a professional actress.

She looks and sounds the part, dressed confidently but conservatively, pronouncing every "T" distinctly in ordinary conversation.

Amy Bryant doesn't have the same credentials. She's a junior at Travelers Rest High, or "TR," where the "R" usually brings out of its students a distinct Southern drawl like the one Bryant has.

Bryant wants to be a veterinarian, and in some way, she looks the part of an outsider.

Her jet black hair contrasts with her pale skin and heavily painted, blue eyelids. The multiple ear piercings add to the image, but it's all disarmed with an engaging, braced-tooth smile.

She believes others at her school were more deserving, but if she's here, she's going to give it her best.

"I just want to prove to myself that I can do it," she says.

Bryant later proves to be a crowd favorite, not for her technical skill, but because of her zeal for the part she plays, the comical Thisbe in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Beaudelaire Garraud, a junior at Berea, might not look the part of a Shakespearean actor.

When Garraud's father, Marc, moved to New York from Haiti years ago, he spoke only Creole.

Marc says he named his son Beaudelaire because it was his middle name and his father, who was killed in Haiti when Marc was 3, loved the poetry of Charles Beaudelaire.

Marc is a jazz musician, but never cared much for Shakespeare. Beau, as he affectionately calls his son, found Shakespeare himself growing up in a Bronx ghetto, forsaking television to read the poet's works.

"You know, he's weird," Marc says, throwing up his hands to signify how he steps back and allows his son to find his own way. "I'm like, 'You've got the Shakespeare, man.'"

Beau, by his own account, is a quiet, analytical type and a serious perfectionist. His father searches for the right word as he watches his cherub-faced son try to strike up a conversation with the other competitors. The word finally comes: "introvert."

"I like to watch people; Shakespeare does that with words," says Beau.

His slight Creole/New York accent amalgam goes well with a flawless recital of Sonnet 116.

It's in Shakespeare's words that Beau says he finds the language to describe how he sees people. On the bus one day, he scolded an irritating girl: "Get thee to a nunnery!"

She was perplexed, to say the least.

He likes Macbeth, particularly the comical character of the porter. To find humor wrapped into one of the most depressing works of literature reminds him a bit of teenage life, he says.

"It'll be really terrible and something funny will happen, and then it's, like, I don't feel like smiling, but I'm going to smile." And then he does.

Dowell, the running back, says he can find no better way to secure a date. "He's smooth with the ladies," Dowell says, half-joking but maybe a little more than half-serious. "If you quote Shakespeare, it just touches a woman's heart."

Catalanotto says she loses herself in the language. She prefers to think of Shakespeare as "400 years young."

"It's a language in which you said exactly what you meant," says Catalanotto, who wants to go into broadcasting. "There's something about that that's really wonderful. It almost makes me hurt for today, that we can't come across that beautifully with our speech."

Love, above all else, seems to resonate with these teens. "A 14-year-old girl reading 'Romeo and Juliet' is going to understand and be able to say, 'I feel that way,'" says Dimatteo, the J.L. Mann and Fine Arts Center student.

And it's difficult for her to imagine anyone missing out. "Shakespeare definitely has a stigma," Dimatteo says, referring to students who are reluctant to decipher elevated text.

"Like anything, if you only know the stereotype, then you probably won't fall in love with it. We're not like a separate breed of people. I mean, we are teenagers. We just found a different love."