Summary

Prologue: A Beautiful Day. The prologue begins with an anecdote about an appearance made by Fred Rogers (known to the American public as Mr. Rogers, referred to in narration and in this analysis as Fred) on a program hosted by Oprah Winfrey, relatively early in her television career. Fred had asked that there be no children present, because he knew that if there were, he would not be able to focus on the interview. There were, however, children and families in the audience; narration describes how the interview quickly got forgotten as Rogers focused more and more on the children. “Decades before,” narration comments, “Rogers had programmed himself to focus on the needs of little children, and by now he had reached a point at which he could not fail to respond to a child who asked something of him” (1).

Narration then sums up...