A Lesson from Mr Rogers: The Tent Debacle

Annie Lundgren
2 min readJan 29, 2020

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“It’s important you don’t think of him as a saint. And the reason it’s important you don’t think of him that way is then his message is unattainable, what he was aiming for is unattainable.” — Joanne Rogers

In my favorite scene in 2019’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) struggles to set up a tent, laughs, gets frustrated and fails.

He watches playback on the video monitor while his team tells him they’ll pre-set the tent for the next take.

He refuses. “No, this is good. We’re ok. Children need to know that even when adults make plans, sometimes they don’t turn out the way we’d hoped.”

This exact scene may not have happened in real life, but it sums up the film.

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The obvious lesson is that things don’t always go as planned.

But the indirect lesson, the one that resonates with me deeply and reflects the core themes of the film is that Fred Rogers was one-hundred percent committed to carrying out his mission in every action he took, day in and day out.

Every decision he made was for the purpose of teaching children and helping them feel meaningful, understood and seen. He sought to fulfill this purpose even at the risk of looking foolish, as he did setting up the tent.

The embarrassing tent fiasco provided an unexpected, unplanned lesson for the children Mr. Rogers chose to serve.

I hope to emulate him — not in fulfilling his particular mission which was singularly his — but in being committed to first knowing my own mission and then having the focus to make decisions based on that purpose and for the benefit of those I hope to serve, even at the risk of looking foolish.

♡ Annie

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Enjoy this blooper of the real Fred Rogers attempting the tent setup (February 17, 1982, The David Letterman Show.)

Originally published at http://www.jomafilms.com on January 29, 2020.

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