It’s a boobiful day in the neighbourhood

My son recently discovered Mr. Rogers. He loves the show. Unlike most people my age, I’m in unfamiliar territory here . . . I grew up with peasant vision in Montreal and have never watched a Mr. Rogers episode until very recently.

Still, without ever having seen an episode, I thought I had some idea of what Mr. Rogers was like. I assumed (through a myriad of pop culture references) that it was not only a very conservative children’s show, but also lame and boring like so many other children’s shows (you know – the whole cardigan and tie thing and the fact that MR was a pastor or something) . But it’s not! I was totally wrong. The children’s librarian/programmer in me has been impressed by his gentle way with children and that he does not talk down to children. Not only does he not talk down to them, but he addresses things that they are interested in. My son will sit transfixed at pretty much anything MR deems worthy.

Today’s episode was particularly astute and groundbreaking! It was about food and included a lengthy montage on all kinds of mammals breastfeeding their babies. And wouldn’t you know, four of the mammal pairs shown were human mamas and babies. That’s right – at 10 am this morning on PBS we saw four boobies (yes, nipple, milk and all) and D. Jr. and I had a conversation about breastfeeding. We saw more booby in 5 minutes of MR than I have ever seen on SATC. It was breastacular. My head almost exploded considering the Facebook crap of a little while ago. Breastfeeding photos are not OK on Facebook, but MR and PBS see no problem whatsoever with a little breastfeeding video. Kudos to Mr. Rogers, no?! I mean the episode looked pretty old to me (eighties?!) and here he is still breaking ground 5 years after his death while Facebook is still scandalized by boob!

All I can say is that it is a crazy, bizarro and hypocritical world when Mr. Rogers is more progressive than Facebook.