How to Show Your Mammoth

November 20, 2015 1:29 PM

For fourteen years, Snuffleupagus was the urban legend of Sesame Street -- Big Bird's even bigger friend only ever interacted with him, and their attempts to convince the adults of the Street always ended in humorous failure. But then the writers realized that Snuffleupagus needed to be seen.

The thing that changed their minds was national coverage of child sexual abuse claims:

The fear was that if we represented adults not believing what kids said, they might not be motivated to tell the truth. That caused us to rethink the storyline: Is something we’ve been doing for 14 years—that seemed innocent enough—now something that’s become harmful?

And so, thirty years ago this week, for the first time, the adults of Sesame Street came face-to-face with the mammoth presence of Aloysius Snuffleupagus.

posted by Etrigan (57 comments total)

Between Mr. Hooper's death and this the early 80s was truly the best time to be a pre-school aged kid.
posted by Space Coyote at 1:33 PM on November 20, 2015 [15 favorites]

All these years and I never knew Snuffleupagus had a first name until now.
posted by workerant at 1:35 PM on November 20, 2015 [19 favorites]

I always hated Big Bird not being believed, because children are powerless enough as it is and I keenly felt this even while watching the show. The reveal happened shortly after, not before, I was too old for SS. Still angry, oh well.
posted by Melismata at 1:35 PM on November 20, 2015 [11 favorites]

All these years and I never knew Snuffleupagus had a first name until now.

He also has a younger sister named Alice, and their parents are divorced.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:41 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

Reading this article makes me just marvel at the Sesame Workshop process. They really think through every storyline and how it affects the children watching the show, over time, and the long-term effects.
posted by xingcat at 1:41 PM on November 20, 2015 [14 favorites]

Let's get this out of the way: It's Snuffle-UP-agus, not Snuffle-UF-agus.

Yes it is. I *will* fight you.
posted by mudpuppie at 1:43 PM on November 20, 2015 [31 favorites]

He also has a younger sister named Alice, and their parents are divorced.

As noted in the article, the divorced-parents thing was scrapped before airing. It's not canon.
posted by Shmuel510 at 1:44 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

All these years and I never knew Snuffleupagus had a first name until now.

I don't think it was canon until we met his mother, Mrs. Snuffleupagus, who was just the Snuffy costume in a housedress. She didn't show up until after Snuffy was revealed as real to the other show regulars.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:44 PM on November 20, 2015

oh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh...
posted by bitteroldman at 1:46 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Aw. It looks like they discontinued their Twitter-joke, where @MrSnuffleupagus had an account that was protected in such a way that only @BigBird could see or respond to the tweets.
posted by schmod at 1:47 PM on November 20, 2015 [14 favorites]

I do find it somewhat funny that it was in response to something that turned out to be hysteria (the day care abuse witchhunt), but I think it was the right choice anyway. By the time they are six, kids are starting to distinguish between things they see and things they imagine, and when they are things the audience see, in the same context as the rest of the show, they are going to be taken as real. And so it becomes about Big Bird being ridiculed and not believed for a true thing.
posted by tavella at 1:52 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

Man, I love me some Muppets and Jim Henson and Sesame Street and all that. Thanks for posting this, nice to hear some more back story.

Anyone have any opinions on the new Muppets? I was a religious watcher as a kid and a teen and I can still binge through the old Muppet Show, but I can't bring myself to watch any of the recent stuff. I suppose I should check Fanfare.
posted by nevercalm at 2:04 PM on November 20, 2015

It's funny - I hear these stores about how the writers realized the importance of kids seeing that Snuffleupagus was real. However, I was a kid who watched Sesame Street during this time and I simply do not remember that Snuffleupagus was imaginary. I also don't remember him coming out in this miraculous moment of sudden reality. They were Muppets - they were all imaginary.

So to past writers of Sesame Street - I think you were writing for the adults watching. As a I kid, I was 100% oblivious.
posted by fremen at 2:09 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

So to past writers of Sesame Street - I think you were writing for the adults watching. As a I kid, I was 100% oblivious.

I never even really watched Sesame Street (too busy with Postman Pat and reruns of the Magic Roundabout and Bagpuss at the key age, I believe), but even I knew he was imaginary.

I never much took to Big Bird. Seemed like a phoney.
posted by howfar at 2:14 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

It bothered me a lot that no one believed Big Bird. It seemed cruel how he was always thwarted just as he was on the point of finally showing Snuffleupagus was real.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:14 PM on November 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

I was born in 1980 and I remember Snuffy being "imaginary" though, and adults not believing Big Bird. It was definitely a thing.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:15 PM on November 20, 2015 [8 favorites]

We weren't all oblivious.

I was a kid watching during the time Mr. Snuffleupagus was never seen by adults, and I was SERIOUSLY ANGRY about it. I would rant about it to adults constantly. "The adults heard the noise he made! He can move stuff around! Of course he's real, why doesn't anybody believe Big Bird?"

It drove me crazy, and I will admit that when I finally saw him interacting with adults, when I was 14 and my little sister was watching the show, I breathed a sigh of relief.
posted by mmoncur at 2:17 PM on November 20, 2015 [23 favorites]

At the time I took the meaning of Mr. Snuffleupagus to be that kids could have a secret world that adults were not a part of and knew nothing about. I was shocked and a bit sad when Mr. Snuffleupagus became real. Now finding out the reason makes me a bit sadder.
posted by drnick at 2:33 PM on November 20, 2015 [12 favorites]

I'm glad they fixed this before I started watching. Little me was extremely sensitive to this stuff - I could not tolerate Looney Toons or slapstick either. I also thought the Muppets were an odd type of person I had just never come across in real life.
posted by bleep at 2:36 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

The big reveal was one of the few times in which Big Bird would've been completely justified and in character to drop some F-bombs.

The others usually involved Grover.
posted by delfin at 2:42 PM on November 20, 2015 [25 favorites]

I'm working on a post about videos made by Satanic Panic-promoting ministries in the 80's and 90's and had kind of a shudder when I realized that this would've happened in 1985. That's five years after Michelle Remembers came out and two years after the infamous McMartin Preschool debacle began, and here's the Sesame Street folks talking about accusations in preschools.

So now I'm sadly wondering how much of what the Sesame Street makers were seeing was the time when society finally chose to begin to acknowledge the horror of child sexual abuse which had been quietly ignored or excused for generations, finally being dragged into the light and taken seriously, and how much of it was the early stages of the long string of lurid false accusations and hoaxes that destroyed a lot of innocent lives.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:46 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

How to Show Your Mammoth

That might not have been the best choice of title for this...
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:47 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

I hated him as a child. Mainly because he was as dumb as a rock. Cruel of course, but you know what kids are like.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:56 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

I simply do not remember that Snuffleupagus was imaginary.

That is because he was never imaginary. It's just that adults think they know everything, and if they don't know something they assume it isn't real.
posted by ckape at 2:57 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

can i ask that we try to be really sensitive when we talk about the satanic panic child abuse era? some of us were actually abused in that era (and some of us were abused by guys who claimed to be satanists). i understand wanting to make sure the truth of that era is told, but i hope we always remember that the truth also includes victims whose stories have been discounted because of the time they happened.
posted by nadawi at 3:05 PM on November 20, 2015 [20 favorites]

I preferred imaginary Snuffy. I was a daydreaming only child, and what this taught me was that my imaginary friends could also become real if I was just adamant enough. When the wizard in my wardrobe did not, in fact, come to life, I was bitterly disappointed. Imaginary Snuffy validated the fantasy world I created in my head.
posted by Ruki at 3:17 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought I remembered watching a lot of Sesame Street around the time this happened, but I have no recollection of it. Up until now I still thought he was possibly/probably imaginary. I also thought I remembered watching the episode where Mr. Hooper died very clearly, but that seems unlikely since it aired in November of 1983 and I would have been about 2 1/2. Maybe WTTW was airing reruns in the time slot that I was watching?
posted by jordemort at 3:31 PM on November 20, 2015

I was too old for SS.

There is no such thing. Watching it with kids is best, but I still enjoy watching it on my own occasionally.
posted by VTX at 3:39 PM on November 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

The big reveal was one of the few times in which Big Bird would've been completely justified and in character to drop some F-bombs.

The others usually involved Grover.

I'm pretty sure that Burt and the blue man with the mustache would be dropping F bombs first.
posted by littlesq at 3:55 PM on November 20, 2015 [12 favorites]

Bid Bird and Snuffy have some much more disturbing secrets [warning: contains disco].
posted by benzenedream at 3:56 PM on November 20, 2015

My son was a toddler in the early to mid 80's. He liked watching Sesame Street. It was educational but obviously engineered to be so. Both of us actually seemed to prefer Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Somehow it seemed to me less manipulative or calculated, albeit slightly creepy at times...
posted by jim in austin at 3:57 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

>I was a kid watching during the time Mr. Snuffleupagus was never seen by adults, and I was SERIOUSLY ANGRY about it.

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I wasn't even mad at the adult characters on the show so much as just mad at the creators and the whole show. There was no way Snuffleupagus could have just COINCIDENTALLY not been seen for so long; the show was clearly running a rigged table.

And while we're at it--the Electric Company used to have Spider-Man segments that ended with fake cliffhangers. "Will Spider-Man be able to get away from the Stinky Pie-Man? TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT!!" But there was no next time; there were no second halves to any of the stories, it was just a joke about comics always leaving you hanging at a suspenseful moment so you'd want to get the next one. I'm pushing 50 and I would still like to kick somebody in the shins for that.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:28 PM on November 20, 2015 [16 favorites]

There is no such thing. Watching it with kids is best, but I still enjoy watching it on my own occasionally.

One of the things that has always been true about Sesame Street is that, while it is obviously meant to educate and entertain small children, they sneak in enough adult-level humor that parents and caretakers in the room can enjoy it too. What toddler can appreciate Monsterpiece Theater or Law and Order: Special Letters Unit or Sesame Street Casablanca?

Also, Cookie Monster revealed that his first name used to be Sid.
posted by delfin at 4:32 PM on November 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

I was a kid watching during the time Mr. Snuffleupagus was never seen by adults, and I was SERIOUSLY ANGRY about it.

That never bothered me. Maybe it was because there are a large number of stories, at least back then, which featured kids knowing truths they could never share with adults. Who knew the dog could speak fluent English? But can't tell mum. She'd think I was crazy. Or there's an alien who crash landed and needs our help. But Dad's too boring. He'd never listen or even go look with us.

When I was a kid, Snuffleupagus was not only part of those other stories, but also represented the idea kids could know and understand certain things which the adults would never know and would never be able to understand. When you're in the powerless state of childhood, knowledge of that sort gives a small bit of power. I was a little disappointed when the adults could finally see Snuffleupagus. I understand completely why CTW would make that change, but made the story lose a little of its magic.
posted by honestcoyote at 5:23 PM on November 20, 2015 [7 favorites]

There's a guy in the comments complaining that Snuffy was revealed for "PC reasons". Because of course there is.
posted by brundlefly at 5:36 PM on November 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

Snuffy tap dancing and rapping with Savion Glover remains one of my very favorite Sesame Street moments.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:47 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

I started watching Sesame Street in January of 1971, and watched it 1-to-several times a day for the next 6-8 years. I was in front of the television for hours a day from 6 weeks old. I was (largely) raised by Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mr Rogers' Neighborhood (plus Villa Alegre and Zoom and stuff, but the big three repeated a few times each day). It's how I learned to count and read and interact with humans and all that. (Funny side note - all this was great for letters and numbers and reading and silent-e and abierto and cerrado and all that, but damn if I didn't show up at school with no clue about the days of the week or months of the year, and really puzzled why everyone else could chant along with them...)

I remember the frustration of Big Bird not being believed, but in all honesty, this reflected my experience as a child, and in a way might have helped me deal with that to some (small) extent. Even well-meaning adults didn't believe you in spite of some pretty clear evidence and you being a truthful and well-behaved person. They were flawed and unreliable and stuff like that that I couldn't articulate at the time. And yeah, like mmoncur, it pissed me off and I'm sure I ranted to other people about it, but again - it reflected my experience over and over and over again throughout childhood.

When I heard as a teenager that he was suddenly visible to adults on the show, it pissed me off for some reason. I just watched it for the first time now, and it seems fake and not-credible and not enough. Only Susan apologises and three people say 'but we DID believe you' and Bob does 'We'll always believe everything you say from now on' - which isn't the same as 'Holy fuck, I was wrong and I'm sorry and I should have listened to you and making fun of you was wrong even if you had been making him up'.

Also it made me really uncomfortable to see the slack-jawed wonder/shock/staring like he was a circus freak when they all saw Snuffleupagus and then they all walked up to him and started touching him. Dude is shy. Even if not, a bunch of people all crowding him and touching him is not cool. Especially if he's a proxy for a child, or however you'd express the 'age' of various muppets.

For me, if they could have kept the whole thing at a level of 'wow, adults sure can be doofuses sometimes'/'haha, two-year-olds can figure stuff out that adults don't get' and avoided having anyone actually making fun of Big Bird ('are you sure you don't want an imaginary dime to call your imaginary friend?'), it would have been fine.
posted by you must supply a verb at 5:51 PM on November 20, 2015 [14 favorites]

That Savion Glover link is amazing, and Imma let you finish, but this is the greatest Sesame Street clip of all time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE
Red sweater kid is kind of my hero.
posted by sweetmarie at 8:04 PM on November 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

As noted in the article, the divorced-parents thing was scrapped before airing. It's not canon.

Well, yeah, Sesame Street intended to write the divorce into the show, but the kids reacted poorly so it was dropped. In real life, though, they're divorced.

They remain on good terms.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:52 PM on November 20, 2015

I had stopped watching a few years before this happened, but I think it should be said that Mr. Rogers had been taking on kid's understanding of the whole real/imaginary concept, both directly and subtly, since his show began.

Take the Land of Make-Believe, for example. By partitioning it off as a place that's "somewhere else" that we traveled to, he was able to subtly address the real/imaginary issue in several ways.

1) By making it a destination, it encourages the idea that imagination is something that is done as a conscious action, and it is separate from the 'real' world.

2) Mr. Rogers never appeared in the Land of Make-Believe as himself. By doing this, Mr. Rogers never blurred the lines between real and imaginary.

3) Sometimes the characters in the Land of Make-Believe themselves had problems with separating imaginary and real things, and by not making those character's imaginary things real, kids could see those characters as others might see them in such a situation. They saw how hard they tried to prove something imaginary was real, and how that felt to everybody involved, including the feelings that come in the aftermath of accepting that the imaginary thing isn't real no matter how much you want it to be. Afterwards, he'd talk with you about what the characters went through, and how hard that is sometimes. Each time we visited the Land of Make-Believe, there was a surface-level 'lesson' to be learned, but without you realizing it, you were learning the skills of empathy by examining the feelings of both sides of an issue, and being able to understand why they feel that way.

4) Imagination was just confined to the Land of Make-Believe, but when it happened, it was something you did with him in the real world. If he was playing with a truck or a clay figure, for example, he moved it with his hands and made sounds - no animation, no sound effects, etc. Sometimes when he would be playing with something for a while, he'd talk directly about what's real and what isn't in a way that a young child would not see it as a lecture, but a discussion about it, calling up situations they most likely had encountered themselves.

I'm not trying to say that Sesame Street is bad or anything like that. For me, Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers are a fantastic combination. Only that Sesame Street is sometimes (almost always unintentionally) held up as the one program that "truly" addressed issues better than anyone else at the time. Sometimes they do deserve such credit, such as the way they handled the sudden loss of Mr. Hooper, but in this particular case, I think they simply did the best they could with the situation after waiting far to long to address it.

The format itself made addressing this real vs. imaginary issue much more difficult than other programs. It's not easy to make a clear examination of real vs. imaginary when the world your show entirely resides in an imaginary place. While this does not pose a problem for 99% of other serious topics, it complicates things when a giant talking bird and his imaginary friend are at the center of a discussion about separating real from not real.

That said, I'm impressed by how they handled the situation, and worked extremely hard for a long period of time to make sure it was presented in a gradual, believable way for children that grew to a climactic moment, instead of doing it in a single, one-off "very special episode" kind of way.
posted by chambers at 9:46 PM on November 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

I was 12 years old and therefore too cool to watch Sesame Street (so I thought at the time), but I do remember seeing this - it was a Very Big Deal.
posted by SisterHavana at 10:12 PM on November 20, 2015

If this happened today there would be no end to the whining about social justice warriors tilting at windmills, this isn't a real problem anyway, children suffer more in other places, etc.

It's really nice to see people get together, hear about a problem they may have some influence over, and decide to act on it. It would have been easy to get defensive, or shrug it off - instead, they listened and reflected and acted. Pretty admirable.
posted by twirlypen at 11:41 PM on November 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

That Savion Glover link is amazing, and Imma let you finish, but this is the greatest Sesame Street clip of all time:

I knew what that video would be before I clicked on it. It's probably my favorite YouTube video, period. It helps that Superstition is my favorite song of all time, but that performance -- and the context! -- is just so wonderful.
posted by brundlefly at 2:19 AM on November 21, 2015

Sonia Manzano specifically mentioned that Stevie Wonder song on the NPR interview about her book, "Becoming Maria", (Which I just took the opportunity to pick up on Amazon.)
posted by mikelieman at 3:31 AM on November 21, 2015

I find him really quite terrifying, especially in that last photo. Imagine that thing lurking in the dark.
posted by lucidium at 5:14 AM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Both of us actually seemed to prefer Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Somehow it seemed to me less manipulative or calculated, albeit slightly creepy at times...

You know, it's quite a strange thing. The single most common adjective applied to Mister Rogers in this and other thread is the word 'creepy'?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:44 AM on November 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

ricochet biscuit links to the comment that basically canonized Mr. Rogers as a Metafilter saint, which has over a thousand favorites.
posted by JHarris at 8:56 AM on November 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

He seemed creepy because it doesn't seem like a human being could possibly be so genuinely calm and caring all the time. He always seemed so happy and nice and I think that we reconcile that by assuming that it's forced and that makes it seem creepy. But when you read about how he dealt with people off-air, you realize that he really just was like that all the time.


I mean, can anyone really imagine someone being angry with Mr. Rogers? Mr. Rogers punching someone? And if someone is punching him, you damn well that is a bad person since there is no way Mr. Rogers could have ever done something to deserve punching. If you can pretend that this is all the result of some weird form of PTSD from his time as a Navy SEAL or that he is a super creep that adopts this weird persona, it makes him seem more human. Otherwise, if he can be that nice, all the time, with absolutely everyone so effortlessly, shouldn't I be at least a little nicer to more people, more often? If it's just a persona, then he's not someone to aspire to be like.
posted by VTX at 11:47 AM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

Mr. Rogers was not a Navy SEAL. He was never in the military. He trained for the clergy then got into broadcasting. This is such a pernicious rumor.
posted by JHarris at 1:36 PM on November 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

When I was both ten and twelve my parents insisted that very real people I knew did not actually exist. The first time it was a boy and a girl I met in the park and the second time it was my best friend. I think it was about that time I stopped telling them about anything including the family friend's teenage boy's habit of taking me into the basement and just lying on top of me in a way that must have been pleasant for him but scared and confused me.

I always just thought of Snuffy as a friendly, shy imaginary friend but that was OK when I was a little kid.
posted by bendy at 3:30 PM on November 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

I would not want to live in a world in which Snuffy was imaginary and the Kardashians were not.
posted by delfin at 3:34 PM on November 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

But when you read about how he dealt with people off-air, you realize that he really just was like that all the time.

I think the odd ways people have perceived Mr. Rogers is an interesting addition to look at in regards to the real vs. imaginary topic at hand.

Growing up around Pittsburgh, where Mr. Rogers lived and recorded his program, we all had the benefit of knowing, often first or second hand, that Mr. Rogers was real. Not just a character, not just some guy on TV, he was a real guy who lived in town. For decades, you could just ask any random person in Pittsburgh and they could tell you a story about themselves or someone they knew running into him around town, and every one of them would mention that he really is as sweet and wonderful as you'd hope he'd be. Think about that for a moment - decades of people sharing stories, and just about everyone had a story about him, and every one of them confirmed that he's the real deal. Even my mom, who worked as a nurse at a large assisted living facility just outside Pittsburgh, and would see him a few times a year when he'd visit a friend of his that lived there, confirms that yep, he's just what you hoped he'd be like. I have vague memories of meeting him once when I was little, but the only thing I can really remember about it was just being happy to see him in person.

So kids in Pittsburgh knew he was real, and that almost all the places he go to visit outside the studio were places around town, real places that we could go to. I'm pretty sure that a lot of area school's field trips for kids in grades 1-3 were inspired by and were helped to be possible because they were shown on the show at some point, and business whose owners wouldn't ever think to have tours (places like the old Heinz factory, for example). If Mr. Rogers went to a place, you'd be sure that soon after, dozens of teachers would be calling about having their students visit there as well. I remember being disappointed when I found out that the Crayola factory he went to was on the other end of the state, and not just a short drive down the road, so we couldn't have a field trip to visit it.

We're all so used to seeing the 'dark truth' revealed of supposedly "good" people over and over again, that it seems that Mr. Rogers can't be real. He must be hiding something. I'm sure there's been countless people who have tried to find that one thing that proves he's fake or it's just an act, but they have all failed. They just find out he's a regular guy who's doing his best to live up to what he believes he should be.

If Mr. Rogers were here, he'd probably respond to all that (far more eloquently than I can) with a talk about his own struggles and imperfections, trust in general, and how we perceive people we don't know. He'd examine this seemingly common desire to skip right past the good and go digging for the bad, and while it's important sometimes to find such hidden things, to have distrust as a default starting point is not a good thing, because over time we end up valuing the discovery of the worst in people over all else, and disregard the best in people as nothing more than a cleverly designed barrier made to conceal something. It keeps us all wanting to bring everyone down rather than figuring out how to raise everyone up, and where does that desire to tear down each other lead us as a species, no matter who they are? This is not to say that we should just blindly trust everyone, but that we seem to be stuck in the belief that we should negate all wise, noble or good things about someone's ideas, actions, or effects on the world upon finding some fault, mistake, or improper act. By all means, dig for the truth like it's hidden pirate treasure, but remember to be mindful as you dig so you can tell the difference between the real treasure and plain old dirt.
posted by chambers at 4:01 PM on November 21, 2015 [15 favorites]

A friend of mine with family who grew up in Pittsburgh claimed that Mr. Rogers swore at one of her cousins for cutting him off in traffic. I guess even Mr. Rogers had bad days.

Also, I wonder if people are confusing Bob Ross with Mr. Rogers, re: the Navy SEAL thing...
posted by pxe2000 at 4:52 PM on November 21, 2015

The way I heard it, he always wore sleeves on air to cover up his tattoos. I've never heard a similar rumor about Ross.

Mr. Rogers was not a Navy SEAL. He was never in the military. He trained for the clergy then got into broadcasting. This is such a pernicious rumor.

Yes, you're right and I know that. I should have been more clear about that in my comment.

In closing, Mr. Rogers is awesome. /derail
posted by VTX at 5:18 PM on November 21, 2015

A friend of mine with family who grew up in Pittsburgh claimed that Mr. Rogers swore at one of her cousins for cutting him off in traffic.

An unimpeachable source if I ever saw one.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:50 PM on November 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

chambers? Your comment actually made me tear up a bit.

SUCH IS THE POWER OF ROGERS
posted by brundlefly at 2:14 AM on November 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

I knew Bob Ross had a military background, and since his earnest level-headedness is similar to Mr. Rogers, I thought there might be some confusion.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:58 AM on November 23, 2015