Saturday night at the Star Theater in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia and the place was packed.
An old school theater (ticket $5.00, leather couch for $1 extra, $2.50 for a box of popcorn), featuring an old school movie – A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — a movie about Fred Rogers – and an old school audience (estimated average age 60).
If the audience that night was polarized, you couldn’t tell.
Mesmerized was more like it.
Fred Rogers believed that “love is at the root of everything.”
The Star Theater Saturday night was quieter than any church Sunday morning.
At one time during the movie, Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) asks a reporter – Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) – writing a profile of Rogers for Esquire magazine – to stop for a moment of silence for “the people who loved us into being.”
Dead quiet on the screen and in the theater.
Not a peep from the 150 people in the theater.
No Republicans, no Democrats, no cell phones ringing, no screaming, no Fox News, no CNN, no MSNBC, no Trump, no Pelosi.
Just quiet contemplation about the people who loved us into existence.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was just that on Saturday night – a beautiful break from the noise and screaming all around us.