When The Moon Sings - April 12, 2025

Some people think of late night as the time for supernatural creatures - Dracula and witches and the creature from the black lagoon.  Others think about late night entertainment – Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, and Craig Ferguson in the old days – Jimmy Kimmel, Steven Colbert, and Jimmy Fallon now.  Not me – I think of Charlie Rose.

Rose was as little like the others as he was Dracula.  He did do interviews, but he did them without all the trappings.  No desk, no couch, no band, no intermittently amusing sidekick.  His props were two straight back chairs on either side of a table that might have been used to serve dinner hours before.  The rest of the set was dark.  He and his guests sat at the table and talked for an hour, a conversation that could wander from humorous to tense, reciting philosophy to talking small.  From 1991 to 2017, Rose interviewed just about everyone worth interviewing, including presidents and other politicians, business leaders and entertainers.  I started doing this show the year Rose left television, and while I do the occasional interview, nobody sees much similarity.  This show isn’t trying to be the equivalent of Charlie Rose’s show – I’m not that good.

However, this week, I watched a few old tapes of Rose’s show, and one of the guests was Fred Rogers, the Fred Rogers who created Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was an afternoon show mainly, and became a gold standard for children’s TV.  The two men were a great match.  They were both veteran TV men who knew the power of their medium and attempted to stretch it beyond noise and entertainment.  Rose fed CBS’s excellent news programs; Rogers had started really thoughtful children’s programming.  Rogers has been credited with opening the gates for funding of public television.

By the time of his interview, I believe it was 1994, Rogers had become an icon for his approach to children’s programming, which mirrored his approach to life.  It took people aback in its simplicity and grace.  Rose, who had been a newsman long enough not be impressed by much of anyone, was clearly charmed.

That night, Fred Rogers spoke as an observer of society rather than a child’s program creator. He was always both of course, but his audience, being rather young, didn’t realize that. He said we’d lost the gift of silence, the interval between receiving information and trying to use it.  He declared that we need that time to fully absorb everything, to put it all in a context useful to us.  We are assaulted with data. Much of which we do not need or want.  The gift of silence is gone.

He also pointed out that our world is noisier.  To capture our attention, people who want to reach us use bright colors, penetrating sounds, aggressive words, emotional stories.  Mr. Rogers has television in mind, but those same characteristics apply to other media and yes, even radio.  It’s a requisite for anything computer-borne, and so much today reaches out to us from our screens.

Mr. Rogers had just written a book, and he guided us to a page where he had an idea he really wanted us to think about.  He enforced the time to think – after the idea, the rest of the page was blank.  He said that the white space between the paragraphs might actually be more important than the paragraphs themselves, and that he’d put all that white space at the end of his idea because he really wanted people to think about it.

That sounds odd, but other forms of communication validate the thought.  Art commonly uses the concept of negative space. It’s the space around the subject of the piece, the part the provides the context for that subject. Live music, unless meant to drive listeners into an emotional frenzy, happens in hushed halls.  Art is visual and information might not be, but perhaps having the time to think about a fact and connect it with other facts makes that fact more valuable. Perhaps the roar of incoming facts interferes with that reflection. Consideration often requires silence, or at least lowering the volume.

These thoughts weren’t new in 1994, and they’re not new now. They’ve become part of the lament of a complex society. Everybody talks about reflection and nobody tries to encourage it, kind of like thoughts and prayers. That’s where Fred Rogers stood out. He actually tried to give his viewers a chance to think about the information he presented.

This week, a new acquaintance asked about my inspiration for doing this show.  I’ve never been able to articulate that idea – I simply do what feels right to me.  I gave the lady the bare bones description – quieter music, interesting people, and so on, the standard pitch I used to get the station to air the show in the first place.  I never really developed a detailed vision.  I know something about look-and-feel (for radio, I suppose that would be hear-and-feel), but not enough to articulate. 

Granted, part of that was laziness, but part of it was ignorance of how a radio hour might work.  The laziness remains, but I have information now.  Show advertising talks about quieter music and interesting people.  I can’t grant the gift of silence, but I can turn down the volume and give listeners things to think about and even a little time to do that thinking.  Fred Rogers described the vision for this show, 23 years before it started and 30 at the time of discovery.  He did it better than the host might be able to manage.  I didn’t develop my inspiration for the show, I tripped over it well after the show began.  That’s a strange feeling, something like a painter of happy little accidents finding a Monet in his attic.  The inspiration isn’t mine – it’s better – more detailed and more articulate.

The talk show hosts willing to chat, like Rose did, do not appear on TV or anywhere else.  Talk there is, but all it pushes products or points of view.  The creatures of the night have their agendas and they entertain those who tune in for entertainment without any interaction.  Radio may respond to a different set of expectations.  We’ll see.