Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,8

complain sometimes you get free things. Useful.

For much of my childhood, the only television channel we were allowed to watch was MPT, so Lassie (RIP), Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street were in heavy rotation. This was fine with me, especially considering Mr. Rogers was home to the original dramatic queen Lady Elaine Fairchilde, the fearsome, overly rouged, cardigan-wearing antagonist of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. I was obsessed with her, with her feckless but fangless villainy, with her catchphrase “Toots!”, with her all-business dirty-blond bob. (Lady Elaine would always like to speak with the manager.) And, although I was a very nice child, I absolutely loved the contempt with which Lady Elaine Fairchilde viewed literally everyone else. Her misanthropy was electrifying. To this day I am amazed that someone as chill and Presbyterian as Fred Rogers created someone as over-the-top fabulous as Lady Elaine. She has a royal title and she is constantly in feuds with her brother; she’s essentially a reality star. And like the most successful reality stars, Lady Elaine Fairchilde is the gay icon we need and want. She has all the hallmarks of gay iconography, eighties edition: an old-timey name, frequent appearances in musicals despite a lack of apparent singing ability, eyebrows, no time to date because she is too busy plotting drama, hates people. Why is there not a Lady Elaine float at every Pride? Why can’t I buy a bedazzled tank top that says “TOOTS!” to wear to the beach? Where is the justice in this world?!

I didn’t have as complex a read of Lady Elaine as a child. I just knew that this queen was extra as hell and I was living for every terse line reading. I would frequently turn from a television playing Mr. Rogers and say to an empty room, “I can’t wait until Patricia Clarkson and Sarah Paulson play her at different stages in her life in a biopic that I am currently writing.”

One of my favorite Lady Elaine moments also spawned one of our household’s favorite catchphrases. It came from the episode titled “Mr. Rogers Makes an Opera.” Oh, by the way, because he was relentless in his pursuit of eccentricity, Mr. Rogers cast all of the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe as characters in an opera that would form the basis of many future homosexual personalities. I really want to tell you, from memory, the in-depth plot of the opera Windstorm in Bubbleland, because, honey, it will blow your wig back. But it would take too long because every single detail is essential. Put this book down right now and google it and then come back. Wait, first grab a snack, then come back. You gotta eat, Toots.

Suffice it to say, Lady Elaine played Hildegarde Hummingbird, a resident of a burg called Bubbleland who sensed that there was trouble on the horizon that would threaten the primary feature of the landscape—bubbles. No one believed her. In fact, they sang a whole song called “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” which is the kind of petty, extra shit I live for.

There’s a whole lot that happens—an evil executive who hates the environment reveals himself to be a wind monster! The dramatic reveal is accompanied by a costume change into a silver caftan! It’s EVERYTHING!—but the thing that I was most affected by was the idea that Lady Elaine, despite her eccentric, sometimes antisocial ways, was not the villain. She was the only resident of Bubbleland who saw its weaknesses and therefore the only resident who could save it from destruction.

The rest of my household picked up a different takeaway. “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland” became my mother’s frequent ironic refrain, a sardonic way of expressing frustration at a situation that was set up for my parents to fail. Our neglected neighborhood was crumbling around us; my parents worked tirelessly but still struggled financially; their parents were ailing. When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.” It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

* * *

—

Utopia came at a figurative and literal price. I was aware as a child that the economics of making a life were hard. I knew it