Paul Reubens Remembered: As Pee-wee Herman, His Impact Spanned Generations

variety.com:

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Everyone seems to have a personal story about Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman. And those stories seem always to revolve around birthdays.

I didn’t know Reubens, but apparently half of the people on my Facebook timeline did, because they’re all sharing memories about the lengths Reubens would go to every year to celebrate their big day. “He loved to make your birthday special,” wrote Joel Stillerman, the former MTV and AMC exec who played a role in helping “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” get made, and later worked with him on the film “Blow.” “The texts, memes, videos and gifs would start in the morning and continue all day until you were in tears, and disbelief that anyone could pull this off.

Because you knew that it wasn’t just you.” Quite honestly, seeing the number of people just on my social media timeline who have a similar Paul Reubens story makes me wonder: If Reubens spent so much time recognizing the birthdays of his hundreds (maybe thousands!) of friends, how did he get anything else done?

And yet, to the very end — even through some of those bumpy moments that reminded us that Paul Reubens wasn’t Pee-wee Herman but an honest-to-goodness human being — he was a part of our collective lives.