In Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams has to dress up as a sweet Irish lady and pose as a nanny in a misguided attempt to be closer to his children. He does a bunch of voices, there are some shenanigans, there's obviously a scene where he has to balance dinner with his family as his widowed alter ego Mrs. Doubtfire and a dinner with his boss as himself at the same time in the same restaurant. It is, in general, one of the most '90s movies ever made. When annoyingly young people ask me what the '90s were like, I show them Mrs. Doubtfire, Space Jam, Independence Day, and The Rock.
In between shenanigans and montages set to Aerosmith songs, we meet a sweet old bus driver played by the late Sydney Walker.
20th Century Fox
Williams as Doubtfire has to take a late bus home from work most nights, and this bus driver is usually the only other person on the bus. When he sees her, he smiles and sweetly flirts with her. It's cute. And the audience watching along is supposed to laugh because, hehehe, the bus driver doesn't realize he's flirting with a guy!
There was no reason for the movie to follow up with this guy because the character only exists as a joke. (In the less sensitive and politically correct '90s, "Man likes other man but doesn't know it!" was an incredibly popular punchline.) I don't know what went wrong in my brain to make me this way, but I think about that guy all the time. To begin with, he's a lonely old man who works the late shift for a bus that is almost always empty. He's obviously single, which means his wife either died or left him, or he still hasn't managed to find someone yet. Then he meets a woman who seems sweet and seems his age and isn't rebuffing his advances, so he probably suspects she's single. Available women his age are probably hard to come by, and now he's found a pretty one that actually seems to like him; he must feel pretty lucky.
20th Century Fox
This was his Basic Instinct.
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