Sweet reunion: 'Blue's Clues' Steve Burns meets Make-a-Wish cancer patient unexpectedly after 20 years
MONROEVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA: Earlier this month, Steve Burns was treated to a pleasant surprise at Steel City Con in Pennsylvania. The 49-year-old 'Blues Clues' actor reconnected with a former Make-a-Wish recipient he had first met in the early 2000s. The former patient, Brandon Ragland, posted two images to social media. One from their first encounter and another from a few weeks ago.
Ragland described Burns' response as follows in the caption, “I showed him these pictures of us from that first meeting, and told him who I was. To which he responded almost instantly ‘I remember this! I remember you!’ and started to spout of some memory about how I was a wild child and was crawling under the restaurant table.” Brandon claimed that he and Burns both "choked up" at this meeting. Ragland has been in remission for almost 23 years after battling stage 4 cancer in his kidneys and lungs, as per TMZ. According to Ragland, Burns hugged him and said, “This made my entire year and I'm so glad you're here.”
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Brandon concluded his caption by saying that Burns is, “one of the nicest and most genuine people I’ve had the pleasure to meet. I think he might been more moved than I was over the whole ordeal.” Burns wrote in the comments, “I can’t. This was too much.” From 1996 through 2002, Burns served as the 'Blue’s Clues' show's host. For his contribution to the program in 2001, he received a Daytime Emmy nomination. Burns has been fulfilling children's fantasies for years but he recently admitted in an interview that he battled depression while filming the show.
Burns left the program after 100 episodes and disclosed he “didn’t know it yet, but I was the happiest depressed person in North America. I was struggling with severe clinical depression the whole time I was on that show.” “It was my job to be utterly and completely full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible,” Burns admitted. “My strategy had been: ‘Hey, you got a great thing going, so just fight it!’ Turns out, you don’t fight depression; you collect it,” he said. “After I left Blue’s Clues, there was a long period of healing. It wasn’t until the death of my father that I really started to take things seriously, and my life became so much more manageable,” Burns added, as per Variety.