“Don’t shit a fan, but J. J.’s on TV in a few minutes,” I said in a rush.
“Why would I shit a fan?”
“You called him People’s Sexiest Moron.”
“Yeah, well…” He looked down. “It’s kind of loud in here,” he pointed out. “Should we head back to the motel?”
“You don’t have to watch. I can find a quieter spot.” I looked around the Chili’s, but if there was a quieter spot, it wasn’t evident to me.
“Let’s go. No big deal.” He acted blasé, but the way he knocked back the rest of his drink suggested fortification.
7
Top 20 Most Crack-tastic TV Episodes of the ’90s
Medium Editors
20. Boy Meets World, “And Then There Was Shawn.” Most of the cast bites it (yes, even Mr. Feeny) in this slasher-flick homage to Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Murder weapons include pencils and scissors. Jennifer Love Hewitt stops by for a cameo. What more could you ask for?
19. Days of Our Lives, “Marlena Is Possessed by the Devil.” For several months in 1995 and 1996, mild-mannered perpetual victim Dr. Marlena Evans went through a killer menopause (or was that just my interpretation?) in which the good doctor transformed into a panther, seduced a priest (her former husband John Black), ruined Christmas, and flashed yellow demon eyes whenever other people exited the room.
18. Diego and the Lion’s Den, “Fairy Tales Come True.” Before starring in the WB’s Honeypot and ABC’s upcoming Narc, Kelly Hale sang and danced on a children’s educational show set at the San Diego Zoo. In the third season—I swear to God this happened—she licked a toad and hallucinated. Some fans believe the rest of the series from that point on takes place entirely in Kelly’s mind.
Jerry Levine’s shtick—the mood of his entire talk show, really—was that of a fanboy Everyman who was suuuuuuper stoked to meet everyone on earth, from a cup-stacking tween to Vin Diesel. He was the anti-Letterman; a sweet younger brother to Jimmy Kimmel. Guests felt safe, which was how he booked all the top stars. They knew he’d make them look good and that his questions wouldn’t approach anything resembling insightful.
Back in our room, I flipped on all the lights and located the right TV channel in time to hear the announcer’s voice-over: “Tonight’s guests are J. J. Randall, followed by the Be-Bop Bunnies!” The audience whooped. The Be-Bop Bunnies—two bunnies who’d been trained to “dance” by jumping sideways, alternating who went over and who went under the other—had gone viral two months ago when some YouTuber recorded them boogying down to “Last Resort” by Papa Roach.
Thom stretched out across his bed, his long legs reaching nearly to the end of it, and fit his earbuds in. “I’ll be on my phone. Holler when the bunnies do their thing.”
“How come you get to use your phone?”
“Because I’m cured.” He stuck his tongue out.
I had the strongest urge to shut off the TV and find out what it tasted like.
I wiped my mouth, shook off my wanton thoughts, and focused on the program.
The opening monologue provoked zero laughs from me. It wasn’t entirely Jerry Levine’s fault; I was nervous and twitchy. Although I’d been stalking the Den gang online for several weeks, I’d deliberately avoided J. J. Last I heard he was dating the new choreographer of the Break It Down dance movies. I hadn’t gone looking for details. And then of course there was the phone call last week where he offered me money. Thinking about that made my insides twist.
Years and continents had passed since we last interacted. I’d seen his picture online or in magazines, of course, but I hoped this interview would serve as a warm-up for Friday night, take some of the shock out of it.
The fact that there were only two guests instead of three told me it would be an in-depth interview. (If Jerry had had depth.)
Jerry asked that we give a warm welcome to “Jason. James. Randallllllll!” Screams and general cacophony filled the air. Thom looked up sharply from his phone. I took the hint and lowered the volume.
On TV, a young woman in the first row held up a handmade sign: J. J., YOU’VE BEEN A BAD BOY. GO TO MY ROOM.
I rolled my eyes—it wasn’t the first time I’d seen that sign—but the rest of me didn’t respond so casually. My stomach clenched and I realized I was holding my breath.
J. J. sauntered out. He wore a bright-orange Supremes tank top, a pair of shredded, stonewashed jeans, striped socks, and red checkerboard Vans. Around his neck he wore not one, not two, but three crosses, and his left arm was covered in ink; I’d held his hand for the first three designs, now lost among the jumble of ones I’d never seen before. A backward trucker hat and barely visible skinny bandanna held his unruly hair back from his face.
Thom stifled a laugh.
“What?” I asked.
“All that streetwear.” He sounded affronted. “Does he even ride?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I thought celebrities had people who dressed them for these kinds of things.”
I nodded vaguely.
The ensemble had obviously been painstakingly crafted in the new spring style. The hair filled with product to make it appear unwashed in the look Vogue had called Scuzz Couture, but Thom didn’t need that information. Nor did he need to know J. J. had once employed the services of a Swag Coach.
The frenzied patterns, gauche colors, needless layers, $1,000 jeans, overlapping tattoos, and scruffy facial hair made no difference; to me, J. J. would always be as clean-cut as the day I met him. Because I knew his heart. His kindness. His unending patience. The person I’d loved more than half my life was still in there, so quick to blush, so eager to be good, his eyes bright and warm and eager, and it made my breath catch.
He and Jerry enacted an elaborate handshake to even louder shrieks from the audience.
“You know they practiced that for weeks,” Thom remarked, with a roll of his eyes.
I ignored him, but I knew he was right.
Once they’d settled in their cushy chairs, Jerry welcomed J. J. to the show and lobbed him a softball question. “You’re from North Carolina originally, right? What are your favorite things they say back home that might get you a funny look in other places?”
J. J. smiled. “If it’s rainin’ real hard, we’d say, ‘The devil’s beatin’ his wife and ran off with his stepdaughter.’ If someone’s a rascally sort o’ character without any prospects, we’d say, ‘He ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.’”
J. J. hadn’t lived in North Carolina since he was a kid, but he still had a slight drawl. Renee and I used to do his banking for him, because there wasn’t an automated phone system on earth that could understand him. When given the choice of “Yes” or “No,” J. J. politely added “sir” or “ma’am” afterward, in full accent.
“Let’s go back, let’s go back…” Jerry sang, in a passable Aretha Franklin impression.
“Let’s go way back, a-way-back when,” J. J. finished.
“You had some good news this week. Your former manager, OffBeat’s former manager, was sentenced for fraud. Twenty years in the slammer! Let’s talk about that for a second.”
“Do we have to?” J. J. replied, deadpan. The crowd laughed heartily, thinking he’d made a joke.
I guaran-fucking-tee you he did not want to talk about it.
That’s when it hit me. The reason he’d called me at rehab: Pam was finally, finally going to jail, and he’d wanted to share the news. (“Wait, there’s something else…” he’d said, before I hung up.) He hadn’t been checking in on me. He’d been checking in on himself, through me.
J. J. was convinced Pam had ruined his life. His determination to view things that way overflowed like sewage into the rest of his relationships, including ours. Especially ours.
Onstage with Jerry, he succumbed to a micro-expression of annoyance but quickly altered it to a smile. “Sure. What do you want to know?” Everything’s great, nothing to see here, I’m just
your average thirty-something Christian pop star enjoying a #blessed existence!
“You told the New York Times back in 2012 that your manager, Pam Oyster, had financially assaulted you guys. What happened there? Walk us through it.”
“Yeah. Our first clue should’ve been that she wasn’t even in the music business.”
Laughter from the audience, as though he were sharing a silly story from his weekend.
“I’m serious. She had a company that rented party zeppelins. Which, if you don’t know, is sort of like a blimp. She’d rent them out for special events, supposedly. We found out later she didn’t even have any; just an empty warehouse and a website for investors. And that’s where we would rehearse, in the empty warehouse, in like a hundred and ten degrees. But she spent money like a billionaire so we figured she was legit.”
“And how’d she find you guys? How’d she put the band together in the first place?”
“Well, two of us—me and Brody Rutherford…” (He paused for screams.) “…were on a kids’ TV show together—”
“Diego and the Lion’s Den,” Jerry interrupted. “Which we’ll get to in a second because oh-em-gee, classic.”
“—and when he joined the group, over in Texas, he called me to audition, too. We wanted to make good music for other kids to dance to, you know?”
I glanced over at Thom, who was watching the TV. When he saw I’d caught him, he returned to scrolling on his phone.
“In hindsight it’s obvious,” J. J. added, “but at the time, no one would’ve guessed she was shady. She told us to call her Mom.”
“Ugh, super creepy.” Jerry shivered.
A still photo of Pam in a prison jumpsuit, handcuffed, flashed on the screen.
“She was finally sentenced last week,” Jerry explained. “After how many years of litigation? Ten? Fifteen?”
“Something like that.” (Trust me. He knew precisely.) J. J. raised a mock glass to Pam. “Cheers, Pammy.”
Scattered laughs came and went; perhaps they’d finally caught on to the fact that J. J. might be bitter about the past.
Join the club, Jay.
Jerry swiftly changed topics. “So, the PBS kids’ show, Diego and the Lion’s Den, is having its twenty-fifth anniversary this Friday at Rockefeller Centerrrrrr.” From his seat, he made a quick raise-the-roof motion. “And guess who’s hosting the after-party?”
Successfully rerouted, the audience slid onto this new path with relief, and offered up cheers and screams.
“It’s time for a commercial break but when we come back, I have a super-awesome clip from the show. If you were a kid in the ’nineties you do not want to miss it.”
Thom’s earbuds were on the bedspread now.
“I never understood what happened with the manager,” he told me. “Who was she? How did she get away with it?”
I muted the TV and we faced each other, cross-legged, from our respective beds.
“From my seventeen-year-old perspective, Pam seemed weird but benign; she sort of faded into the wallpaper. You most definitely did not think international con artist.”
“Ah.”
“J. J., Brody, and the rest of the band performed in Europe nonstop for years. Pam paid for everything—flights, hotels, meals, clothes, rehearsal, demos. She even paid for me to fly out and visit J. J. in London.”
(If we go to hell it’ll be worth it.)
“She told the boys that once she recouped the money she’d invested in them, they’d all get paid,” I explained. “They expected half a mil each, easy. On the day of reckoning, they had the number-one single and video in Britain. But the check was for ten grand each, for years and years of work.
“It turned out their contracts were completely bogus. She’d put herself in them to get paid five different ways. First, as a member of the band—I know, it’s absurd, a fifty-year-old woman in a boy band—but also as a producer, manager, booking agent, and songwriter.”
“Holy shit. What’d the judge say?”
“The judge agreed she couldn’t possibly pay herself as a member of the band, but otherwise the contract was technically legal. The trial took forever because she fled the country and they had to extradite her. What nailed her in the end was the zeppelin Ponzi scheme.”
“It’s back on.” Thom nodded toward the TV and picked up his phone. However, he didn’t put his earbuds back in.
Onscreen, to my surprise, a familiar tune poured through the speakers and I automatically mouthed the words:
What would you do
If you could live at the zoo?
Roar like a lion
Stretch like a giraffe
Jump like a kang-a-rooooo
Join us! Join us!
We live at the zoo
You can visit us too
Join us! Come join us!
Our days are filled with derring-do
The final part of the show’s theme song showed each cast member popping their head out from a different section of the titular lion’s den to shout his or her name.
Brody! J. J.! Mel-o-dee!
Holly! Ethan! Tara and Kel-ly!
Back to the late-night studio, the camera swung over to Jerry’s empty desk as he jumped up behind it to shout, “Jerry!” then turned to reveal an empty couch as J. J. leapt out: “J. J.! Again!”
The audience lost it.
“Lion’s Den Roll Call. I just fulfilled a lifelong dream,” Jerry said, breathing hard. Once he and J. J. were settled in their seats, he asked, “What was it like, being on TV when you were, what, eleven? Twelve?”
“Oh my goodness, it was like summer camp.” (That’s what I used to say.) “Free trips to SeaWorld. Joyrides in stolen golf carts. Running around the beach at Hotel Del in the middle of the night. Talent shows. Mixtapes. Remember those? Crushes on our tutors. All that good stuff.”
Don’t forget promises to always be there for each other.
The execution of which turned out to be pretty lopsided.
“I need to ask you some things about the show, because looking back, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
J .J. pretended to play dumb. “It was basically a documentary, so I have no idea what you mean.”
I grinned despite myself.
“Why did you live in a lion’s den?” Jerry asked. “Isn’t that a lawsuit waiting to happen?”
“No, it was safe, the lion was never there. In the first episode you find out he was getting a new habitat. So we were able to chill there.”
“For five years?”
J. J. laughed. “It was for little kids.”
“Hey, I watched it until I was like, twelve.” He coughed. “Mostly for Kelly.”
“But only for Kelly, right?” J. J. said at the same moment, and everyone laughed.
“Next problem: Did they ever go to school? How did they learn anything?”
“They learned at the zoo.”
“Only about zoo stuff!”
“What do you want from me?” J. J. said.
“These are pretty thin answers, I gotta say. Was it true Tara was secretly twenty-seven when she auditioned for the show?”
J. J. laughed. “No, man, she was ten like the rest of us. She always sounded like that. Even at four foot nine, in braids, she was a belter.”
“Last question, then we’ll show the clip. There’s a fan theory from a while back that got resurrected this week, about the time Kelly licked a toad in season three and went on a drug trip.”
J. J. threw his hands up in pretend-frustration. “What are you even talking about? Are you sure you aren’t the one tripping?”
“I’m just saying, it would explain a lot…”
“Does the guy from Blue’s Clues get interrogated like this?”
I guffawed. He and Lainey used to watch it on DVD, and he was right: That show made no sense.
“That was pretty funny,” Thom conceded.
“Roll the clip,” directed J. J., circling his finger in the air.
“Hey, that’s my line. Ahem. I have a clip from the show,” Jerry announced. “And it’s not any clip. It’s the blooper reel from the first episode.”
J. J. covered his face in mock-horror. “How’d you even find that?”
I knew what it would show, because you don’t forget a train wreck of that size. We were supposed to ad-lib the opening segment. For most of us, it was our first time on camera.
The blooper scene fired up.
“People! We are live in five! Four! Three! Two!” (Mr. Studdard, off camera.)
Kelly was only half made up. She looked like the villain in a Batman comic.
On tape days she gelled her epic curly hair back into a bun that slowly unfurled as the day wore on. Due to the Studdards’ insistence on producing the show themselves, no one had hired a script supervisor or continuity editor, so close-ups of Kelly within the same scene were jarring. She’d go from long hair to short hair and back like a subliminal message. In their Retro Flashback Summaries, Television Without Mercy once referred to season one as “seizure-inducing.”
Kelly, Tara, Brody, J. J., and I ran onto the set.
Watching from two and a half decades removed, I inhaled sharply, practically feeling the cold air of the soundstage hit my skin. The thermostat was kept at fifty-eight degrees because the audience members, lights, and constant physical activity—singing and dancing, mainly—heated the place up. The chill kept us focused, too; after three hours of tutoring and five hours of rehearsals every day, we needed the cold blast to reenergize us for the live audience. By the time we shot the studio segments in the late afternoon / early evening, we were exhausted, but the adrenaline rush from performing kept us bouncing and bopping.
The main set piece was the Lion’s Den itself: a smooth, fiberglass-coated “mountain” that composed the lion’s living area. The boys used to jump from peak to peak until the health insurance company forbade it. The enclosure had a large open space with a tan camouflage dance floor, as well as a roofed section, bed-size cubbies embedded in the main structure where we allegedly slept (on hay and straw, for some reason), and a picnic table where we ate. It was rare for the scripts to include eating, but for one of the Christmas episodes we baked pies, “and with a parent’s help, you can follow along at home. Yum.”
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