I offer this short piece as a sidebar to my interview with Maris Kreizman to give a little bit of personal backstory to my obsession with Beverly Hills, 90210, which started in college and continued throughout the rest of my adulthood, becoming deeper with every passing year. Over that time, friends and family have bought me the entire series on DVD and showered me with every piece of merch they find in secondhand shops, garage sales, and house clean outs. In their minds, my personal being is automatically linked to everything 90210. But this is a side that doesn’t seem to translate well to my current position at TW and the musician path I’ve been going down over the past few years. The Kreizman interview is a preliminary attempt to integrate it into those other pursuits.
How the above voice message ended up coming to my phone is a somewhat mundane six degrees of separation sort of situation. One of my bandmates used to date a woman name Rachel, who later dated the tour manager of a band whose drummer dated Jennie Garth. Rachel would still hang out with us after she and my bandmate broke up, and one day she told me, “I have the inside scoop on Kelly Taylor.” The band played a New Year’s Eve 2011 show in Chicago, and both Rachel and Jennie were hanging out backstage together.
I was in the Poconos with neighbors of mine and falling asleep, somewhat uncomfortably tipsy from wine, when Rachel called me to tell me that Jennie was about to call. Since my phone was almost dead and I was not in great shape to talk, I let it go to voicemail instead of risking having the phone die as soon as I answered it. I was thinking, “I’d rather have a recording of this that I can play back than a transient experience.”
Listening back to it now, almost exactly 12 years later, it conjures up a funny scene in my head. I’m on the sidewalk outside a second story apartment in the rain with a boombox, a mix between John Cusack in Say Anything and John Cusack in High Fidelity inside the phone booth. Jennie Garth is in the window of the apartment and this message is playing over the boombox. I’m yelling, “BUT YOU SAID YOU LOVED ME!”
A car next to me rolls down its window (another image taken from High Fidelity, after John Cusack has jumped over a bench). My wife Olivia is in the driver’s seat and my two children on in the back seat. She says, “Dude, seriously? What the fuck? The kids are hungry, come on.”
This message has been read and approved by Olivia.
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