Hollyweird Babylon: The Nine Lives of Tara Reid

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https://johnnylawandorder.substack.c...the-nine-lives

Tara enrolled in the renowned New York Professional Children’s School alongside future costars Christina Ricca, Jerry O’Connell and Sarah Michelle Gellar. She then attended Barnstable Academy, a private college prep school in Glen Rock. After graduating in 1994, Tara headed west to take her shot at the Hollywood dream. Her original plan was to pound pavement for the summer before starting college in the fall. As luck would have it, her big break came along first.



Though her involvement in Saved By the Bell: The New Class is often characterized as having “joined the cast” of the show, in truth, 18 year old Tara appears in one episode (season 2, episode 5, “Squash It”) as Sandy, a minor character who gets exactly three words of dialogue (“Hi Brian…What?!”) and is seen in the background in a handful of shots.

While the paycheck for a single day of work at scale might not have been much to write home about, basking in the warmth of the lights on set that day in Burbank was enough to hook Tara Reid for life. She spent the next several years grinding away at the old familiar Hollywood hustle alongside hundreds of hopeless hopefuls while hovering around the outer rim of the NBC Universal orbit. She began attaching herself to a friend group that included Saved by the Bell: the New Class’s Jonathan Angel and Sarah Lancaster along with Alfonso Ribeiro, at the time starring in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Another member of this mid ‘90s Brat Pack was General Hospital heartthrob Steve Burton and Tara was able to raise her profile a bit further when the two began dating.

In May 1995, Tara landed her next NBC gig, which received outsized attention after Steve talked with Soap Opera Digest : “The funny thing is I did Days of Our Lives when I first started out. It was the same kind of deal. It was supposed to be for a couple days, but it ended up going on for longer. So who knows? Maybe the same thing could happen for her.” [May 26, 1995]

It’s unknown if Steve Burton’s skills at divination factored into his recruitment into Dione Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network around this time. But at any rate, the same thing did end up happening for Tara, whose tenure on Days of Our Lives coincided with the peak of the show’s infamous “Marlena’s possessed” arc, the “who shot JR?” of 90’s daytime television. Meanwhile, Alison Sweeney is, as of this writing, in her 33rd year of playing the role of Sami Brady. As Marlena-mania continues to sweep over Salem, 17 year old Sami runs away from home out of jealousy over older sister Carrie’s upcoming marriage to her crush Austin. And because it’s 1995 and she’s a teenager, Sami’s navelgazing vision quest takes her to Seattle, Washington, the Grunge Capitol of the World, where she meets Ashley, played by Tara, a slightly more streetwise runaway who quickly develops a codependent attachment to her.



In 1996, Saved By The Bell show runners Franco Bario and Sam Bobrick brought Tara back for another one-off, this time for their other live-action Saturday morning offering, California Dreams, in a role that would foreshadow what was to come. In the episode “Graduation Day,” 23 year old high schooler Mark Winkle’s (Aaron Jackson) crush seems to have a one-track mind. Sara (Tara) loves to party, and to win her over, Mark goes against the wishes of his DARE-friendly straight-edge bandmates and permits beer drinking at their graduation party. Mark gets himself three sheets to the wind before defiantly driving off to the next party with Sara. Since this takes place in a Saturday morning sitcom, an off-camera car wreck is guaranteed, and Mark hijacks his class’s graduation ceremony to serve as his own public therapy session. Sara’s more serious injuries, meanwhile, are barely touched on as an afterthought.

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LANGUAGE WARNING

A year and a half in the making...the long-awaited (?) prequel to Fire Crotch has arrived! 131 minutes of the deepest dive ever on Hollywood's notorious party-girl-turned-scream-queen.