These Child Stars Were Supposed to be the Next Big Thing and Now They’re Just Joe Sacksteder

image curtesy of the Public Domain Review

by Joe Sacksteder

Amelia Bones, Backyard Paleontologist

Amelia Bones was not the first young person to imagine that an oddly shaped rock in her backyard was a valuable fossil, but she was the first to have a monstrous Cretaceous-era marine reptile named after her. She began the dig just outside Hurricane, Utah, with her best friend Lisa Leoncavallo during the summer between fifth and sixth grade. But once she realized that this was more than pretend, she feigned waning interest so as to avoid damage to the specimen by her less detail-oriented classmate. Mesosaurus Ameliorus drew national attention and landed Amelia a role in the re-reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise as a know-it-all rival to the sarcastic and dreamy protagonist.

The only place she loved as much as the field was the classroom. So numerous were her accolades that classmates groaned when her name was called at awards ceremonies (she was also a Latin scholar). When the time came for yearbook superlatives, they named her “Most Likely to Discover Second Dinosaur.” Unsmiling, she was pictured with a rock hammer raised in one hand and a model of Mesosaurus Ameliorus in the other. She forsook offers from the ivies because she saw a really cool-looking rock on her campus visit to South Dakota School of Mines. This time, feeling bad for her previous deception of Lisa, she invited her friend on the dig, and together they fulfilled the yearbook’s prophecy.

Fresh out of her PhD from UC Berkeley at age twenty-two, she was poached by tech billionaire Brayden Slocomb. His offer was high enough for Bones to overlook his inexperience and the whimsicality of his notions. Her early discoveries in the Red Deer River valley of the Alberta badlands were met with great fanfare, but Slocomb soon took to micromanaging. He dropped in on her team’s work with increasing regularity, copied her on dozens of emails per day, and filled up her Google Calendar with check-ins and fundraisers and press events and other tech billionaires’ kids’ birthday parties. At one meeting, labeled “Optimizing Wonder,” he disclosed that her current rate of 0.17 dinosaur excavations per year was insufficient. The new benchmark was one intact specimen per month—no missing bones this time!

She immediately quit, forfeiting fame and a six-figure retainer to take a faculty position at the failing liberal arts college where Lisa taught creative writing. Now, Dr. Bones loves hearing her colleagues complain—about workload, about shared governance, about disfunction. Believe me, she thinks, you don’t want to see what passes for function out there. Her colleagues biannually bemoan first-day anxiety, but that’s her favorite moment of the semester: walking into the auditorium at the precise moment class begins and doing the initial survey. The faces are studious, distracted, scared. She wonders how many of them even know. How many of them even think about the ground beneath their feet. The vastness of time. She begins to tell them, and always at least one face takes on a certain quality. A rock that might be more than just a rock.

Gabe Aristides, Expert in Asking Girls Out

Some people think it’s funny that a boy who once claimed such intrepid dating expertise is still single at thirty-five. Thing is, when Gabe Aristides goes back and watches clips of himself on the morning shows, there’s something about the schtick that’s so decidedly…unwholesome. It’s less what he’s saying and more how the adults are reacting. Mature and chivalrous and adorable curdle in the hot lights of the studio. These days, it makes him want to wake up alone every morning, to tell no one where he’s going, to take his family name to the grave. His solitude will show that boy on the morning shows a thing or two. Wipe the smile off Robin Roberts’s face.

Rule #6: Be an ally without saying ally. Be a feminist without saying feminist. Girls know lip service when they hear it.

One day, the calls stopped coming. His manager at least had the decency to inform Gabe that she would no longer be representing him (his book agent simply stopped responding to emails and calls). Finally, after several uncomfortable but insistent conversations with friends, it appeared that Gabe had been… cancelled? Yet, no one could provide any specifics, and there was no news online of his fall from grace. He replayed conversations in his head, combed through a dizzying glut of social media posts. They were a little cringey, and there were always some trolls, but nothing that carried the whiff of cancellation.

Rule #11: Never talk about political correctness or acknowledge cancellation as a contemporary phenomenon. Nervousness here is a red flag. Girls like guys who are “above it.”

Years later, his best guess is he’d been cancelled via Mandela effect. That because his schtick was a little heteronormative and PG-predatory, people just started assuming he’d been cancelled.

Rule #1: Girls don’t like “the bad boy.” This is bad boys’ baddest myth.

What else happened was Elsa. A girl he’d been dating just before his cancellation. Indeed, he’d had a lot of girlfriends since first appearing on TV, a combination of fame on his part and morbid curiosity on theirs, but Elsa was the first girlfriend who made him start questioning his certainties. She loved mountain climbing, and on several occasions, he observed her eating a whole box of cereal early in the morning while just staring at the rock or cliff face. One day she gave him such a look when he bestowed some piece of thoughtfulness on her. “But who are you?” she asked him. “What does Gabe like?” Kept asking him, verbally grabbing him by his lapels and shaking. He tried answering, but every answer he gave sounded like he’d flipped through a rolodex. It turned out that girls, girls like Elsa at least, did not want a guy who needed a list of rules.

Florence Zerrata, Master Chef, Jr.

Long before she became Joe Sacksteder, Florence Zerrata was on a kid’s gameshow called SuperSaver, where she quickly impressed host Jeff Pantages and the show’s devoted viewers. It was her fierce brand loyalty, the precision of her coupon scissorwork, and her instinctive knowledge of where to find elusive products like tahini and Kraft parmesan cheese. Her first official product sponsorship was for a pricey toothpaste that dispensed from two vertical chambers in blue and white like a reactive epoxy. She had no difficulty recognizing its superiority to traditional tube-based toothpastes. Her life-sized cardboard cutout could soon be seen directing perspicacious shoppers to the refrigerated Boar’s Head line of products. One leg turned out, knee bent, arm propped up with a fist to her side, impishly ready to chide any shoppers willing to accept substitutes. Some say Jeff Pantages took Florence with him when he was given the knock-off cooking show Meister Jeff, Chewer, but Florence’s star had already eclipsed the host’s by that point. Either way, it was no surprise that she won Meister Jeff, Chewer’s opening season, wowing audiences with dishes like sandcastle nachos and gumball jambalaya.

After a few years as a guest judge on Meister Jeff, Chewer, she graduated to a solo Food Network reality show: CSA Surprise. It did not go well. Week after week, she greeted her new bevy of incompatible ingredients with looks of greater and greater physical pain, sometimes tears. People started calling the show What the Hell Do I Do With My CSA Box? Always too many leafy greens—chard, kale, second kind of kale, Brazilian spinach, third kind of kale, two to seven heads of lettuce. “No basil for six months, and then… I could paddle a canoe with this… tree branch of basil!” Ratings continued to fall as she spent airtime flipping through recipes, trying to cypher something together, cursing the non-functionality of cookbook indexes. She didn’t “use” ingredients, she “neutralized” them. As in: “Last week, we thought we neutralized the last of the yellow eggplants, but guess whaaaaaat?” After one too many episodes in which she gave up and just made salsa, pesto, and veggie broth, her first and last cooking show was canceled, and she has since disappeared into domesticity.

In a recent profile in Good to Be Home—a magazine courtesy of your local Keller Williams realtor—Zerrata claims that she’s made peace with her CSA subscription, that an ingredient can get composted every now and then no big deal, and that the combinatorial ingredient flowchart she’s been perfecting since her time on CSA Surprise should be ready for publication within the decade.

Anton Roslov, Emergency Backup Goalie

“It started off so joyful and serendipitous,” Coach Don Pfluger remembers on a recent episode of Long Bench. “It’s all the more disappointing to know how it ended. For Anton’s face to be on the jumbotron drinking a BioSteel right when Vern Turner joked over the sound system, ‘Is there by chance a goalie in the house?’ I don’t think Anton ever really appreciated how one-in-a-billion it was.” The Rockford IceHogs’ starting and backup goalies were already injured, and on that fateful night against the Manitoba Moose, the third-string goalie tweaked his hamstring and the emergency backup goalie—the team’s skate sharpener—was practically vaporized by an Igor Klapka slapshot. Add to that the IceHogs being sponsored by BioSteel, and it created a veritable Price is Right scenario. Anton was hurriedly plated into starter Tom Söderblum’s equipment like a medieval knight. “The fit was perfect,” Pfluger recalls. “Surreal. I asked him if he was good, and he answered like I asked how he was feeling. No, I said are you good at stopping pucks. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘I am.’”

At the postgame presser, they asked Roslov what he was going to do with his hundred-dollar EBUG payday. “I don’t know, buy a hat that says Professional Athlete? Because I guess technically that’s true.” He’d been cut from his college hockey team, a reporter brought up. Imagine if he’d played like that at tryouts. Roslov took a sip of the rainbow twist BioSteel that had been placed into his hand. “Who says I didn’t?”

The twenty-two-year-old posted a 1.74 goals against average and a .933 save percentage over the nine games that he filled in for the IceHogs’ four injured goaltenders, helping his team to the second round of the AHL playoffs before third-string goalie Caleb Roos returned from IR and resumed duties. The Hogs were promptly eliminated from the playoffs. It came out that Roslov had made about three thousand dollars from his time in the AHL, but he made roughly seventy times that for a handful of BioSteel commercials. (“Emergency? Emerge—”)

“What happened after that is a real case of sour grapes,” Pfluger says at the end of his interview. “Guy I know tried to buy him a beer at the TGI Friday’s Roslov’s bar league team goes to after games. He made the mistake of calling him Little Big League, just bustin’ his chops. Roslov muttered something about getting the nod. He said, ‘For a while I kept in shape. Every time I got a call or text, I thought this is it. It was like believing in heaven again.’” Pfluger snorts a little, turns the ring on his finger. “That’s how I think of his legacy. Turning down a free beer.”

Roslov, now forty-one, stockpiles whatever scraps he’s thrown in his final years of being able to perform a passable mimicry of peak form. “We’re grateful to have a good goalie in central Virginia,” a guy on the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs tells him between games at a Fourth of July tourney as they sip beers and watch a B-League game. “How old are you?” a talented high schooler incredulously directs his way in the handshake line after a dominant performance. For some reason there are high schoolers in his league. On his late-night, hour-long drives home, sometimes he sips a BioSteel and conjures a press conference. “I refuse to watch the video,” he tells the empty car one night, still tasting blood, after a cheap shot that could have been so much worse.

To this day, in the streets of northern Illinois, you can find an occasional fan wearing a faded, officially licensed BioSteel hat or t-shirt that reads Professional Athlete.

Kitty Hoss, Octuplet

I’ve reviewed over one hundred books in the last decade, but this is the first time I’ve reviewed one by a family member. You know me—I’m number eight, technically the youngest of the Hoss octuplets featured on the hit show Eight of Control. More significantly, you know my brother, Bjorn, the eldest, author of the bestselling “novel,” Eight Americas. This thinly veiled allegory tells the story of the eight Richardson siblings. (Changing octuplets to just siblings = fiction.) They represent different “types” of Americans, filling out a spectrum between the cartoonishly bleeding-heart communist Wendy to our hero, Rufus, the money-conscious, rule-oriented man of faith who uses his common sense and even-handed correction to unite his family after the death of their beloved father sends their mother into “hysterics.” Two of the four left-skewing siblings are rehabilitated and forgiven, but one must die at the fault of Wendy, who is then cut off from the family.

Characters reveal their creator, said some centuries of literary hermeneutics. Usually the creator’s genius. A novel’s characters conceal their creator, Oscar Wilde countered. A novel and its creator are unrelated, New Criticism came along and announced. A text is whatever each individual reader makes of it, stated Roland Barthes, burying the author for good. In the case of Eight Americas, I urge readers to get a little old fashioned. I assure you that it’s not an exaggeration to interpret the Richardsons’ fate thusly: two Americas will have to get killed off to save the other six. A quarter of us Hosses. (I do hope I’ve earned the distinction.)

As a work of ham-handed trolling, the plot description of Eight Americas suffices as a review. Yet, somehow, we live in an America where the novel’s popularity has catapulted Bjorn into political prominence. No doubt you’ve seen the headlines; but let me use this space to amplify what’s truly important: do not vote for my brother. He’s literally a fascist. This is why not four but six of us Hoss octuplets—six of the seven Americas who really know my brother—have voiced our opposition to his candidacy. Like Rufus Richardson, Bjorn truly has unified our family. (Our poor mother just wishes we could all be nice to one another for once.)

Sometimes, I watch old episodes of Eight of Control just to see if I can identify what went wrong—the first glimmers of cruelty, of arrogance, of wild egotism. I look at the girl who was me and wonder what I could have done. Could still do.

Especially because he’s the one who most resembles me.

Jaime Forrester, House Flipper

I don’t know, he had some HGTV show called Jaime’s Treehouse or some shit. Look, these days Jaime doesn’t recognize that kid as his younger self. Or even the same species. He squandered what was a livable income and painted houses for most of his twenties. Swore he’d never do it again. But, at forty, he bought at about the worst time possible, and now he’s a full-time house painter again—just not getting paid for it this time—in addition to whatever else he does for a living. Occasionally, a stranger hails him with his show’s catch phrase. Occasionally, he can be heard muttering it to himself: “This house is no fun.” Today, he went to Lowe’s three times.

Hank Shirley, Screams Like a Goat

It was a reverse boy-who-cried-wolf situation: as a gay kid growing up in rural environs, Hank Shirley found that it was the only way he could scream without his parents noticing. On his parents’ tax forms, it said they ran an animal sanctuary. But sons didn’t count as animals. It became a game that helped make his myriad chores tolerable: how close to one or both of his parents he could rage and still evade their attention. When he finally gained the courage to break a cardinal rule and post his talent on TikTok, it went so viral that his mother finally heard him. Instead of punishing him for the violation, however, she became his manager.

She booked his appearances, she set his regimen for training, for rest, for special teas made of slippery elm, and she produced biweekly posts to grow his online presence. Boy Screams Like Goat on Bike with No Breaks, their first team venture, garnered even more attention, soon eclipsed by Boy Screams Like Goat Thanksgiving special. His first public performance—screaming at the end of the National Anthem at the Butler County Rodeo—attracted a new fan base for both rodeos and patriotism. From there, it was on to the late-night shows.

Hank Shirley understood his fame to be unsustainable, that he needed to not just hone but to develop his craft. “Oh, Sweetie,” his mother consoled him, “you just keep screaming. They’ll never get tired of it.” He began taking lessons from the only piano teacher in his hometown, who was confused but supportive of his desire to incorporate screaming like a goat into his repertoire. Hank humored her with “Old MacDonald” before striking out into original compositions.

He began posting some of his “bleats” under a different account, which developed a cult following that considered themselves the real Goatheads. His mother found out, demanded that he take them down. His bleats were oversaturating the market and diluting the purity of his vision, she claimed. A scene ensued that led to a full confession: he was gay, he hated picking ticks off animal scruff, and he was going to NYU on a music scholarship. “Oh honey, that’s all just swell news,” she said, then delicately shifted into criticism. “These bleats of yours are just highly derivative of ’90s alt-screamwave.” She showed him how to use some of her equipment, played him some of her student compositions, and eventually drove him to New York City herself. Where she did her best to put a brave face on his studio apartment, its “sanctuary” of roaches and rats.

In New York, he quickly found that a goat scream was more likely to draw attention than a human scream, and that busking his talent resulted in more trouble than dollar bills. Classmates were not exactly Goatheads; in their silly designer clothes, they imitated his accent and called him “problematic” with no provocation. He was great at music theory, but being half-deaf in one ear left him not-so-skilled at sight-singing and dictation, necessary skills for music composition majors. His first NYC performance, at a seedy bar in Bushwick, was disastrous (screamed like an albatross). In short, he did not feel like he was finally home. “If you give up,” his mother reminded him on their weekly phone call, “I’ll never forgive you.”

Currently, he’s regrouping, at work on an album, on a disappearing piano quintet, on a video for “Surf’s Up” with Boy Screams Like Goat. He’s making calls, looking for like-minded artists, if you know anyone. A band, a herd, an ensemble. There are times when he thinks he’s on the tail of someone, a potential collaborator, but it always turns out to just be a beautiful gray cat, a white Volkswagen Rabbit, a working theory on the mystery of the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a clever t-shirt advertising a sports drink, or “God’s Influencer” Carlo Acutis, recently canonized. “Honey,” his mother tells him when he describes these fugitive traces, “you’re all the ensemble you’ll ever need.”

Hughey Dormouse, Child Actor

No child actor had their innocence shattered more times on the big screen than the biggest child star of the early 1990s: Hughey Dormouse. We first caught a glimpse of his “betrayed elf” expression when he asked the heartbreaking question, “Why would they plant bombs in the ground where any boy’s best friend could find them?” That’s from Invisible Fence, of course. In Deadbeat (Ghost) Dad there was: “It’s not a haunted house. It’s a haunted home.” And in Rex Kaiser, Kid Landlord: “I learned a new word today. Foreclosure.”

As a teenager, Dormouse tried to shake up his typecasting with the role of streetwise pickpocket Lucifer St. James in Rope of Smoke—but the dissonance caused critics and audiences alike to experience something akin to violent seasickness. Not content with traditional selfies, fans took to ambushing Dormouse with “shockies,” firing off a cruel fact of life like “One hundred percent of men’s testicles contain microplastics,” something even more sexual in nature, or “There has never been full accountability for the Armenian genocide” and demanding that he react accordingly for the camera. So, Dormouse grew up more quickly than most American boys, becoming a grudging repository of grim knowledge. “No, more betrayed!” one fan was filmed berating him.

Dormouse’s many imitators are undeserving of full entries on this list. Like this betrayed elf out of Oklahoma named Gretchen Thoms, who captivated the nation by sifting through the rubble of her family’s single-wide for her mother’s GLP-1s. For a few truly batshit years, Thoms was rushed in advance to disaster sites to perform our devastation. Or Martin Kesterson, whose shocky dunk tank in Millennium Park helped raise funds for the diocese’s legal defense.

Unlike most child stars who were supposed to be the next big thing but now are just Joe Sacksteder, Dormouse is still practicing the art that won such unanimous approval from adults in the wunderkind years—just few people watch anymore. Many of his films are of the Rope of Smoke variety, increasingly intense shockies redirected back at the public. Daring the public to keep ignoring his work. But not all of them. Some of his movies are downright sweet. Once in a while, he tries on a role that calls for him to summon the elf of yore. But who at this point could believe there are words he has yet to learn?

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