Being on Zoom
Actually, I was nine when I started. It was the 70s, 4th grade, and one of my mother’s friends told her that Zoom, the TV show, was holding auditions. She thought I might like to try out.
I don’t remember all the auditions, of which there were four, but by the last one it was down to a handful. The producers were looking for a diverse group of kids, and I only had to compete against other white boys. By the end, there were maybe two or three others. We sat in groups and did “Zoom raps”—talking to each other about socially meaningful issues like homework and divorce.
When a producer called my parents to tell then I’d made the show, I listened in: “We just have one question. Is Nicholas a union child?”
This was PBS, but I guess they were a non-union shop. When my parents said “no,” the producer said, “then we’d love to have him on the show.”
The contract we signed said I would make 12 episodes and get paid $200 for each one. The money went into a college fund, but later on that was the main thing that other kids wanted to know: “You were on Zoom?” “How much did you make?” I refused to tell them. Light bullying tended to ensue, especially if those kids were older.
We were all thrilled to be on the show. As promised, the cast was diverse— four girls and three boys: Latino, Irish, Black, Chinese, Jewish, half-Jewish/half-WASP (me). We rehearsed five days a week at the WGBH TV studios in Cambridge. My family had gone away for the summer, so my dad and I moved back to our house in Boston. We practiced singing. We practiced dancing with our choreographer, Lois. I learned how to project, and did blocking. We had some sort of green room and a minder, named Jeff, who resembled John Ritter on Three’s Company, with a bushy mustache and a vest. He was a piano tuner (and later did come over and tune our piano).
By the time I’d turned ten and 5th grade had started, Zoom had already been taping for several months. It started to air in the fall. With school in session, we rehearsed after class—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—and taped all weekend long.
I was already semi-notorious at school for having made the show. When it started to air, I was famous. But according to middle school’s rigid rules, Zoom was for younger kids. Kids who were older than I was would tell me they’d seen me, but only because their little sister or little brother had been watching. But I had been watching Zoom since the first grade. PBS was the only TV my brother and I were allowed to watch. I’d had one of my first crushes on a girl on Zoom. I had mailed in for Zoom cards. Everyone I knew knew Zoom.
This was 1977. Year Zero for punk rock, but punk was not in our line of vision. Everything was extremely 70s. For me, being on PBS made it even more so. Zoom had an ideology: It had been founded by a very earnest Brit (he came and philosophized at us one day) who believed that kids needed a show of their own, where they created their own material instead of having it being written by grown-ups. Every skit we did, every recipe we created, every “Zoom raps” topic for was submitted, by post, by our viewers—hence the incredibly memorable “send it to Zoom!” song, with the address stinger that every single kid my age knew by heart: “Box 3-5-0, Boston, Mass, Oh-two-onnnnne-three-four!” One time, we went to visit the mail room, located in a different building. Three women worked there full-time, opening endless sacks of mail. Zoom had ethics, as well: Since we were on public television, we couldn’t be seen endorsing any products. Our signature Zoom shirts were striped Lacoste shirts with the alligators carefully cut off. When we made recipes, the props department created generic labels to paste over the actual labels on jars of peanut butter or boxes of crackers. Zoom’s only “cheat” was that, for the “Roll Out The Barrel” segment—where a Zoomer reached into a barrelful of mail to pull out an idea—there was actually a shelf inside of the barrel. The shelf only ever had one idea on it. But even there, ethics applied. Once, along with a fellow cast member, I got caught peeking into the barrel. We both had to sit that segment out—our reactions to the idea wouldn’t have been genuine.
The WGBH station was like a playground for kids and, in retrospect, we were incredibly well tolerated. I learned how to operate a television camera and spent lots of time in the control room, where the producers would let me do fades and wipes at the board. There were ashtrays everywhere. Every show ended with a “production number”—a highly choreographed song, usually from a musical—and, once a week, we’d go to a recording studio in Jamaica Plain to record our vocals. I remember mic stands, conga drums, and the first joint (more accurately, a roach) that I’d seen. Our minder, Jeff, loved these trips — he was in fact not just a piano tuner but a pianist. I don’t know whether they let him lay down any tracks, but I looked the Zoom theme up recently and discovered that our musical director—a cheerful, energetic guy named Newt Wayland—had written it. Apparently, when Arthur Fiedler, of the Boston Pops, died, in 1979, Newt had almost been named the conductor. Newt described his compositional style as “Hindemithian.”
I don’t recall all the musical numbers, but I know we did “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing” (dressed as hobos) and “Consider Yourself.” I think we did “Free To Be You And Me” (as a kind of 70s kid-culture crossover). That might be a synthetic memory—I had memorized that record and sung that song so many times—but I’m pretty sure we did sing it, along with “Ease On Down The Road,” from The Wiz. In something of a first for Zoom, we did an episode on the road, too: “Zoom Goes To The Zoo,” taped at Bentson’s Wild Animal Farm in New Hampshire. We got long-sleeved rugby shirts for that one. The musical numbers were “If I Could Talk To The Animals,” from Doctor Doolittle, and “Monster Mash,” where I got to fake the organ intro to Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”
Right up to the last day, I loved being on Zoom. I don’t recall how it actually ended but all of us knew that, each year, Zoom got a new cast. We weren’t expecting it to go more than one season—and, at some point, we learned that our season was going to be the last one. (The show was revived in the 1990s, but this was the end of their 1970s run). That year, Zoom VII was nominated for a Daytime Emmy. The awards were in New York City but only the producers went. We lost to Captain Kangaroo.
Nicholas Butterworth lives and works in New York City.
