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Did anyone else read actor Scott Baio's response to having his tweet posted on Jezebel and wonder "What the hell happened to Chachi?"
Gone is the adorable adolescent who accidentally burned down Arnold's. In his place we have The Real Scott Baio, who tweets:
"Taxes are DONE .. that should feed, house & provide for quite a few lazy non working people at my expense..Have a great Monday!"
When did Chachi become so hostile?
Chachi was a fictional character on a TV show, and The Real Scott Baio is his own person; I understand how this all works. Still, the vitriol in Baio's past tweets delivered a shock to the little girl I once was, the girl who watched Happy Days every Tuesday night for what felt like the entire 1970s. How could Chachi be so mean? It just seemed so, I don't know, un-Chachi-like.
I remember Chachi Arcola as happy and fun. When he first arrived on the scene, my friends and I were head over heels -- probably because we all may have felt deep down in our little-girl guts that The Fonz and Richie were a bit too old for us. And up until then, we kind of ignored it, because who else was an option? Potsie? Ralph Malph? Hell no. None of us wanted to admit we were secretly wishing Potsie would serenade us.
But Chachi. He was so cute and way closer to our own age. We could see dating our own version of Chachi when we hit high school. He was Fonzie's cousin, which immediately gave him the thumbs up. Ayyyyy!
But Chachi didn't have to rely on his gene pool to be cool. After all, Chachi played the sticks in a band. But even though he was the drummer of my little-girl dreams, he wasn't stuck up. Chachi was aware of the difference in social class, and I can remember as if it were merely 1978 when Chachi was embarrassed to show Joanie where he lived, thinking she would think less of him.
But of course she didn't. She accepted him as he was, and even though he pissed off The Fonz from time to time, or exasperated Mr C by trying to climb through the windows in the Cunningham home, we, just like Joanie, loved Chachi.
I can't love the actor who played him all that much, because he's just Chachi's evil twin. Only unlike on the soap operas, where the evil twin goes away, it's Chachi who seems to have disappeared. The Real Scott Baio on Twitter and the teen heartthrob Scott Baio I used to read about in Tiger Beat? Not the same Baio, not to me.
It's was weird enough reading his bizarre tweets about taxes, Michelle Obama and Lady -- as he calls her -- "Gag Gag." And then the four walls of my sitcom world came a-tumblin' down after seeing what Baio's wife, Renee, posted from her Facebook page.
Let's just say her word choice is far more graphic than anything rhyming with Buck-O, and she even made up a word (think "cuteness," but with consonant and vowel substitutions, and much more crass). All I could muster after taking this all in was, "Oy vey, Chachi's wife just lost her shit on Facebook."
This whole strange situation triggered just one question (beyond "WTF, Chachi?") This question remains yet unanswered. That question is, "WWJD? (What Would Joanie Do?)"
I want Chachi back. The Chachi who kissed Joanie for the first time. The Chachi who sang really stupid songs, even if I didn't realize it at that time they were stupid, back when thought maybe, just one day, I would be lucky like Joanie and have a boyfriend like Chachi.
I know it sounds a bit over the top and dramatic, but I'm still going to say it: Never in a million syndicated reruns did I ever consider The Real Scott Baio would yank a part of my childhood away. But the little girl who loved Chachi hasn't disappeared, and she's got something to say to The Real Scott Baio: "SIT ON IT!"
What about you? What do you think of Scott Baio, and do you have Chachi memories as fond as mine?
