Just a Typo: The Cancellation of Celebrity Mo Riverlake

By John Bennardo

Never click send without proofreading. When a personality falls from grace, can he crawl his way back from an ostracized wasteland?

Mo Riverlake always dreamed of the limelight. And now that he’s the dazzling host of America’s favorite game show, he’s certain he has it made for life. But when a fat-fingered tweet accidentally triggers the wrath of cancel culture... nothing he does can stop his perfect world from turning into a brutally vindictive social nightmare.

With the police banging down his door and his entire history dragged into the public eye, Mo’s shocked by the speed of his downfall. And with the media twisting his innocent past into prejudiced poison and former friends conducting damning paid interviews, every backpedaling effort the man makes tumbles into an avalanche of insane accusations.

Can the most hated star of the week hit undo without suffering irreversible damage?

Just A Typo: The Cancellation of Celebrity Mo Riverlake is a hilarious tale taking aim at the dangers of mob mentality. If you like side-splitting humor, poignant societal examinations, and satirical genius, then you’ll love John Bennardo’s page-turning story.

Buy Just A Typo to spell disaster today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Bennardo
• Release date: Feb 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005410131

John Bennardo

Don’t be fooled by the topic of John’s first published novel - "$2 dollar bills: America’s Forgotten Currency." Despite writing a book and producing a documentary about the quirky currency, John is first and foremost a humorist.In his new fiction novel "Just A Typo", John examines cancel culture and celebrity and gets back to doing what he loves most - pointing out the absurdities in everyday life.A writer since his childhood in Yonkers, New York, John now lives in south Florida with his wife and teenage son. He is a cancer survivor, former college professor, and Wheel of Fortune champion, although he admits to still being disappointed he lost the bonus game.

Book preview

Chapter One

To think my whole life turned on a typo.

I was up early that Tuesday morning, not because my calendar was teeming with production meetings, endorsement opportunities, or one of those massages where they drop hot coals on your back, but because I had to pee. My goal was to take care of that and rush back to bed to continue my dream. I was about to accept my lifetime achievement award from Charlize Theron when she whispered that further accolades were awaiting me in her dressing room. My bladder interfered toward the end of an extremely truncated speech.

My pee lasted longer than those rising water race games at carnivals, and with equal force. I darted through the dark without flushing and dove under the duvet, but it was too late; my mind could only conjure the same unsettled civilians that comprised my reality.

The anxiety of losing both my reputation and my livelihood had caused me to revert to my old eating habits. I’d dug out six boxes of Pop-Tarts from my earthquake preparedness kit when everything started, and I thanked them daily for supporting me.

After nestling my breakfast treats into the toaster oven, I stood and waited. Across my forty years, I might never have gotten a dream to resume properly, but I’d always been adept at determining the precise time needed to heat two Pop-Tarts to perfection. It was a necessary skill because my toaster’s timing mechanism had recently been declining in perfect step with my career. I’d crank the dial to fifteen minutes just to get it going, but I’d monitor my internal clock instead, releasing the pastries at their optimum temperature.

This was grounds for a new toaster, maybe even one with a touchscreen display. However, acquiring it under the current circumstances would be as difficult as winning the bonus round on my hit game show Hats Off. I’d been a prisoner in my own house for two weeks because of the legion of irate citizens outside. I couldn’t even get deliveries. When Amazon sent a package of comfort food by drone a week earlier, someone shot it down with a BB gun, scattering chocolate chip cookie dough amongst the masses.

It was while staring at my toasted delicacies that the whirring of helicopter blades overtook the wheezing of the timer. Here in Los Angeles, that usually meant a high-speed chase was about to barrel through my neighborhood, or perhaps a local grocer had run out of avocados. In this instance, I feared it was related to the hysteria outside my front gates.

There’d been a police presence out there ever since the infamous typo and the never-ending stream of false narratives that followed. People had been picketing my existence for weeks, but when I stepped away from the toaster to look out the window this time, the melting pot was bustling with anticipation, like I’d soon be opening for a Black Friday sale.

My curiosity chafed at me like an old bathing suit. I needed news. My phone was not an option; it was now in several pieces beneath the cracked photo of Weird Al Yankovic, the result of a disgruntled heave before the weekend. I couldn’t find the television remote until I remembered how I’d whisked it into a half-eaten bag of pork rinds the same day.

Sure enough, what popped onto my TV were overhead views of those same exasperated masses, clamoring for justice as far back as the next ZIP code. I always thought it was a cliché when people described angry mobs as carrying pitchforks and torches, but there they were. Several people toted flaming broomsticks, and I swear there was one pitchfork poking through the protestors. It was that or some decorative piece from Crate & Barrel.

My toes tightened as Al Roker wished a happy one-hundredth birthday to a woman on the outskirts of the crowd. She was wearing a T-shirt with my likeness under the words Mo Riverlake Sucks. When they cut back to the hosts, it was finally clear what was going on.

I was going to be arrested.

Two thoughts washed over me: I better put on some clothes, and I think I just burned my Pop-Tarts.

Chapter Two

All the network news shows had picked up their local affiliates’ feeds, which were helicopter views of a parade of squad cars turning onto my street. The only reprieve came when Fox spent two minutes promoting a special episode of The Masked Singer .

My Pop-Tart fail left me without breakfast. There was no time to toast more, and there was no more cookie dough in my emergency kit. But hunger was second on my list of concerns. What detail in the last fortnight of bad press was bust-worthy? Had inadvertently offending people suddenly become a crime?

As I paced my living room, nervously pecking on petrified pig skins, it hit me: maybe this wasn’t a real arrest at all. Maybe it was an orchestrated ruse, something that would appease the public and clear the neighborhood so they could start street sweeping again. I became giddy at the prospect of returning to my acting roots, playing the part of a celebrity felon.

Here’s how I hoped it would go: I’d invite the officers in, put out some beer nuts, and then have a few laughs while strategizing about how they’d take me to the patrol car. Should I smile, scowl, or cover my face in embarrassment? How many officers would escort me out? Whatever the number, I’d ask for the shortest ones, so I didn’t look weak by comparison. I’d learned that technique from my public relations team.

A quick glance in the mirror showed my hair needed a little gel. I couldn’t get it as slick as it looked on television, but it would have to do; the police were ringing from the front gates.

If you read the profile on me in the August 2012 issue of Game Show Monthly magazine, you know outside callers are treated not to an actual buzzer but a random game show theme. It seemed appropriate that Jeopardy! sounded this time. I let the police enjoy the entire song before buzzing them in.

They knocked on my door a moment later.

Knowing dozens of cameras were pointed my way, I opened it slowly. I intended to peek out and say something to ease the tension, like, Thanks, but I already bought tickets to the Policeman’s Ball. I couldn’t have opened the door more than six inches, however, when it got rammed into my skull with force unlike anything I have ever experienced.

"Down on the ground, motherfucker! Right now!"

I complied, less by choice than physical necessity. An officer pounced onto each limb.

Move a muscle or try anything funny and your prejudiced ass is toast.

They read me my rights, rolled me over, cuffed me, and hoisted me to my feet. They dragged me outside to the waiting patrol car. I can’t recall whether I smiled or scowled—I think I just spat blood—and dammit if both officers with hands under my armpits weren’t over six feet tall. With the crowd cheering and a TMZ guy shouting questions about what Netflix shows I’d been binging, the car door was closed, and we drove away.

It was just a typo, I said to the driver once I could feel my mouth. I didn’t mean to offend anyone.

He and his partner didn’t say a word, nor did they flinch. Maybe my words got trapped in the thick glass between us. I raised the volume.

"It was a typo! Everything you heard about me is because my finger missed the L. You should be apprehending the real bad guys, like people who don’t know the difference between ‘there,’ ‘their,’ and ‘they’re.’"

They must have heard me this time because they glanced at each other and began chatting with an assortment of eyebrow raises and shoulder shrugs—probably confirming they’re was short for they are and not the word you use when you finally hang a picture straight after three failed tries. But they didn’t acknowledge. They’d heard it before. Everyone had. Not long after I’d sent that ignominious tweet, my manager issued a statement explaining what happened. No one believed it; everyone thought I was making excuses.

Pardon me, though. I’m telling the story and assuming you know what happened. Maybe you’re one of the few people who don’t.

In a major news story two weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had shot down an initiative that would have given the LGBTQ community some fundamental rights. The entire country was in an uproar about it. I didn’t know all the details, but it still stung. I mean, I’m not LGBTQ, but I have someone close to me who is, and I respect it. If you are lesbian or gay or whatever the B, T, and Q stand for, you’ll get no flak from me. In today’s world, we should be above that.

As a celebrity, I understood the importance of weighing in on issues like these. My first instinct was to send thoughts and prayers, but since there hadn’t been any gunplay involved, that seemed inappropriate. I also didn’t want to copy what others were saying. I did, however, read three screens of related tweets to get some ideas. The prevailing sentiment was how part of America had died with this decision. Bingo! I’d use a death metaphor to share my thoughts—I mean, feelings—about what happened, being careful not to imply that I didn’t really know what happened.

Here’s what I wanted to say:

Sad news for America. We should all have our flags at half-mast today.

Pretty clever, eh? I was so eager to tweet it that I made the Starbucks barista wait while I typed, all while the long line of patrons hollered at me. Funny how things work, though. If you’re familiar with the keyboard on the iPhone, you know the L is on the far-right side. I believe it’s in the same place on the Samsung Galaxy. Well, apparently, when typing at 185 miles per hour, it’s easy to assume your right thumb pressed the L, when in fact it scraped the side edge of your phone and recorded nothing.

What I actually tweeted was this:

Sad news for America. We should all have our fags at half-mast today.

That’s it. One tiny L goes missing, and the whole country is no longer talking about a court ruling but about how this asshole game show host is an unsympathetic, bigoted lowlife jerk. That is not a direct quote from anyone, but it is close.

Granted, the missing L completely changed the context of my tweet, but after my manager’s statement, I posted a video showing how easy it is to make that mistake. I demonstrated what would happen if one’s thumb fell short of the L and hit K instead: fkags autocorrected to flags. In fact, no matter which nearby letter is pressed by mistake, flags is always the result.

Try it!

Fpags corrects to flags. Fmags corrects to flags. But press F, miss the L somehow, then type ags? Nothing. It types fags, because fags is a word. And not a good one when you’re trying to be sympathetic to a community of lesbians, gays, Bs, Ts, and Qs.

Either way, I imagine the subsequent firestorm would have dissipated with minimal damage if not for the litany of strangers, colleagues, roommates, and former sex partners who followed the lead of one spiteful individual and came forward with their wayward tales—tales of how something I’d once said or done could now be twisted into a prejudiced slur. It’s the reason I found myself caged in a cop car instead of challenging contestants at the crest of my career. There’s a heck of a lot to catch you up on.

Chapter Three

First, the truth about my name: it’s not Mo Riverlake. That’s a stage name my manager Karl created when I booked my first job in the mid-2000s. He thought it sounded just Jewish enough to open some doors in Hollywood. The Mo part was easy since it was a shorter version of my first name. The last name came about when an intern delivered our Jamba Juice order. He heard us brainstorming and added his two cents to Karl’s change.

You know, I’m from south Florida, he said. I lived in a community called Waterside. Down the block they had one called Canary Hill, and my best friend lived in Deer Creek.

So? Karl chortled. Please tell me you didn’t forget the soy protein boost in my smoothie.

There were a bunch of places like that. Windwood, Sweetwater, Pineapple Walk, Timber Pines. It seems like to name a community down there, you have to use a combination of weather elements, fruits, or some kind of flora or fauna.

We looked at the kid, dumbfounded. What the hell are flora and fauna?

Karl took command, plucking the drinks from the boy’s hands. Thank you, but we’re not naming a Florida community here. This is a professional comedian.

Slash emcee, slash actor, slash musical talent, I added.

I’m just saying, the kid barked. He pulled a straw from each pocket and twirled them at us like a quick-draw artist at a gunfight.

Pick two somethings from nature, and there’s your last name.

And that’s how I became Mo Riverlake. Karl liked the water theme since he was a Pisces. The intern eventually got promoted and is now a top agent at CAA.

It took a while to feel comfortable with the change, and it’s not just because the new return address stamp I ordered took four to six weeks to arrive. I felt like I was betraying my family and the God-given surname I was born with: Besilio. It’s the Italian name my grandparents Rachel and Mauricio carried with them when they immigrated to the United States in the late 1940s.

Rachel was old-school Italian, set in her ways and stubborn. Despite being seven months pregnant with my mother, she insisted she was okay to board a ship that offered as many luxuries as the one parked on Gilligan’s Island. After a week of sleeping on a wooden bench and vomiting so often that she redefined the term mess hall, she arrived in New York Harbor to the welcome sight of the Statue of Liberty.

"Quella donna indossa un vestito di cattivo gusto were Rachel’s first words upon seeing her. Or in English, That woman is wearing a tacky dress."

My grandparents had to adjust to American life in a hurry because my mom was on the way. They found a cheap rental in the back of a magazine shop called Herb’s Stationers. The owner, Herb, had reconfigured the property to generate extra revenue. He rented what used to be a storage room and office in the back, maintaining his store selling newspapers, candy, and grocery staples in the front. My grandparents used the office as a bedroom and the windowless storage room as a kitchen, complete with zero appliances.

The building had but one bathroom, located on the other side of the facility, near the cash register. In the mornings, Mauricio would saunter through in a bathrobe, grab a copy of the New Yorker (just for the cartoons) and spend twenty minutes on the john humming opera tunes with customers right outside the door.

After my mother was born, Rachel needed the sink for urgent cleanups. She’d charge through the store at random times, a cloth diaper full of smoldering shit in one hand and a screaming naked baby in the other. If someone occupied the bathroom, she’d stand at the door and curse the culprit for disrespecting her property. Heaven help the poor soul waiting at the register, trying to purchase a Charleston Chew.

My grandparents dealt with the inconveniences because they had free rein of the place when the store closed. Whatever item they needed that Herb had in stock, they just took. They felt it was their right since they were paying rent for a living space with a variety of items close to their restroom. When Herb called them out for stealing by pantomiming a theft from the grocery shelf and then retrieving the missing item from under my grandparents’ bed, they shrugged their shoulders like they didn’t understand. This was a story I heard countless times as a child, although the word took was replaced by borrowed.

My grandfather found work as a restaurant dishwasher soon after they arrived. Between his wages and the money he saved by borrowing food from his employer, he was soon able to move his family into a regular apartment, where strangers could no longer access their toilet.

It was good timing, too, as things were getting heated with Herb. My grandfather had begun to learn the English language, and Herb knew it. When items went missing, he could now confront Mauricio directly. My grandfather often had no out. He blamed everything on my toddler mother, saying she crawled into the store in the middle of the night and stole things. When asked how she got to cigars on a shelf five feet above the register, Mauricio bragged she was very athletic.

The new apartment afforded my grandparents amenities they’d never had, but the transaction almost didn’t happen. Their application was initially rejected due to the landlord’s inability to get a straight answer about my mother’s name. I understand the confusion.

When Rachel was in the hospital preparing for labor, she and Mauricio knew no English, and they did not know the sex of the child. When a beautiful baby girl was placed in Rachel’s arms, she had to come up with a name. Rachel looked around for inspiration. It came from none other than her hospital ID bracelet. It had a bunch of gibberish printed on the fringes, but beneath her name, Rachel observed a series of letters she thought were classy and beautiful. She assigned them to my mother.

My mom’s name is Female.

Sure, it’s pronounced fuh-mah-lee, but from that day forward, any situation involving my mother’s name was quite the clusterfuck. In this apartment application case, the landlord consistently handed the form back to my grandparents, launching a scenario resembling a Marx Brothers routine.

Please write your child’s name on this line.

(They write Female.)

No, no. The landlord erases it. "Your child’s name."

(They write Female.)

He erases again. You must be misunderstanding me. The name. What you call the child.

(They write Female.)

The landlord gave up. For the entire time my grandparents lived there, he referred to my mother as your young one.

Rachel went right to work making the place her own. She decorated it with a ton of tchotchkes she thought were classy. Mostly, these were miniature Italian statuettes. Some were men, some were women, but all were nude. When I visited her home as a youngster, these figures comprised the bulk of my sex education. Rachel also specialized in mismatched colors, crooked pictures on the wall, and using Scotch tape to fix anything broken.

With a full kitchen, she also began cooking, even though Mauricio continued to borrow food from his employer. They raised my mother on a variety of pastas, breads, and whatever Today’s Special was. Instead of traditional milk or formula bottles, Rachel blended whatever they were eating into liquid form and poured that in a bottle instead. The diet often caused Female to become constipated, so Rachel added prune juice, citing it as a digestive aid. Failing that, an enema was in order, which I only share because Female applied the same tactics to me after I was born. I developed such a fear of having a hose shoved up my ass that I’ve learned how to poop pretty much whenever I want to. This is especially handy as a game show host since I always make sure to go before a taping. I’m proud to say I’ve never had to delay one episode because of an urgent bathroom need.

Female began packing on the pounds as she got older and the food got more solid. She was picked on throughout adolescence. Her nickname for most of grade school was Jelly Belly Fe-melly. In high school, it was shortened to Fat Ass. To combat the resulting low self-esteem, and perhaps because she was so used to the way an enema felt, she became quite the boy toy. By age sixteen, rumor has it she’d had trysts with a busboy from Mauricio’s restaurant, a fourteen-year-old from the neighboring apartment, and a substitute teacher.

The only skill she developed (besides the obvious) was sewing. When we were children, she told us it was a passion of hers and it came naturally, but Rachel divulged the real story. Apparently, my mother was passionate, but not about sewing. In the heat of more than a few moments, several items of clothing got torn. She couldn’t allow her parents to see her looking like the final survivor in Night of the Living Dead, so she bought her own sewing kit and learned how to restore her outfits before she got home. According to Rachel, Female always believed she got away with it. But she and Mauricio knew.

I don’t know why my grandparents did nothing to curb my mother’s promiscuous behavior, but I wouldn’t be here if they had. Female’s sewing prowess led to her first job as a seamstress at a local tailor. That’s where she met my father, Hank.

Chapter Four

The best word I can think of to describe my father is numbnuts . I love him, but he brings a shame reminiscent of what it’s like to take showers in middle school Phys Ed. Still, he helped shape the man I became. Since that man was now riding in a police car with all of America watching, these details are relevant.

Hank was the youngest of six boys, at one time all under the age of eighteen. They lived in a single-family home with their mother, Ellen.