Mitch Albom: Job-shamed ‘Cosby Show’ actor exposes addiction to judging
It was called a “feel good” story, but it was all about feeling bad.
A 50-year-old woman was shopping with her 40-year-old wife at a Trader Joe’s in New Jersey. At the checkout counter, they noticed a slightly heavyset cashier with a graying beard. He was ringing up and bagging groceries.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the guy from The Cosby Show,” Karma Lawrence would tell the media.
Had this been 30 years ago, the incident would have ended there, and you would not know a thing about it. But because everyone now carries the world in a pocket, Lawrence quickly went online and found photos to confirm her belief that the cashier was indeed Geoffrey Owens, who had a featured role on “The Cosby Show” from 1987 to 1992.
So Lawrence did what so many of us now do, for no reason, and with nothing good to come from it. Without even speaking to him, she snapped Owens’ picture and posted it on the Internet.
You know what happened next. The Daily Mail ran the photo and wrote a story about how Owens, 57, had been spotted working as a cashier, a job that reportedly paid around $11 an hour. And a viral firestorm began.
Now, while the Daily Mail piece had a condescending tone, if you read the actual comments after the article, you see more people saying, “Why is this a big deal,” than you do people making fun of Owens.
But there’s no pathos in that. Instead, the headline became that Owens was being “job shamed” on a massive scale, and way more media outlets ran that story, and next thing you know, Owens was on “Good Morning America”, and CNN, and in People magazine. He said all the right things, that work was work, that there was nothing shameful about going from high-profile acting to low-profile earning-a-living.
Geoffrey Owens paired his Trader Joe’s name tag with a ball cap from his alma mater, Yale, for his Tuesday interview on ‘Good Morning America,’ where he said working a day job is nothing to be ashamed of.
And before you could say “Instagram,” he was being offered $25,000 from the rapper Nicki Minaj, and a role on an upcoming Tyler Perry TV show, which Owens has reportedly accepted.
It’s the new American Horatio Alger equation: Riches to rags to Internet to riches.
We make comments but know nothing
First, hats off to Owens, who showed nothing but honest work and honest answers in telling the media, “A job is a job” and “Every job is worthwhile and valuable.” He said the royalties from The Cosby Show trickled when the show was pulled from syndication (after the sexual assault charges against Bill Cosby) and that Owens’ acting work these days, when he got it, was usually a day or two, so he needed to supplement his income.
He did nothing sad or unusual. Just what millions of Americans do when they need to support their families. But because the story went viral, actors quickly tweeted out their unity with Owens. Patricia Heaton posted, “Why are you trying to humiliate this honorable, hardworking actor?” James Woods tweeted, “Maybe some casting director will take note of a fine man who swallows his pride and is willing to work.” (Never mind that “swallows his pride” is kind of an insult to everyone who works at Trader Joe’s.)
The whole drama took place on the Internet and on TV. And fittingly, the Internet and TV have now lifted Owens back into another high-profile acting role — the Tyler Perry gig — where he will once again be chatted about on, you guessed it, the Internet and TV.
Meanwhile, the biggest question of this whole story is going relatively unasked.
What has prompted us, when we see people going about their lives, to take their picture without permission, post it for the world to see, and make comments about a situation we know nothing about?
What made a woman named Karma (and boy, is that a loaded moniker) think it was OK to invade a man’s life that way in the first place?
