June 11, 2009

Fingers Crossed: Saved by The Bell Reunion

by Carls Life on Flickr

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On Tuesday night, my friend Lisa sent me an e-mail with “Amazing clip!” in the subject line. In the e-mail, she included a link and wrote: “This is the best clip ever! Zack Morris brought back to life!” Knowing that Lisa can be a drama queen, I waited a full 36 hours before checking out the e-mail. When I did, I was amazed. I had no idea that Jimmy Fallon had dedicated a significant amount of his life to organizing a Saved By The Bell cast reunion. In my mind, the whole Tonight Show switcheroo has already been trumped by Fallon’s single-handed endeavor.

I’d always hoped to meet my childhood idol Zack Morris, and actor Marc-Paul Gosselaar’s brilliant in-character appearance on Fallon’s show kept my dream alive. For those of us born in the mid-1980s, Saved By The Bell gave us the scoop on high school from the time we entered kindergarten. And while no show is perfect (Chuck Klosterman famously critiqued SBTB’s  “Tori Paradox” in his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs), I believe SBTB flirted with perfection.

Three Bayside Tigers cheers to Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, and the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon production team. Without further ado, here it is:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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