Was That Joe Biagini in Jimmy Fallon’s Audience? (Josh Donaldson Says Yes!)

| Andrew Stoeten

Joe Biaginni
Photo Credit: Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports

America’s favourite deferential muppet, Jimmy Fallon, hosts a television program called “The Tonight Show” that, if you’re over 35, you may have heard of.

Or, apparently, even folks as young as 26 are familiar with this strange medium called TV, because — holy shit! — I think that’s Blue Jays reliever Joe Biagini in the audience getting an exceptionally poor high five from the host!

Do you think so, Josh Donaldson?

Well that settles it! And is… awesome? I don’t know that it is. But I’ll spare you my Fallon take and give you my own somewhat relevant true story that’s probably only entertaining to me. Years ago, when I was, like, 16, I went to a taping of Conan O’Brien’s old show, which was not in the same studio as Fallon is now, but also at Rockefeller Plaza. This was in the days when Andy was still there. I think they did one of their bits about trying to get Dirty Dancing re-released. Kevin Bacon was the guest. No fucking joke! So, I was in an aisle seat — much like our goofball reliever friend in the above clip — and before the show, after the warm-up act, Conan came out to interact with the crowd. The band played and he danced his way up and down the aisle I was next to. It was all cool enough, but then he got about three or four steps in front of me and, I swear to Christ, did an exaggerated point right at my face and bellowed, “I wanna dance with you.”

Uh… not sure if you’ve ever been 16, but holy shit, fuck that. I was stunned. And yet he does it again, band blazing, audience worked up, bringing his arm from behind his head, up and over, and right to a stiff, shaking point in my face. “I want to dance with youuuuu.“

What the fuck, Conan? You dick! These are the things I’m thinking. Getting out of my goddamned seat and dancing in an aisle with a grown-ass TV-show man? Not cool!

But he does it again. I’m frozen and all I can see is his big pasty fucking face and his hair and the whole bit as the fucker asks me to dance with him again. Now everybody is really looking. Now apparently I’m the turd in the fucking punch bowl, not breezy enough to dance, not giving the crowd what they want — or Conan what he, for somefuckingreason, wants. And so I breathe. I steel myself. I put my palms on my legs and ever-so-slightly start to shift my weight to get up out of the seat and fucking participate in this humiliation when the very attractive young blonde from Sweden who was sitting directly behind me and he had actually been pointing at finally gets up to dance with him.

Sweet. Delicious. Relief.

There’s truly nothing like it.

And the moral of the story, because I’ll take that terror to my fucking grave, is: never go watch a TV show taping, or if you must, at least don’t sit in the aisle. I mean… look at Biagini’s disgust at the tepid high five from Fallon! And he probably didn’t even see anyone half as awesome Kevin Bacon.

Assuming Donaldson is right, that is.

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