Zach Braff’s Dr. John J.D. Dorian is back on our TV screens.
A “Scrubs” reboot with (almost all of) your favorite stars is now streaming on Hulu, and Braff is doing a delightful and somewhat unhinged little media tour around it, which included a very not-PG rated appearance on comedian Rick Glassman’s “Take Your Shoes Off.”
These two very funny Jewish stars talked about everything from said reboot to masturbation to how their dogs help their neuroses. Braff commented that Glassman’s Jewish dad dog jokes would have gone over well in the Borscht Belt. They also discussed how a pretty big celebrity attended Braff’s New Jersey bar mitzvah — Lauryn Hill.
“From ‘Sister Act 2?’ Lauryn Hill?!” an incredulous Glassman responded, before breaking out in song.
“Lauryn Hill from ‘Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit’ was at my bar mitzvah. She wasn’t in the habit yet,” Braff confirmed.
Braff and Hill went to high school together — specifically, Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. Braff attended Oheb Shalom Congregation in neighboring South Orange, and later explored (through fiction, of course) his relationship with Judaism in his 2014 movie “Wish I Was Here,” starring fellow Jews Kate Hudson, Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and a very young Joey King.
Braff shared that at the time, both he and Hill were going for auditions in New York City and would practice their lines together. Braff got a role in a TV pilot for a show called “High” that never went to air, and later acted in “The Baby-Sitters Club,” while Hill got her first role in “As the World Turns.”
So of course, Hill got the much-coveted bar mitzvah invite to Braff’s celebration. The theme was, what else, musical theater. When Braff visited “Late Night with Seth Meyers” to promote his Broadway debut on “Bullets Over Broadway,” he told Meyers, a fellow Northwestern alum, about the event.
“You had a bar mitzvah, you had to have a theme, and I was never into sports. So I picked Broadway musicals, which, in hindsight, at 39 years old, is humiliating,” Braff mused.
“I entered to the song ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy,'” which Meyers noted was a terrible bar mitzvah song, and Braff added that it’s not in any way a musical theater song.
As he entered into the room, a bunch of young people hired to be the centerpieces of the tables were all dressed as different characters from musicals — from “Les Misérables” to “Cats.”
As Braff entered to the Deniece Williams ’90s classic, actors, who were frozen like statues, started moving like robots to the tune of the song.
“I felt so bad for these poor actors, because, you know, they’re just trying to take a gig,” Braff recalled. “Whoever planned this party, planned it really poorly.”
Braff mentioned that Lauryn Hill was a guest at the trippy party, and was even his games partner on the dance floor.
“That’s why she got into music — your bar mitzvah,” Meyers suggested.
“I think when there was something so magical, when I walked in to ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy,’ that Lauryn Hill went ‘I’m gonna write music,'” Braff joked back.
It wasn’t until Braff was in college at Northwestern and no longer friendly with Hill that he discovered he went to school with one of the greatest musicians of his time. Walking down the street in Evanston, Illinois, he passed a record store with a cutout of the Fugees and immediately recognized his former line-running partner.
Since then, Braff has became a TV and film star in his own right. Aside from “Scrubs,” he gave us the cult hit “Garden State,” which features many local haunts he and Hill probably spent time in during high school. The movie also made him a fellow Grammy winner — though Hill has eight, and Braff has just one.
So can we thank Braff for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” one of my favorite albums of all time? Eh, probably not, but a Fugees-themed bar mitzvah does sound pretty incredible to me.
And if you’re wondering if you should watch the “Scrubs” reboot, I can say that the first episode features a bar mitzvah joke, in which Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) tells now private concierge doctor J.D. that he “hands out erections like tiny hot dogs at a bar mitzvah.”
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