When he first arrived at the auditions for Hybe x GEFFEN’s new international idol group, everyone figured Morris Feldman was someone’s old dad. He brought half a thing of chicken salad that he ate with his mouth a little open, and when he got some on his favorite t-shirt (long sleeved, with a Far Side cartoon; his wife Carol bought it for him but signed it from his kids on Father’s Day 1994).

He got out of line only twice over the course of the entire seven-hour day, once to take a leak in the bathroom of a nearby Subway, and once to go back to that Subway and ask for a water cup that he filled with fountain iced tea.

 

The judges were, at first, skeptical. They’d imagined someone more, you know. Young. Female. Certainly not as much ear hair. But he was there, and it was the end of the day.

 

“Do you know what this is?” They asked. “Sure,” he said. “My grandson loves the Lady Demon Hunters; this is like that.”

 

“Why are you here?” They asked. “Well,” he said. “43 years at Harmon and Schuster and can you believe it? Laid off. You ever heard of such a thing?” the judges assured him that they had, and he then he asked if the accompanist knew “Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan, and they said, “we don’t have an accompanist” and he said “that’s okay”, and before anyone could stop him, he started singing “Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan a capella.

 

They asked him to return for the dance audition.

 

Morris’s loud and aggressive throat-clearing threw off the choreographer once or twice, but he was a quick study. He hit the final pose, then looked at his thumb and pointer finger held together at an angle. “This is supposed to be a heart? Looks like a kidney stone. Don’t ask me how I know.” They did not ask.

 

Carol helped Morris move into the trainee dorms. Even though Carol joked that having Morris out of the house for a bit was a dream come true, the way she lingered as she plugged in his CPAP told a different story. “For the snoring,” she said, handing a pair of ear plugs to his new roommate, Eun-Ji.

 

Morris brought with him four funny t-shirts, three pairs of compression socks, a garbage bag full of tiny packaged toiletries he’d snagged from the Holiday Inn they stayed at when they visited their oldest, Noah, the disappointment, and enough antacids to kill a dyspeptic whale.

 

Morris excelled in training. First of all, he had extremely slender wrists, and he weighed in at 40kg, due to his brittle bones and constant diarrhea. Second, it was easy for him to blend into the background. It wasn’t that he didn’t complain; it’s that he complained so much it all kind of blended together into a sort of low-level brown noise. He knew the choreography, he sang mostly on key, and he didn’t mind waking up early - “if you don’t wake me up at 4am, my prostate will.” Third, although the other trainees were skeptical at first, they came to respect him. After a dance teacher commented on the size of Nala’s thighs, Morris made a noise like a startled horse. “Her thighs? You got cataracts or something? I’ve eaten bigger breadsticks at Olive Garden and believe you me, they skimp on the breadsticks.”

 

Many of the trainees were sent to receive plastic surgery. Lina got her jaw shaved. Ria got eyelid surgery. Morris was sent in for a rhinoplasty but, upon realizing that he’d attended summer camp with the anesthesiologist, he buddied up to the doctors: “look, do what you want with the shnozz, but while I’m under, I’ve got this mole right here on my neck I think it’s high time someone take a good look at.” Then he said the real thing he needed was a penis enlargement and they all laughed and laughed.

 

They removed the mole. They left the nose.

 

No one expected Morris to make it as far as the costume fittings. “Hope you didn’t pay too much for this; they only gave you half a shirt!” He said to the stylist. Then he turned to Mari and said, “look at this, they only gave me half a shirt! I hope they didn’t pay too much for it!”

 

They debuted as Ch3rry: Mari, the visual; Nala, the dancer; Eun-Ji, the leader; Alice, the maknae; and Morris Feldman, the diabetic. Their first single, “Liftoff”, premiered on M Countdown. It was an immediate hit. Netizens favorably compared Eun-Ji to Jisoo, and Morris to “the guy from Curb”. 

 

The fame didn’t seem to phase Morris all that much. He liked getting his picture put up on the wall at Gino’s Pizza in Long Beach, New York. He didn’t like filming 72 questions for Vogue (he felt it was an excessive number of questions; “what, are you writing a book?”). He was VERY excited to receive his idol card. “I feel like Hank Aaron!” He said to Eun-Ji, who didn’t have the heart to tell him yet again that she didn’t know who that was.

 

The first time a fan told Morris he was their bias, Morris wrinkled his nose. “Not good to be biased,” he said. “Not at your age. Keep an open mind.” Later, his handler explained what the fan had meant: he was her favorite. “Oh,” he said. “Well that’s nice, but my point stands.”

 

Ch3rry fans were called “Pi3s”, and fans of Morris in particular were called Morriors. Morris enjoyed identifying them in the crowd at shows - instead of the red Ch3rry lightsticks sold by the label, they wielded flashlights purchased, at Morris’s urging, in bulk at Costco (“those red ones won’t help you see for shit if the Big One hits”). Online, Morriors referred to Morris as a “cinnamon roll”, and edited vertical videos of his dancing overlaid with skin smoothing filters that made him look a gyrating sweaty cheese.

 

Touring weighed on Morris. He and Carol joked, but they really didn’t like being apart for that long. He missed reading the Sunday funnies next to her. He missed yelling at Bill Maher with her. He missed ordering takeout with her and realizing the one they like is the OTHER Indian place. And when he asked the label if he could have some time off to go with her to their Key West timeshare for a few days, he was told it was important for idols to keep up the appearance of being single.

 

“Awful lot to ask of these kids,” said Morris.

 

Carol didn’t take the news well, and especially didn’t take it well when Morris suggested she go to Key West with her sister Wendy instead. “Wendy’s a bitch, Morris, and you know that. Where’s ‘end call’ on this piece of shit—” She hung up the phone.

 

By the time “Full Stop”, Ch3rry’s first studio album, was released, the Morriors were a big enough presence online that anyone who dared so much as misspell Morris’s name, much less point out that he missed a few steps during a live performance of “RARE 애인”while repeatedly sneezing directly into the audience, was subject to an avalanche of bizarrely personal attacks. “Do NOT come for our sweet baby Morrie,” they’d say. “He’s going through an eczema flair up and it’s a really hard time for him so if you ever talk about him that way again I’ll call in a bomb threat to your dad’s office.”

 

The Morriors gained a reputation for their toxic online behavior, even amongst other Pi3s. An all-out flame war nearly broke out after an Alice stan posted a photo of the band but accidentally cropped out part of Morris’ face. When Nala thanked her Lalas for her support through a bout of food poisoning, Morriors accused her of copying Morris: “eating expired fish is HIS thing!”. Upon learning the Morriors were behaving this way towards a girl he really did care about despite still thinking her name was Nora, Morris tried to get a hold of his stans. Somehow, though, his all-caps post of “HEY STOP IT” on his personal Facebook did little to quell the Morriors’ feverish vitriol.

 

As the world tour was on its last stop, Ch3rry had two singles in the Billboard Hot 100 (“Get Me” at #3 and “SSSStop”at a respectable #26) and the dance for “RARE 애인” had gone so viral on TikTok that Colin Jost did it as Pete Hegseth during the SNL cold open. That episode also featured a joke that referenced the completely unfounded online speculation that Morris might be secretly involved with Han from Stray Kids. Morris was desperate to correct them that he was married to Carol, but the label intercepted his strongly worded fax.

 

It was a level of attention and scrutiny that really began to grate on Morris when he was told by the label that for his own safety he was no longer allowed to leave the hotel - and he was never not in a hotel these days - without personal security. Morris liked his bodyguard (“Vic’s a good kid; the neck tattoos, I could do without…”), but he wanted to cropdust the aisles of Duane Reade in peace. It wasn’t long before he couldn’t go into a store at all, with or without Vic - the inevitable crowds of screaming Morriors would be a fire hazard. When he wasn’t on stage, in the gym with his label-assigned personal trainer, or recording a video for one of his brand deals (Thick-A-Way toenail antifungal had given him a record breaking $1.3 million dollars to exclusively use their product; Morriors were stubbing their toes on purpose hoping for an excuse to use it), Morris spent his time alone in his hotel room, complaining about room service prices, yelling at Bill Maher by himself, and trying not to call Carol. 

 

When the label first suggested a solo album, Morris was excited. Ch3rry’s bubbly electro wasn’t exactly the kind of music Morris bumped in his 1999 Buick LeSabre, and he was hopeful he could make something he’d like to listen to. “Maybe I could be more of a Todd Rundgren,” he told Tristan, his 28-year-old Hybe liaison who quickly googled “Todd Rungrin” [sic].

 

“No,” said Tristan. “Probably not.”

 

Morris’ first single, “Ki$$ (feat. bbno$)”, was an immediate, stratospheric hit. Morris was booked on Inkigayo, and Jimmy Fallon, and TWO different online interview shows that involved eating chicken (“the girl with the funny accent I liked; the spicy one my bowels could have done without”).

 

It was on his private jet somewhere over the Atlantic that Morris asked Tristan if it might be possible to scale back on the fame a little bit. Maybe he could take a break from it for a while, come back to it later, like saving half a Subway footlong in the fridge. “That’s not really how it works,” said Tristan. “You’re this kind of famous until it ends, and then it ends forever.” Morris asked how long that usually took, but Tristan was back on his phone, checking engagement with Morris’ “What’s in my bag?” video (spoiler: it was mostly nickels).

 

Morris only learned about his Grammy nomination because it was mentioned in one of those limericks on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. In his excitement that Peter Sagal knew who he was, Morris picked up the phone, went to call Carol - and then remembered. He shoved his phone in the pocket of his Kirkland sweatpants and went back to starting at the Singapore skyline from the back of the Escalade.

 

Morris never cared for red carpet events (all the flashing lights, all the ear hair tweezing, all the girls his grandson’s age that should put on a jacket), but the Grammy’s felt special. Plus, he got to see his old bad mates. They hadn’t been in the same place in months. Eun-Ji and Alice had recorded solo albums as well, Mari was the new face of Evian, and Nala was starring in a remake of The Elephant Man that reimagined Joseph Merrick as an exceptionally beautiful young woman. It was good to catch up with them. Plus, there was a free Kind bar in the swag bag! So Morris was having a good night.

 

It wasn’t until he saw Sabrina Carpenter canoodling with Earl Sweatshirt (not the rapper; the heir to the sweatshirt fortune) that he started to feel a little funny. He popped a Pepcid in the hopes that it was just gas, but no - there was something else. It took him a moment to put his finger on it, but part way through Shaboozey’s cover of “Tubular Bells” Morris realized: he was lonely.

 

Morris was really, truly, deeply lonely, and not Vic, not Tristan, not Alice or Eun-Ji or Mari or Nala, not all the brand deals, not the fancams, not even every single Morrior on the planet or even Todd Rundgren himself could fill the void.

 

Morris left; he never heard Shakira open the envelope and call his name.

 

When Morris got home, he dropped his twelve wrinkly NPR tote bags on the floor. Carol feigned indifference. She barely looked up from where she was re-heating a leftover bread bowl of chowder. Morris kicked off his Merrells. He took his seat on the couch. “Oh, just make yourself at home,” Carol said, sarcastically. Her bread bowl sufficiently lukewarm, she took a seat next to him. They didn’t say anything for a long time.

 

“Carol?” Morris said at long last?

 

“Yeah?” Said Carol, around a mouthful of chowder.

 

 “You’re my bias.”

​

She scooched a little closer.