Actress and Jeopardy! host Mayim Bialik was a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on April 4. At about the 4:50 mark in the clip above she tells the story of traveling with her father to the Iron Range to visit their “personal Mecca, which is Hibbing, Minn., the birthplace of Robert Zimmerman — also known as Bob Dylan.”
Of course, the Jeopardy! question that would lead one to the place where Robert Zimmerman was born is “What is Duluth?” The Zimmerman family moved to Hibbing when Robert was 6 years old.
The mixups continue as Colbert holds up a photo of Bialik from the early 1990s — when she played the title role in the NBC sitcom Blossom — standing in front of a house in Hibbing. Pointing to the image, Bialik said, “that is Bob Dylan’s childhood home … or so they told us.”
Colbert asked for clarification. “Is it? Did you find out later that it wasn’t, or is it?”
“I’m going to believe that it is,” Bialik responded. “And I’m not going to go on social media where people tell me it’s not.”
Well, as Iron Ranger Aaron Brown pointed out on his blog, Minnesota Brown, “it’s not.”
It actually looks nothing like it, although it’s not as if, in the early 1990s, Bialik or her father would have seen a photo of it on the internet. They were at the mercy of directions given by a random person on the streets of Hibbing.
Left: Blossom in front of some house in Hibbing. Right: The childhood home of Bob Dylan.
In the spirit of Iron Range hospitality, Brown invited Bialik to return and see the real thing. “If you’re reading this, you’re always welcome back in Hibbing,” he wrote. “Bring your family. This time we can have some people show you around. I bet we can even find the right house. A collector owns it now and is restoring it to look like it did during Dylan’s childhood.”
Bialik was on Colbert to promote a new film she wrote and directed, As They Made Us, which honors her late father. It opened in theaters on April 8, but is not presently listed as playing at Hibbing Cinema 8 or any Duluth theaters.
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