Myisha Procter strapped a life-sized cardboard Justin Timberlake into the back of a New York Uber at one in the morning, asked the driver to treat him as “precious cargo” and watched him vanish towards an address she didn’t know.
By breakfast he had a new face, a new name and top billing at a 97-year-old’s birthday party.
Justin arrived the way most legends do. Uninvited.
Myisha, 40, moved to New York in autumn 2018.
Chicago-born, she had spent several years working in the beauty industry in San Francisco, but New York had sat on her bucket list since childhood.
She arrived knowing nobody. Once she had found her people, she invited them back to her apartment after a night out, and the next morning discovered a folded cardboard figure sitting on the sofa.
Unfolded, it revealed a grinning pop star in a camel suit.
Nobody ever owned up. “Nobody knows where you came from and nobody has a clear answer, but I’m definitely not throwing you away,” she remembers thinking.
So Justin stayed. He got his own spot in the apartment and came out whenever guests did, posing for photos like the professional he technically is.
Lockdown with a pop star
Then the pandemic hit and the community Myisha had built vanished from her daily life.
She spent lockdown alone with her toy poodle, Malkia, fielding welfare checks from friends and relatives.
Justin got a promotion. She began propping him up beside her on family video calls.
“I’d tell them, ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not alone. I’ve got Justin,'” she tells Creatorzine.
“As silly as it sounds, this cardboard presence became a genuine presence in my life.”
A $5 listing and a very suspicious message
Once normal life resumed, the party invitations slowed and dust settled on the camel suit.
Myisha decided Justin should go and help somebody else who was starting over or feeling lonely, so she listed him on Facebook Marketplace for $5.
The price wasn’t about money. It was a filter.
“This was my friend,” she says.
“I couldn’t just send him off with anybody.”
The message landed while she was out at dinner.
A man named Dylan Markowitz wanted the cutout and insisted he needed him that same night.
“I thought, ‘Cardboard cutout? Oh – Justin! Say his name!'” she recalls.
She told him it was too late. He replied that it didn’t matter what time it was; he needed Justin by morning.
“My city-girl radar went up,” she says.
“I thought, ‘Who desperately needs a cardboard cutout by the morning? What is this all about?'”
She said no twice. Then her gut overruled her. She waived the $5, ordered an Uber and loaded Justin into the back seat while the driver stared.
“There were so many emotions wrapped up in that moment,” she says.
“Justin had been part of my entire journey. I simply said, ‘Thank you for everything.’
“More than anything, though, I wondered where I had just sent my friend. Where was he going, and who so desperately needed Justin Timberlake at one o’clock in the morning?”
She went to bed without an answer.
Enter Dean Martin
Dylan’s message was waiting when she woke. He had needed Justin for a surprise 97th birthday party for his grandmother, known as Baba.
The photos showed the cutout still in his smart suit, now wearing an entirely new head.
Somebody had turned Justin Timberlake into Dean Martin.
“Of course, I was a puddle of tears,” Myisha says.
‘I approve this usage of image and likeness’
She posted the story on Instagram on 19 July. It has since racked up 2.5 million views and more than 223,000 likes, plus one comment she never saw coming.
The real Justin Timberlake wrote: “I approve this usage of image and likeness.”
“When I first saw the comment, I thought, ‘It can’t actually be him,'” she says.
“It was so wonderful and generous of him.”
Dylan turned up in the comments too, reporting that “Dean Martin (aka masked @justintimberlake) was the life of the nursing home!” and that “People kept taking pictures all day long!!!”
Viewers lost it. “This is the best story I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” wrote one.
Another filed it under existing IP: “This is just TOY STORY 7.”
Why It Matters
Myisha isn’t a professional creator, which is rather the point.
One well-told personal story, posted with no strategy beyond honesty, outperformed content that full-time creators spend weeks manufacturing.
It is also a neat case study in celebrity likeness online: a cutout passed between strangers is precisely the sort of thing that can summon lawyers, and instead Timberlake’s one-line blessing handed the post its biggest distribution bump.
When the subject of the meme endorses the meme, the algorithm barely has to lift a finger.
The story also fits a wider run of stranger-kindness content dominating feeds this year, as audiences tire of engineered drama and reward anything that feels genuinely unplanned.
Dean Martin remains at the nursing home, still in demand for photographs.
Myisha says the reaction proved “people want to be reminded that there is a lot of love in the world – and that sometimes, saying yes is the right answer”.
Eight years on, though, nobody has ever admitted to leaving Justin on her sofa.
Somewhere in New York, someone is watching all this unfold and saying nothing.
