The voice of that Jardiance commercial is standing up to trolls -

A woman walks down the steps of a townhouse and breaks into song.

I have Type 2 diabetes, but I manage it well. It’s a little pill with a big story to tell!

Next thing you know, she’s in the midst of a razzle-dazzle dance routine in the center of a park with some of the happiest people who have ever lived as she sings about once-daily Jardiance, a diabetes pill that costs roughly $570 a month.

As time went on, it was easy to seeeeeeeeeee: I’m lowering my A1CCCCCCCCCCCCCCC!

A letter carrier strolls by, explains how the medicine works and warns of the risk of a perineum infection. A director snaps the clapperboard in the commercial. Is he filming the commercial? Does he know he’s in a commercial? We’ll never know.

The woman changes into a yellow dress for the big finale.

Jardiance is really swell! The little pill with a big story to tell!

It’s a scene familiar to anyone watching football this year. Or baseball. Or really any TV.

“Be kind. Everyone is going through something. Heartache. Financial stress. Their bananas ripened too quickly. Having the song from the Jardiance commercial stuck in their head because it’s aired 5 million times a day,” tweeted writer Abby Heugel with only slight exaggeration.

It joins the lineage of capitalist earworms that dominate the brain, such as: “I want my baby back baby back baby back”; “Break me off a piece of that KIT. KAT. BAR.”; and “Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow ... ”

“The Jardiance commercial makes me want to lower my A1C, and I don’t even know what that is,” tweeted one fan.

And there, dancing at the center of every frame, is Deanna Colón, the exuberant singer.

“This is a story of a woman who got handed Type 2 diabetes, and she’s making lemonade out of lemons,” Colón says of her now-ubiquitous character. “She’s living her best life.”

Despite some of the reactions to the commercial, Colón is, too.

Colón grew up in her family’s Italian restaurant in Arlington, Mass., a few miles northwest of Boston, gaining the kitchen skills to compete on “MasterChef.” She attended the Berklee College of Music on a scholarship and reached the quarterfinals singing on “America’s Got Talent.”

She moved to New York, where she dubbed herself the “callback queen,” never quite getting cast on Broadway. (She hopes that’s next for her.) But she co-wrote the club hit “Higher” and several others. After 9/11, she swapped coasts: Los Angeles for 13 years, Las Vegas for the past few.

Commercials she filmed for Big Lots nearly a decade ago caught the eye of the production company tasked with the Jardiance spot. Colón found herself auditioning from her Las Vegas bedroom over Zoom, then on the Universal lot in Orlando, where she woke at 4 a.m. to dance and sing about lowering your A1C for 12 to 15 hours straight for about a week as they nailed down the choreography. (The dancing between her and the letter carrier was a little too racy in one take.)

The Jardiance commercial is everywhere. The companies behind Jardiance have spent an estimated $77.6 million airing both versions — yes, there are two — of the ad, according to reports from TV measurement company iSpot. She insists it’s not a “big break,” but a “big crack” that will help her seep into the limelight. “Here I am at 50, and I can say, ‘I just got started,’” she says. “I feel like J.Lo.”

“It’s wonderful to see her really hitting her stride later on in life,” says blogger Perez Hilton, who now counts her as a friend. “We live in a youth-dominated, hyper-focused world where the algorithm heavily pushes and favors young, pretty, skinny and White.”

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On Hilton’s advice, she’s now on Cameo, where she records personalized videos for around $25 a pop. In one, she tells a fan where to get the yellow dress from the commercial. The proceeds help pay for her seven rescue dogs.

On X (formerly Twitter), she offers prayers, gives dating advice, advocates for canine adoption and battles the many, many trolls who take umbrage with the jingle. “The haters are sad, pathetic people. There are wars going on, innocent people being mutilated but ignorant ass humans choose to add to the grief of this world by coming online and slamming a stranger,” she recently tweeted in response to a particularly nasty one. “It’s sick but my gratefulness and positivity is immune to it!”

“She’s crazy, in the best way,” Hilton says. “Despite the fact that she’s married and her husband works and has a good job and she has 10 different jobs and she’s got all these dogs, … she doesn’t hire a cleaning person. She likes to clean her own house herself.”

“What kind of a lunatic is that?” he adds. “What kind of an insane person loves cleaning her house?!”

Her mouth would make a nun blush, but her faith runs deep. (To publish this in a family paper, we removed some — okay, a lot — of that language.) She believes God has a plan for her. He’s just always three steps ahead: “When it’s my time to make an impact globally, it’ll happen. And it’s going to happen on His time, not mine.” It’s like her mother always says: “Man makes plans, God makes decisions.”

That doesn’t stop her from imploring Him from time to time. “I always say, ‘God, f--- around and make me rich,’” she says. That way, she could rescue more dogs.

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She has the conversational energy of a pinball machine in a hurricane, each topic breathlessly but delightfully crashing to the next — and she does not hold her opinions back. In the same laughing breath, she’ll share her feelings on:

Chrissy Teigen’s cyberbullying scandal: “Throw that b---- under the bus, I can’t stand her.”
Her pups: “Dog backward is God, and I do not think that’s a coincidence. I truly believe how you treat a dog on Earth is how you’re going to get judged.”
The crisis in Gaza: “Hamas is one thing, but what’s happening there is a travesty and has been a travesty for a very long time.”
Getting married at 41: “If you watch ‘Sex and the City,’ you know that s--- doesn’t happen! But it’s all God’s timing!”
Online bullies: “That is indicative of a person who has nothing better to do with their day. Nothing. Go ... volunteer at a dog rescue. What ... is wrong with you? Go donate time at a children’s hospital. Honestly, you need a change of perspective.”
Roseanne Barr: “I love her. She’s one of those people who does not care if she gets canceled. She’s going to speak her ... mind and call it a ... day. She stands on the ground she stands on and won’t waver for anybody.”
Uhh, me: “Wake up every day and feel grateful for your life, your little pod in the world you created with your little wifey and your poochie. Bro, you have that. Some people have nothing.”
The Kardashians: “Don’t get me started on the Kardashians.”
The Kardashians, at a later point: “They put themselves under such a microscope, they can’t fart without being judged.”

A picture soon emerges: She strives to be a “voice for the voiceless. I advocate for children and for animals.”

“I’m against all the -isms,” she says. “I’m against racism, ageism, sexism, weightism, all the -isms.”

The Big Crack may have boosted her reach, making it easier to help others, but it also exposed some of those -isms. She has been bullied her whole life, finding solace onstage, creating art — but now she wakes up with hateful DMs every single day.

“You really get how hated and despised overweight people are if you check out the comments under my Jardiance video” on YouTube, she says.

“Nobody happy with their lives is saying the things they say to me online,” she adds.

Anyway, there are bigger things to worry about. “Like, you should be mad that there are Palestinian children being blown to bits today or what Hamas did in Israel,” she says. “Be really mad about that. But to be mad at a diabetes commercial, you’re warped.”

So she just kind of rolls her eyes. “Calling me ‘fat’ at 50 years of age? I’ve heard ‘fat’ since I was 3,” she says. “What else you got?”

But she worries about others. It has become her mission “to inspire people that look like me.” She accomplishes it through her body-positivity clothing line, Bomb Chica Apparel, for which she trademarked the phrase, “I am a masterpiece,” for apparel, and with that mantra, she closes each installment of her TikTok cooking show, “Go Fork Ya Self,” for her nearly 300,000 followers: “I am a masterpiece. You are a masterpiece.”

“I hope Hollywood starts calling and looking at women like me, a real average woman, and saying, ‘She could be the star of the show,’” Colón says. “We’re focused on how people look instead of how people make other people feel. And that bothers me.”

In the end, though, she tries to just ignore the trolls. They’re not going anywhere, and she’s got better things to do.

“There’s an a-- for every saddle, and I’m not going to be for everybody,” she says.

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