Maine’s sixteen counties are happily mingling at a birthday party when Somerset suddently asks, “Where is Piscataquis?”
Piscataquis, dressed in hiking clothes with a bandana around her neck, is standing alone on a backyard deck. “It’s just so crowded in there,” says Maine’s least populous county, with fewer than 18,000 residents.
The party can be seen in a video on Instagram, with each county displaying a well-defined personality, quirky pet peeves, obvious passions and distinct fashion choices. But they all share the same face, which belongs to Katie Zarrilli of Gorham.
Zarrilli has built a social media following and a business over the past couple years by creating short, funny and frenetic videos focused on Mainers’ shared experiences and culture. Her rapid-fire exchanges between the counties are among her most popular, but she’s also done videos personifying Maine landmarks like Portland Head Light and Bangor’s Paul Bunyan statue. She’s portrayed infamous Maine roads promoting their own reality TV shows. Route 161 from Caribou to Fort Kent delivers the tag line, “Oops, I dropped your call, again.”
She’s also worked with more than 80 businesses. Some of the videos are fairly straightfoward descriptions of the place or product, but others blend her brand of Maine humor with the sponsor’s product or event. In one, the sixteen counties are prepping for the 2025 Maine Wild Blueberry Weekend. Washington County is nearly brought to tears by the pressure of being in a statewide spotlight, blurting, “I’m not used to people paying attention to me.”
The natural goodness of Maine. But funny.
In a video for Portland-based Oakhurst Dairy, Zarrilli gives examples of how people can stay warm without turning the heat up, a point of great pride to native Mainers. These include wearing many layers of clothes, stuffing towels under drafty doors, baking cookies and drinking hot chocolate made with Oakhurst milk.
Oakhurst decided to work with Zarrilli because her humor “feels very authenically Maine,” said Belinda Donovan of the Ethos Vont marketing agency in Westbrook, which hired Zarrilli for the campaign. Donovan said when her agency looks for influencers to work with Oakhurst, they look beyond follower numbers and try to find people who understand the Maine audience. (Zarrilli has more than 56,000 followers combined on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.)
“She has a knack for taking the quirks, traditions and everyday experiences of living here and turning them into content that Mainers immediately recognize and relate to,” said Donovan, account and public relations director at the agency.
One hallmark of Zarrilli’s videos is that she often plays all the characters, or counties or landmarks or whatever. In her video about Northern Mainers driving south and Southern Mainers driving north, Zarrilli shows how different the state feels depending on where you’re from and where you’re headed. The Southern Maine driver peers out at the landscape near the end of the journey and says dejectedly, “Where’re we gonna eat?” The Northern Maine driver, ending presumably in some crowded restaurant district, is wide-eyed and smiling as she says, “Where’re we gonna eat?”
In her video about growing up in Maine, she’s seen asking her parents to turn the heat up, to let her go to Funtown Splashtown in Saco and to play a cassette by beloved Maine children’s singer Rick Charette. She also sings the “Maine County Song,” taught to school kids here for generations. She yells “I see the bridge” — the Piscataqua River Bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery — a time-honored ritual for families driving home after time away.
While building her business and social media following over the past two years, she’s also been dealing with her husband’s serious health issues. Matt Doyen had a kidney transplant in January at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. After three different hopsital stays in the spring, he’s now doing well and is back at his job as a loan officer, Zarrilli said.
Zarrilli, whose legal last name is Doyen, posted about Matt’s need for a kidney donation to her followers more than a year ago. One of them who saw the post was inspired to help. Sarah Konchalski, a pharmacist from Wayne, was not a match for Matt but donated a kidney on his behalf through the National Kidney Registry. Her gift gave Matt a voucher that put him higher on the transplant list, and he underwent surgery less than six months later.
Growing up with a microphone in hand
Zarrilli, 36, grew up in Vassalboro (Kennebec County) and Gorham (Cumberland County) before working at a TV station in Presque Isle (Aroostook County.) So a lot of her Maine pop culture references and observations come from personal experience.
Her mother, Jeanne Zarrilli, remembers that, as a very young girl, Katie would grab a piece of wood from the fireplace mantel and use it as a microphone. She loved singer Amy Grant, studied her videos, and tried to hold her microphone/stick exactly the same way. When they lived in Vassalboro, Katie would organize neighborhood kids to put on skits or musical numbers for the adults, her mother said.
Zarrilli’s family moved to Gorham when she was 12, and she played soccer at Gorham High School, where her mother was the team’s coach and an English teacher. Zarrilli hadn’t given much thought to what she’d do for a career, but remembers her mother once pointing at a TV news reporter and saying “You’d be really good at that.”
In high school, she reached out to long-time Maine TV news reporter and anchor Shannon Moss, hoping to get some advice or visit her in the newsroom. Moss was working the morning newscast at WMTW (Ch. 8) in Portland at the time and invited Zarrilli to come to the set, at 4 a.m. Zarrilli came and the two have been friends and kept in touch ever since.
After Zarrilli graduated from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, Moss suggested to Zarrilli that she take a job at WAGM, a TV station in Presque Isle. “You’ll be reporting on potatoes, but you’ll be reporting,” Moss told her. While there she met her husband, whose family ran a potato farm in Mapleton, W.C. Doyen & Sons.
She worked there for seven years before taking a job at a station in Salisbury, Maryland. After five years there, she moved back to Maine in 2024. While in Maryland she worked on a lifestyle show that promoted local places and businesses. She always looked for the story behined the place, so it didn’t seem like an advertisement. When she came back to Maine she thought she might do that sort of thing on social media.
“I saw people doing these things on social media, and they were doing great. So I figured I’m trained to talk to a camera, maybe there’s something I could add here,” Zarrilli said.
She got the idea of personifying the counties from an influencer named Annie Agar, who does videos where she plays various NFL teams talking about games. But Zarrilli’s knack for doing characters, voices and facial expressions seems innate. Like so many people who grew up in Maine, she’s a big fan of comedian Bob Marley, whose stand up routine is peppered with funny observations of the mundane aspects of Maine life. She figures some of her comic inspiration comes from him.
She keeps the clothes she uses for the counties and other skits in bins. Some she seeks out specifically, some she’s acquired over the years. The hat she wears for Aroostook is from her husband’s family potato farm, and the work coat is his. The captain’s hat she wears for Sagadahoc, a nod to the area’s ship-building heritage, is something she got on vacation in Mystic, Connecticut.
Because she films all the videos herself, and plays up to 16 parts in each one, they are pretty labor-intensive. Sometimes she comes up with a concept and asks her followers for their thoughts. Then she writes the script. The filming might take a few hours, with all the costume changes. So does the editing, to make sure Waldo reacts appropriately when Somerset does something surprising, or that Lincoln laughs at Hancock’s jokes.
After working on local TV, Zarrilli understands and appreciates the greater reach of social media. When she was on TV in Aroostook County or Maryland, her audience was relatively finite. But now her funny videos and observations on Maine life can reach Mainers and fans of Maine wherever they are.
“I’v just seen a lot of people (responding to her posts) who used to live in Maine, or who miss Maine or have family here,” said Zarrilli. “They’re like ‘Oh my gosh, I love watching this because it makes me feel like I’m home.’ I think that’s cool.”