I have a couple of friends, one an older man and the other a younger woman, who each are firm believers that there is something to all of the UFO sightings. They believe E.T. and his (he was a he, wasn’t he?) buddies are out there buzzing around in the ultimate flying machine.
I play the role of good listener when the stories of UFOs begin, but I had to interject when one of them recently began talking of a sighting in Eureka Springs. “A spacecraft or an alien?” I asked. “Because, if it was an alien in Eureka Springs, how would you know?”
I spent the better part of that weekend trying to extract a foot from my mouth when she informed me that her parents were originally from Eureka.
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I have a friend who went to a movie premiere in Hollywood a few years back, hanging out at the After Party with some of the stars on hand, including Jon Voight, Dean Cain, Trent Ford and Tamara Hope. The movie was “September Dawn,” which was about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Sept. 11, 1857 killing of 120 Arkansans on a wagon train headed to California that was ambushed in southern Utah.
My friend is a real estate agent, farmer and auctioneer (first cousin to Dan Dotson, the founder of the cable television show “Storage Wars).” The friend was president of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, which recently helped secure National Historic Landmark status at the gravesites of those slain at the massacre.
This particular friend of mine is at home on the back of a horse, auctioning off John Deere parts, or showing property deep inside of rural Madison County. However, attending a Hollywood premier is another story.
My buddy knew he was having fun at the After Party, even if he was a fish out of water. After unloosening with some liquid courage, he began small talk around the hors d’oeuvres. He walked up to one fellow he was sure he had recognized and informed him how much fun he had earlier in the day on the ride named in honor of this actor’s 1985 film at Disneyland. It was the most fun he had there, my buddy said, thinking Michael J. Fox would approve of such small talk since he was still being remembered for his work in “Back to the Future.”
“Fox looked at me kinda funny the whole time I was talking to him,” my buddy said. “I thought he couldn’t hear me very well, or something.”
It was “or something” all right. Michael J. Fox was in fact, Emilio Estevez, there only to celebrate the movie premiere with his old friend, director Christopher Cain.
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My favorite small-world story occurred during my first-ever trip to California in 1981, which also included a trip to Disneyland.
I had visited an aunt in Pasadena. While she was at work one day she put me on a bus to Anaheim to visit Mickey and Goofy and the gang.
My story has to do with the bus ride to and from Disneyland and nothing at all with anything inside of the Magic Kingdom.
A large, older man was the bus driver on both ends of the trip that day. Being a kid out of the country, I was interested when he told passengers that he had been raised in the south before moving to Cleveland and later Los Angeles. His thick southern drawl was evident as he played the role of tour guide driving across Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Since Pasadena was one of the final stops on the return trip, we were down to just three passengers on the large bus with just two stops remaining. I took the opportunity to move behind the driver and begin small talk. I told the man that I, too, was from the south, and was visiting from Arkansas and was originally from Alabama. “Me too,” said the driver.
I told him I was from a very small town called Marion in the very lightly populated Perry County. “Me too,” he said.
I told the man my name, unsure if he was pulling my leg at this point since I had supplied all of the information up to this point.
“You any kin to Welch Mooty?” he asked.
“Kin? He was my grandfather,” I said, now with eyes now larger than Goofy’s.
The man then informed me that he had cut my grandfather’s grass when he was as young as six, then noted later that he and his father were stopped by my grandfather, a deputy sheriff, once in either the ’30s or ’40s for hauling moonshine.
At this point I worried about some long-standing, repressed grudge the man may be holding.
“Mr. Mooty made us pour it all out on the road,” the man said. “But he didn’t arrest us.”
Whew, I thought, as I thanked him for the visit.
“Pouring it out hurt my father more than arresting us would have,” he added.
I don’t remember, but I believe I told the man to have a good day as I exited the bus in Pasadena.