25th Anniversary of the Goose Incident
At the end of March (I've seen the 27th, 30th, and 31st listed) in 1999, a buck wild thing happened to one Fabio Lanzoni. (It even has its own section on his Wikipedia!) And yes, it involved a goose.
First things first:
Who is Fabio Lanzoni?
Largely known as only "Fabio", Lanzoni made a splash in the 1990s as a frequent cover model for "bodice rippers" (aka romance novels). Long before the pops of cartoony color today, romance covers showed readers what they were all about with half naked men and women.
Or maybe you remember him as the spokesman for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!
Click to viewAt any rate, Fabio had many business ventures (including penning his own romance novels) and seemingly stayed booked and busy.
The Goose Incident
The Incident occurred at Busch Gardens Williamsburg in Virginia. As Esquire puts it, Fabio "wasn't [there] to kill a goose; he was there to take a front row seat for the inaugural ride of Apollo's Chariot, the theme park's first hypercoaster."
A goose just happened to get in the way.
News channels and late night hosts had a field day. Everything was goosegoosegoose.
Many assumed that the poor goose just flew into Fabio's face. But in 2021, Fabio clarified:
"Actually, the bird hit the camera, and a piece of the metal of the camera flew and cut the bridge of [my] nose. And that was a miracle. But...they were afraid of me suing Budweiser, and so they blamed it on a bird. But actually the bird hit the camera. The bird never hit my face...I was very fortunate, very lucky because I needed one stitch."
And there you have it. A very weird day in the last year of the '90s. A day, Esquire argues, that killed the "dream of Fabio". For his part, Fabio seems to have taken all the attention and jokes in stride. The goose on the other hand...
OP NOTE: I was really hoping that the 25th anniversary is the "Golden Anniversary" so I could make a Golden Goose joke. However, Google tells me that that's the 50th. Only 25 more years!
SOURCES 1 | 2 | 3 | 4