5 Things: Well, Really Only 1, Because It's Long. It's About My Friend Stephen King.

I remembered today that I know Stephen King. Ok, "know" might be stretching it a little. When his movie The Green Mile came out, a group of us went to see it at the HA E movie theater in Boone. If you aren't a local, the HA E theater is the CHALET movie theater, except the C, L, and T lights were operational for a minute, maybe two, then burned out and they never bothered to change the bulbs. Anyhoo... We were sticking to - I mean sitting in - our seats before the movie when a group of maybe 8 people came in and sat 2 rows in front of us (the row between was empty). Upon first glimpse of one of them, I thought to myself, "Whoa. That dude looks like Stephen King." so I said to my friends, "Whoa. That dude looks like Stephen King." in my whisper-loud-enough-so-the-three-people-I'm-with-can-hear-me-but-the-dude-two-rows-ahead-of-me-can't voice. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, because the dude turned around and stared right at me. And it was Stephen King. Staring into my eyes. My very wide, amazed, freaked out eyes. And yes, it was creepy. Like he was staring into my soul and putting some kind of voodoojoodoo on me. At first I thought I wet my pants, but then I remembered I was at the HA E and it was probably already in my seat to begin with.
Stephen King. In Boone. At the HA E, no less, where you need a crowbar to pry your feet off of whatever has accumulated on the floor for 20 years. Stephen King. Yeah.
I know.. you're wondering why Stephen King was in a tiny movie theater in a tiny North Carolina town. Well... Part of The Green Mile was filmed at Moses Cone Manor on the Blue Ridge Parkway (about 5 miles from Boone) and locals were hired as extras in the film, so the night the movie opened in Boone, Stephen King came back to watch it with them. I thought that was pretty cool, especially given the theater in which he had to watch it. It was shortly after he was randomly run over by a dude in a van while walking on the side of the road, so he was using a walker. And if Stephen King's creepy factor isn't high enough on its own, Stephen King hunched over a walker with a limping stride... Ew.
Anyway, I just remembered this today for some reason and the memory of looking into his sinister eyes is a disturbing enough memory that I thought it was worth sharing.
Please don't tell him I said anything. I don't want to die.