be lived in reruns. Watch me in the
new show Love Boat! Walk in the light,
Chad Everett.”
And so all the way across the coun-
try, as we were driving from Texas to
the Grand Canyon, Ronnie would go
over the contents of that letter with me.
He would say, “What does that
mean, ‘Life’s not meant to be lived in
reruns’? And what does that mean, to
‘walk in the light’? I’m walking in the
light, right?”
And I would say, “Yeah, Ron, you’re
walking in the light.”When we reach California, it’s a won-
derful moment. We all go swimming
in the ocean, and everybody’s really
happy. Except for, of course, Ron. Be-
cause he’s on a higher mission.
He and I come to this agreement:
Everyone else involved with the film
is going to fly home, and he and I are
going to spend a few more days in Los
Angeles.
On our last day in California, we
hatch an idea. We go to this town near
Malibu, out in the hills, where Ronnie
had heard that Chad Everett lived. We
go to a shopping center, and Ronnie
gets really excited because he inter-
views this kid who apparently had
bagged Chad Everett’s groceries. Then
someone else tells us that they know
the street that Chad Everett lives on.
Ronnie says, “I just wanna see what
his house looks like.”
It’s a gated community, and I find
myself sneaking past as the guard’snot looking. We get to what we think
is his house.
Ronnie says, “I just wanna take a pic-
ture in front of his house.” So Ronnie
gets out, and it’s not until we’re hiding
in the bushes and we’ve been there for
over an hour that I realize that this is a
terrible idea. Why are we here? What
did I think was going to happen? I had
this crazy idea that Chad Everett would
see Ronnie and he would understand
that this was someone that he should
get to know. But of course, if Chad
Everett walked out of that house, Ron-
nie was going to rush toward him, and
someone was going to call the police.
It was going to be a disaster.So it was a certain sense of relief
that I felt when a security guard came
up and told us that we had to leave.
And that film ends with Ronnie kissing
Chad Everett’s star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame. It’s a good ending, but
of course it’s not the ending that Ron-
nie and I wanted for that film.
As we took the film to festivals
around the country, Ronnie became a
little bit of a celebrity, and it was funny
because that didn’t mean anything
to him, to be a celebrity himself. HeRONNIE SAYS,
“I JUST WANNA TAKE
A PICTURE IN FRONT
OF HIS HOUSE.”90 june 2019
Reader’s Digest