OH, DANNY BOY

The name Danny Lloyd may not exactly jump out at you like a goblin in a haunted house. He's better known as the child actor who portrayed Danny Torrance, the cute little mop-top who possessed a spooky form of ESP in The Shining, a creepy movie based on the even creepier Stephen King novel by the same title. It's especially creepy when you're reading it while holed up in the Colorado mountains at night, as I was last year.

Watching the movie for the umpeenth time the other night on TV, I wondered if the real Danny, who was just six years old at the time the movie was made in 1980, turned out okay--or had he ended up crazed from his acting experience? It's such a scary movie. Did he end up with a Hot Wheels phobia? Might he be haunted by visions of Jack Nicholson chasing him with a knife? Would encountering twin sisters with long brown hair and British accents cause him to flip out? Did he go into hibernation every time it snowed? Was he only having conversations with his index finger and no one else? Poor, poor Danny. How was he?

Well, thanks to the Internet, I learned that the adult Danny Lloyd became a middle school science teacher in Illinois. Yikes! Facing 13-year-old terrorists every day has got to be scarier than anything Stephen King could ever imagine. His life had turned out worse than I thought!

Now, something even stranger happened as soon as I got off the Danny website. All sorts of scary messages popped up on my #$%@ computer!!! Messages with words like: virus, infections, and the like. In spite of all its techno protection, the computer is in critical condition and about to be hospitalized. It's back to the library computers until further notice. Obviously, Danny still has some sort of horrendous power, and he didn't take a shining to me.