Nineteen years ago today, everything changed.
For those of us who came of age in the late 1990s, it was our Shot Heard 'Round The World, our Day The Music Died, our Secret Handjob At The First Lollapalooza. In an era rife with divisiveness and scandal—Whitewater, the O. J. Simpson (excuse me, the "somebody else") murders, JonBenet Ramsey, Carrot Top—only this brush with national tragedy truly changed how we live now.
Yep, you guessed it: on March 30, 1999, male supermodel/margarine spokesman Fabio killed a goose in mid-air with his face. We've been reeling from the aftershocks ever since.
Fabio, (whose last name is Lanzoni, but we didn't know that then and we certainly don't need to know it now) wasn't at Busch Gardens Williamsburg in Virginia to kill a goose; he was there to take a front row seat for the inaugural ride on Apollo's Chariot, the theme park's first "hypercoaster." Apollo's Chariot was—and is—a thing of towering beauty, the likes of which Virginians hadn't seen. And the park's promoters knew that they couldn't settle for anything less than Fabio to lead its first charge.
Fabio was, and remains, a professional—you don't pose for the covers of hundreds of romance novels by showing up to a gig without a clue—but even he couldn't have prepared for what lay ahead. What, was he going to wear a helmet and cover that chiseled face, all that flowing hair? No, Fabio boarded Apollo's Chariot like a more handsome version of everyone else, soaking in the momentousness of the event as part of a group, stepping down from his golden pedestal to be with "the people."
A thing about hypercoasters (really, the main thing): they get really high up in the air. Not so high that your ears pop or you have small planes rerouting around you, but still: pretty high. A hypercoaster takes its passengers 200 feet or more above the ground, after which it drops them hard and fast. (If the drop is over 300 feet, it's called it a "gigacoaster." No, seriously.)
Of course, nobody counts on a 10-pound flying obstacle getting in the way of someone's face during this drop, much less the face of the ride's most renowned passenger. That's exactly what happened on that fateful day, though—at roughly 73 mph. Unlike almost everything else Fabio has ever done, it wasn't pretty.
For Baby Boomer audiences, this (literal) run-in was hardly newsworthy: good for a chuckle, sure, but couldn't the late-night talk shows maybe give it a rest? The young people knew it meant more than that, though. The dream of Fabio was dead. Never again could a man be physically perfect without being the subject of mockery. It is no coincidence that The Man Show, with its celebration of beer-gutted male mediocrity, debuted mere months later: it was the first stage of a revolution. Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, and the rest of the schlub army were waiting in the wings, knowing that heterosexual women and gay men would one day celebrate Leonardo DiCaprio's dad bod for lack of another ideal. Who could want a Fabio now? Handsome, chiseled, earnest guys like that… Why, their faces are practically goose magnets!
Nineteen years ago, a goose died. The same day, a generation's drive for physical beauty, and a little bit of our national innocence, died with it.
The photos and video that circulated endlessly for days after the incident (this was before the Internet could do anything useful, so the news cycle was still pretty slow) were deceptively gruesome. All told, it only took three stitches to get Fabio back in action. Still, his career never quite rebounded from the indignity of his goose blood-covered face becoming national news. Despite his stoic good humor about the incident and his relatively negligible physical injuries, Fabio was irrevocably hurt. Nobody would ever take him quite as seriously again.
