Disclaimer: please do not try this yourself if you’re driving through bear territory.
You expect rock and pop stars to do wild a crazy things. But those nice Osmond boys? You wouldn’t expect deviant behavior like biting the heads off bats or wearing meat dresses from them.
But it seems that Donny Osmond – of “Puppy Love” and “Morning Side of the Mountain” fame in the ’70s – does have a wild side and appears to enjoy traumatizing his kids by bringing them up close to hungry bears.
Appearing recently on 7 Questions with Emmy – a children’s health and wellbeing blog hosted by East Idaho News – Donny, the seventh eldest of the nine Osmond siblings, revealed a prank he played when he visited Yellowstone Bear World with his family a few years ago.
“I was at Yellowstone (National Park) with my family,” he says. “My kids were quite young and we were coming out the west end when I saw this billboard for Bear World,” Osmond told Emmy Eaton. “I said to the kids, ‘Want to see go see some bears?’”
The kids, of course, replied, “Yeah!” but they may not have done if they knew what dad had in mind.
On the way to Bear World, he stopped at a grocery store. “My wife says, ‘Honey, what are you doing?’ And I said, “Don’t ask!”
What he did was buy as much honey as he could, and then smeared it over the bumpers of the family car.
The he drove into Bear World. “My kids were screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’ I thought it was kind of cool. The bears were all over the car!”
Luckily, the bears didn’t go into a honey-fuelled kill frenzy and the family – and car – left the park unscathed (though no doubt with bear spit all over the bumpers).
At least Osmond has the self-awareness to realize to admit to Emmy that he’s embarrassed to relive the story. It was, after all, a potentially dangerous thing to do, even with “tame” bears in a bear park. “Don’t ever put honey on your bumpers and drive through Bear World. Don’t do it. Don’t do it,” he says now.
They may look cute but always be wary of bears, even ones on wildlife parks. It’s important to know what to do if you meet one.
