When it comes to reptiles, apparently Sharon Stone and many of her fans have a long, long memory.
On Sunday, the actress posted a video on Twitter of a gigantic lizard walking through her Beverly Hills neighborhood. Her two-sentence comment included 11 exclamation points. (Follow-up tweets indicated that animal control had picked up the lizard without incident.)
Stone’s excessive punctuation is understandable. Since she and her former husband Phil Bronstein had a bizarre and traumatic encounter with a Komodo dragon at the Los Angeles Zoo in 2001.
Stone had arranged a private tour of the zoo for Bronstein, then editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, as an early Father’s Day gift, SFGate.com wrote at the time. He had always been fascinated with Komodo dragons, and zookeepers allowed Stone and Bronstein to enter the enclosure for two of the lizards.
One of the huge lizards bit Bronstein’s foot and wouldn’t let go.
News reports differed on how Bronstein was extricated, but there was no disputing that Stone did a lot of screaming.
Bronstein required surgery to repair his foot, but the dragon was uninjured.
A number of people on Twitter remembered the zoo incident:
For the record, the lizard that Stone saw on Sunday was not a Komodo dragon at all. It was a monitor lizard, SFGate.com reported.