When Tufts senior Megan* headed to Boston on the last Saturday night of February to celebrate a friend's birthday, she didn't expect to run into a former member of the Partridge family. (Let alone one whose 2001 autobiography is entitled "Random Acts of Badness.")
But that's exactly what happened when Megan, along with a group of friends and housemates, hit the Harp's dance floor,
"Basically, I was dancing with this kid when Danny Bonaduce walked in the door," Megan recalls. "I didn't notice him until the kid I was dancing with said, 'Look, there's Danny Bonaduce!'"
"At that point," Megan laughs, "I said, 'See ya - I'm going to dance with Danny Bonaduce!'"
And so she did: "He and my friends and I just ended up hanging out," Megan says of Bonaduce, whose struggle with sobriety - and keeping his 15-year marriage on track - was chronicled in VH1's reality series "Breaking Bonaduce."
Bonaduce lives in Los Angeles, but was in Boston that weekend to receive the Harvard Lampoon's spoof version of the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year award.
According to the Lampoon's Web site, Bonaduce stripped down at the end of the ceremony, saying, "Before I came up here, I asked this police officer if he would arrest me if I got naked. He said 'I guess I would have to.' That's why I waited until the end to do it."
Throughout his speech, Bonaduce also gave the audience tips on how to use your forehead to successfully break a man's nose: "The trick is, you do it while doing this [pretending to apologize]," he said.
Though Megan and Co.'s encounter with the former child star didn't end at the edge of the Harp's dance floor, it included no nudity or head-butting - just "chilling."
"He came back to our house at the end of the night and hung out for a few hours," Megan says of Bonaduce. "He smoked an entire pack of Marlboro Red 100s in our living room while giving us advice on life and love."
When asked whether Bonaduce was a nice guy, Megan's response is an emphatic yes.
"He really was - he was a lot of fun," she says. "And he was very respectful. He was a perfect gentleman."
But he was not, apparently, perfectly sober. Despite the fact that Bonaduce's reality show centered on his attempt to curb his alcohol addiction, several of Megan and her friends' pictures from that evening show Bonaduce with liquor in hand.
Megan and her friends - who have not kept in touch with Bonaduce - requested that the Daily not print those pictures for privacy reasons.
"I think he was on the wagon for a little while, but when he was hanging out with us, he was drinking casually," Megan says, though she adds that "the pictures with the liquor bottle in his hand were a joke poking fun at the media buzz over his alcohol use."
When you click on the "related links" section of VH1's "Breaking Bonaduce" Web site, the sole link that comes up is one for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services.
*Due to the sensitive nature of the situation, only Megan's first name has been used.
