‘I still think about it’: The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz on a scary moment when he was shot

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Micky Dolenz is a former resident of the UK, but that doesn’t mean he’s always welcomed there. In fact, during a scary moment in the early 1980s, he was actually shot near the River Thames in London.

“Yes, by a pellet gun,” the Monkees star confirms in a talk with Absolute Radio. “You know the canal trips you can take? We used to love to do that, as a family — get the kids and get on one of those canal boats and go up through the lochs. It wasn’t on the Thames. It was one of those places in London where you rent the canal boats.”

Despite all of the time that’s gone by, Dolenz still gets emotional about the incident — mostly because his young daughter was nearby.

“We had just taken off,” Dolenz adds, “and we were going through some farmland — and I’ll be damned! This schmuck. I’m sitting there guiding the thing, and my little daughter — who’s like 12 at the time — was sitting right next to me. He could have hit somebody in the eye. It hit me in the hand, a pellet from a pellet gun. I stopped, and I jumped off the boat, and I ran through the bushes and tried to find the little shit. [Laughs.] To this day, if I ever found him, I’d beat the — it’s been years, and I still think about it. He could have really hurt somebody.”

Safely back in the states these days, Dolenz is set to star in a new play by Emmy-winning Simpsons writer Mike Reiss called Comedy is Hard, opening Wednesday (September 24, 2014) in Centerbrook, Connecticut. Dolenz, whose previous stage credits include Grease, Pippin, Aida and Hairspray, is co-starring with Joyce DeWitt of Three’s Company fame.

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