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“Cheers” stars remember skipping work to get high on mushrooms
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“Cheers” stars remember skipping work to get high on mushrooms

Cheers Stars Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson and George Wendt take a real Trip memory down.

In an exclusive clip from the upcoming episode of Sirius XM’s Where everyone knows your name In the podcast, hosts Danson and Harrelson are joined by Norm!—or rather, the man who played him, George Wendt—and together the trio recall a time when several cast members skipped the show and some of them took “extraordinary amounts of mushrooms.”

This “truancy day,” as Danson called it, came about because the popular sitcom’s shooting schedule included “a lot of women” and the male co-stars were therefore not needed as much. “So we thought maybe we could (play truancy) – John had just bought a boat,” Wendt explained, presumably referring to Cheers Co-star John Ratzenberger.

“A Boston Whaler,” Danson clarified. “Yeah, and he really wanted to show it off, so we planned this little trip,” Wendt added.

George Wendt as Norm Peterson, Woody Harrelson as Woody Boyd, Ted Danson as Sam Malone in Cheers.
Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

Danson, who played bar owner Sam Malone in all 11 seasons of “The Last Man,” Cheersexplained that he and Harrelson – who played Woody Boyd on the show – were already stoned when they all met at the boat. At that point, they called producers and said they weren’t feeling well, which Wendt said was also “peer pressure” forcing him to do.

“So, we go on the boat,” Danson recalls. “Kelsey (Grammer) was up all night playing cards, went straight to the bottom bunk and fell asleep on the way. He was fast asleep. Woody turns to me and says, ‘Have you ever eaten mushrooms?’ And I say, ‘No. No, I haven’t.’ And he said, ‘Well, this is going to be a good time. We’ve got nothing to do. We’re going to go out on the boat.’ We hadn’t had breakfast, so I was pretty hungry and I think I ate an extraordinary amount of mushrooms, and then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s OK.'”

From there, however, the trip was anything but smooth—literally. As Danson explained, they were halfway to Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California and there were “remnants of a hurricane in Mexico,” so the boat had to contend with enormous waves.

“So people who don’t take mushrooms would get seasick quite a lot,” Danson explained. “But I was sitting there getting more and more nervous and whatever it is – you get stoned or whatever it is when you take mushrooms – and I look at you, Woody, and you’re sprawled out on a bunk and I think, ‘Oh, he’s so used to it that he just chills it out and relaxes. I’m panicking. I’m having trouble breathing. I’m going upstairs.'”

Danson said that at that point, he joined Wendt on top of the boat, who immediately realized he was high. “I came and sat next to you and you looked at me and was like, ‘You’re high, aren’t you?’ and I nodded sheepishly and John was like, ‘Oh, for God’s sake,'” Danson recalled, adding that it was Wendt who calmed him down during the ride. “You spent the next 45 minutes poking me about every minute or every other minute and saying, ‘Breathe,’ because I literally forgot to breathe and felt like I was dying, and then you nudged me.'”

At one point, Danson remembered Harrelson coming up to them, but when he did, his friend looked like “Woody the Skeleton” to him thanks to the drugs, Danson said. “That was my only visual experience, you know, I looked at you and you looked like a skeleton. He looked like Woody the Skeleton to me. That was my only visual experience through mushrooms,” Danson said.

According to the Good place Star, Wendt was his “lifesaver” because he himself was not high. However, Wendt – who says he never took mushrooms – pointed out that he got seasick on the way back due to the “terrible” sea conditions.

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Although it was “the worst four hours” of his life, Danson said he might try the experiment again. “I think I’m ready to take mushrooms again, because that’s a good thing, right? Mushrooms?” he asked his co-stars. Harrelson joked, “Well, I guess it depends on the environment, but definitely in the middle of a hurricane in the Pacific.”

Watch the full trippy memory in the video above. Wendt’s episode of Where everyone knows your name will be available Wednesday on the SiriusXM app, on Team Coco’s YouTube page, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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