Once in a blue moon, have fun

Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm said last week that we’ve become a nation of whiners. Speaking for myself, he’s right. But before he disses an entire nation, would he prefer that we become a nation of mooners instead?

Perhaps that’ll be an upcoming show for “Larry King Live” and, if so, I’d trot out Mission Viejo’s Robert Zoellner as a panelist. And I’d keep him on for the full hour, as Larry likes to say. And he’ll take your calls!

Zoellner took my call Monday afternoon, some 48 hours after he somehow morphed from a 47-year-old pool designer, husband and father of three into a man who stood alongside the railroad tracks in Laguna Niguel on Saturday, waited with a few thousand others for a train to roll by and . . . then dropped “a very nice pair of white shorts” from his backside and mooned the passengers.

Hey, it’s tradition down there, going on nearly 30 years, and in a country beset by all kinds of angst, what’s wrong with a little ribald behavior?

And beyond that, how come nobody ever invites me to stuff like that?

Zoellner knew of the annual mooning but had never gone. He fixed that this year by driving a motor home down on Friday night and parking near the tracks with a pal. His wife’s parting words: “Go have fun.”

Boy, did he. I figured a businessman like Zoellner might have some morning-after regrets, but no way. He talked about it Monday like a cowboy after his first roundup.

“I’d only heard good things about it,” he says, “a fun gathering of adults. Some flash, some don’t, it’s a public spectacle, a public event. It’s one of those things you do once in life, like a Woodstock. I wouldn’t go to a demolition derby every weekend, but I did it once. I looked at it like the first time I went to NASCAR.”

Did he premeditate the dropping of the shorts? “Nothing was premeditated,” the 6-foot-4, 210-pound Zoellner says, recalling the moment of truth. “Here’s what it was: At that point, there wasn’t a large number of people, maybe a couple thousand, and you could feel the momentum of, like, hoo-hoo, a train’s coming. I literally was talking on the phone and the person on the line said, ‘Are you going to flash?’ and I said, ‘I guess now’s as good a time as any.’ ”

Of such spontaneity are life’s great moments created.

Zoellner, the father of 7-year-old twins and a 12-year-old, says the kids don’t know how daddy spent his Saturday afternoon. Nor would he want them there, although he says he saw no lascivious behavior or misconduct.

To the contrary, he says, he was impressed by the eclectic mix and the camaraderie of the crowd, which police estimated at several thousand. “There were people from their 30s to their 90s, Asians, bikers, Spanish, everybody was getting along, having a good time and anticipating the next train.”

Zoellner concedes that “I wasn’t as prepared as the guys wearing kilts” but it wasn’t his first moon. As a fraternity pledge at Cal State Chico and under orders from his frat brothers, he targeted a rival fraternity house.

This time around, it was his call.

Zoellner was put off by the police who showed up midafternoon to break up the crowd. He says it was unnecessary and created more problems by forcing lots of inebriated people onto a single roadway.

Other than that, Zoellner says, the day was a success.

Well, there was one little thing . . .

“I was called a novice,” he says. “I didn’t know the difference between an Amtrak and a Metrolink. One is a commuter train for businessmen, the other’s more like the public train. A veteran told me I must be a novice, because I’d flashed the Metro rather than the Amtrak.”

Correct his mistake and show up again next year? Aw, probably not, he says. “Looking back, it was not the most educated choice I’ve ever made in life,” Zoellner says, “but for adults to have fun in one place for one day, it just didn’t seem inappropriate.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.