What do you think of when you think of Anderson Cooper? His beautiful face and hair? That time you saw him in midtown? His giggling? His terrible daytime television show, and the time he held a fat cat, and found poop on his cell phone, and tried coffee and spinach for the first time, and yelled at the human barbie? His letter to Andrew Sullivan? His eyeballs? Or any of his real work (no link)? Well, get ready for all that shit to be blown right out of your brains and replaced with the one TRUE Anderson Cooper memory: When he saved America from a mailbox banana peel. From E! Online:

“There was a lady putting a used banana peel into a mailbox on my street, and for some reason, I don’t know why, it so bothered me I did something I’ve never done before,” Cooper recalled. “I stopped dead and I started yelling at her. This is my mailbox, by the way.”

Acting like the model citizen his fans imagine him to be, CNN’s top banana [Ed Note: Good.] took forceful action, not only upbraiding her for her laziness but physically restraining her from mailing off said peel.

“I pick up the banana peel, I pick up her hand and I turn it around; I open up her palm. I put the banana peel back in her palm. I don’t know when I became this guy,” said Cooper. “I put it back in her palm and I said, ‘Go walk across the street. Put it in the garbage can.’ And her daughters were there. Then I was like, ‘Who am I?'”

“AN-DER-SON COO-PERRRRRRR!” (To the tune of “24601,” obviously.) (FROM LES MIS.) Certainly all of America thanks Anderson Cooper for his brave banana gesture, especially those who had mail in that mailbox that day, and also the mailman who would have had to retrieve the banana. That woman and her daughters maybe don’t want to thank him at the moment — they are the only exceptions — but certainly in time they will learn their lesson and think back on what he did for them fondly. Thank you, Mr. Cooper. You are a true banana hero.