She let him cheat, they married, she moved to Hollywood. Wait a sec …
At the annual Dierks Pine Tree Festival, there was Danielle Hicks. Danielle dressed and talked differently from the mostly beauty-pageant-loving girls in town. Was she just confident or, having just moved to the small town from the capital city, was it big-city sophistication?
No, she had “a little bit of a hippie vibe going on,” with long, natural hair, cut-off jeans and Birkenstocks, she says now.
Whatever, Brady Davis sensed something different about Danielle Hicks, and “I was pretty intrigued by that.”
School started and they were assigned to the same 10th-grade geometry class.
“I sat in front of him and I let him cheat off my papers sometimes,” she says.
Brady worked in his aunt’s restaurant, Teresa’s Drive-In.
“She would come in and order milkshakes,” Brady says. “I saw her coming in and out of there probably three or four times —.”
“— A week,” she says. “I don’t think I was even thinking I wanted to be his girlfriend or I wanted to date him. I just wanted to be around him — to be in the restaurant or be near him by the lockers or be close to where he was at school or wherever he was.”
Brady’s friend caught on to this and decided to urge things along by dropping Danielle off in a gas station parking lot with Brady one night while everyone was in the middle of the weekly small-town cruising ritual. When the friend drove away, Brady and Danielle were the only ones left in the parking lot.
“I had my truck there, and I was like, ‘Well, I guess you’re riding with me,’” Brady says.
“We were both very happy about that,” Danielle says.
They rode around together for three or four hours that night, talking and listening to music, and togetherness became their habit.
“He played football, and I was kind of an artist, and we both loved music. There was just good conversation and funny banter,” she says.
Danielle waited for Brady every night after his games. On one of those nights, he patted the middle of the truck seat, an unspoken request that she move closer to him.
“It was very small-town,” she says of it all. “It hasn’t really stopped since that first night that his friend dropped me off. We were pretty inseparable.”
Brady did break off their relationship after high school graduation, though. He was going to Arkansas Tech University at Russellville and she was going to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, and they couldn’t see a reality where things would work with them apart.
“I wasn’t planning on trying to find another girlfriend; I just didn’t want to deal with this jealousy that I thought I was going to have,” he says.
They talked every day, though, and after a year of that they realized they were acting against their shared interests.
Danielle gave up a full art scholarship at UCA to join Brady in Russellville.
She was with Brady the night a hypnotist entertaining a crowd at Arkansas Tech picked him as one of 10 students to come onstage. Brady was put into a trance, during which he told the hypnotist — and the crowd — that he was painting a picture of a beautiful woman who was right there with them, and that if he had $4,000 he would buy her an engagement ring.
This was the first Danielle had heard from him or xhis near-term plans.
“He was flamenco dancing all over the stage and I was telling my friend next to me that he would never ever do this in front of 1,000 people,” Danielle says. “So I knew when he asked him the question about the ring he wasn’t kidding around. He wasn’t putting on at all. That was really what he was thinking.”
He proposed soon after — scrapping plans to do it while his buddies played guitars around a candlelit table on top of a cliff — because he had a ring in his pocket and could not wait. “But she said yes!” he says. They were married July 24, 1999, before their junior year in college, in the Wesley Foundation Chapel at Arkansas Tech.
Danielle and Brady have three daughters — Maggie, 10, Mimi, 8, and Ruby, 6.
Aside from enduring a year of long-distance relationship while Danielle moved to Burbank, Calif., to try her hand at acting, they have lived their married life together in Little Rock, where Brady works as an information technology specialist.
“That was tough,” Danielle, a photographer, says of their time apart. “We missed each other and I waited a lot of tables and served a lot of drinks at the bar and didn’t get a lot of acting gigs. We kind of just follow our hearts with the big things. When I look back at our life together, that’s been a huge wonderful navigating force for us.”