Celebrity Moments (Bogus Edition)

I love finding new, really well-written blogs. But I don’t like using services like StumbleUpon and Technorati et al. to find them. Many of my favorites I came to almost accidentally; someone comments astutely on someone else’s blog, for example, and I follow up the link from the commenter’s name, and lo, there I find a rich verdant pasture of daily commentary and/or howling snarkery, or whatever.

So it was that I landed on The Misssy M Misssives (yes, those are triple S’s), subtitled “Stories from a Besom and Blether.”

In particular, I landed there on a post from May, entitled “David Bowie sold me a raffle ticket”:

…in my life, it appears that I have met quite a few famous people. I thought I’d list some of them for you for a laugh. They are all true.

True. All right then. That’s interesting. And they are funny. (Likewise all the comments, in which visitors listed their own brushes with the notable.)

(Note, though, that not all these celebrities will be familiar, capital-N Names on this side of the Atlantic — or maybe just on this side of 40-some years of age. Like, Christopher Lee? Sure. Even Roland Gift, whose name gave me a little ego puff because I knew who he was before she said so. But “Wet Wet Wet’s Marty Pellow”? Sheesh.)

I’ve got no “celebrity moments” to report at the moment. But I thought it might be entertaining (well, to one of us, anyhow) to riff on the idea of celebrity encounters which never actually happened…

Bumping Elbows

• When my Dad was in the Army, he worked on a Jeep driven by Buddy Hackett. Buddy was so grateful to have the thing running again that he gave Dad a can of beer and a pack of smokes. Years later, we were visiting Las Vegas as a family and Dad introduced us to Buddy after his early show at The Sands casino. Buddy said “Hey, squirt” to me and tousled my hair — difficult when the touslee sports a crewcut — and then had somebody from his entourage remove us from the dressing room because, he said, he had served in an anti-aircraft unit during the war and never drove a Jeep. Dad was still laughing about that when the LVPD drove him away.
• I delivered newspapers for many years when I was a boy. One of my favorite customers was the Stapleton household, where actress-to-be Jean lived with her parents. I liked delivering their paper because they had lots of bushes out front and it was fun and easy to “miss” the porch. They were lousy tippers, though.
• During the Christmas shopping season in 1995, I was browsing in Saks — THE Saks store, on Fifth Avenue in NYC. (Of course I couldn’t afford to buy anything there; I’d lost my paper route the previous year and hadn’t yet found something lucrative to take its place.) En route from the second to the third floor, I was suddenly stuck on an escalator. In the ensuing panic, I almost didn’t realize that the impatient voice behind me was Téa Leoni‘s, repeating over and over, “Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m sorry, can you step aside?”
• Paul Reubens, a/k/a Pee-Wee Herman, once muscled me aside to get into a men’s room in Radio City Music Hall.
• In the late 1990s, I tried speed-dating a few times. The last time I did this was at a function held on the second floor of a firehouse in Washington, DC. I’m pretty sure two of my fellow speed-daters were Donald Rumsfeld and Laura Bush, but of course neither of them were all that prominent at the time. Laura Bush (if it was her) asked me what I thought of tatting, but it was the last question and I never got to answer before the buzzer went off. Don Rumsfeld (ditto), well, I never got to interview or be interviewed by him. It was probably just as well.
• Finally, just a few months ago, I had just finished pumping a tankful of gas at the local Circle K convenience store and was driving away. I couldn’t get a real good look at him, but I think the guy who was chasing after me to warn me about the nozzle still stuck in my gas-tank receptacle — I think that was playwright David Mamet. He had the right build, the right hair, and he was cussing a blue streak. And of course he was smoking his trademark cigar. But then the nozzle popped out and, well, if you read the papers you know the rest.

Yes, I’ve had an eventful, celebrity-filled life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything — not even a raffle ticket from David Bowie.