That broke parts of my brain that I didn’t know I had. Were you a door buster, or was he a “poo with the door half open because he makes it know when he “dumps his assets”?”
No, you met her once, and then saw her a few times after that.
Upon further thought it is possible to meet Madonna more than once. One can meet her when she was an American and separately when she was a British person. Her Italian heritage is given no thought these days because, I guess they don’t have “sexy skeletons” in Italian culture.
When I was just out of high school, I was in a basement/garage band. We played a few community center gigs before going our separate ways. Years later, I got in touch with a former band mate & asked if he was still pickin’. He said he was in a country band & invited me to one of their practices. I followed his directions & found myself in some dude’s basement listening to my friend’s band covering Hank Williams Jr. & George Jones songs. Their singer was very good. He eventually left the band & moved to Nashville.
I have a much better “AFTER they made it big” story: When Jeremy Gelbwaks left/was booted from The Partridge Family, his family crossed the country and he wound up at my elementary school (and eventually, my class) in Reston, VA. Kind of a douche, but I sucked up to him right away. I was not alone in that sad regard.
My dad, a crusty old civil servant in the late 60s, was sent to what they called “Executive Charm School” in Berkeley with a bunch of similarly-placed federal and military types. Being square establishment types, they were naturally curious about all the “counterculture” stuff going on across the bay in San Francisco, so they went to see a comedy group called “The Committee.” Dad wasn’t impressed. His most enduring memory was hearing a bad rendition of the song “Higher and Higher” by the then-unknown…
…Valerie Harper. This story had a lot more punch when he told it thirty-odd years ago.
Rodney Dangerfield said I was a funny guy.
John Travolta winked at me and said I looked really good in my gabardine suit and fedora.
Chubby Checker asked me to play in his band.
David Bowie gave me hugs and kisses.
Salma Hayek’s dog peed on me.
I injected Mötley Crüe singer Danny Joe Brown a few times before he died.
Before his last concert, I told Elvis he was a no-talent imposter.
Burt Reynolds picked up my mother, then hugged and kissed her in front of my father.
Ringo Starr and Steven Hawking told my brother that he was too big to sit next to them.
Dave Bowie, on the tour (Spiders from Mars) that turned him from a one hit wonder into a superstar.
We nearly didn’t bother going, and the venue was 95% empty.
They closed down the balcony area to make it look more full.
When D.B. came on he blew our socks off, and actually fell off of the stage, though he tried to pretend that it was part of the act and carried on with the song on ground level with the audience.
It cost as I recall, about 50p in todays money, not long after people were paying many pounds to see a small dot in the distance repeated on tv screens closer to the watcher.
And we nearly didn’t bother going.
One small gripe I want to get out of my system while we’re on the subject, D.B. is a great admirer of Jim Bowie, and so named himself after him.
So his name is pronounced the same way, not as in the bow of a ship as many pretentious tossers say it.
Thanks.
This is the part where I say I saw the fiddler from Dave Matthews Band in Athens in the early 90s. The rest of the band didn’t show, and neither did the other bands that were supposed to show except for the opening act – Gypsy Train, and they only had one album worth of material ready so they played the exact same set three times in a row. At the start of the third set the fiddler appeared and he actually made the music a lot better, but not good enough to listen to for a third time, so we left.
DId you ever get to the Agora Ballroom in Hallandale during the early 80’s to see the The Kids?
Met 16yo Johnny Depp from that band, in front of Lums on Hollywood Blvd and 441. Guitar player sweet, quiet, nice smile, bummer that I was with my boyfriend.
I hardly ever see bands before they make it big, of course partly because most bands don’t make it big. But often it’s because they don’t tour unless they are big. For instance, I was a fan of Fountains of Wayne ever since their debut album, but I didn’t get a chance to see them in concert until after they’d released Welcome Interstate Managers which of course had Stacey’s Mom. I’d say they weren’t “celebrities” before this, because the local record store didn’t even stock Welcome Interstate Managers when it came out (perhaps not expecting Stacey’s Mom to be a big hit.)
I agree, David Bowie used to put on great shows (maybe he still does?).
The encounter I referenced above took place at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia during his Diamond Dogs tour in '74. In those days, I was working summers as a stage hand at various venues, including the Tower, so I got to meet him. I asked him to autograph a concert program for me and he signed it, *“To Tibby, Hugs and Kisses, Bowie.” *I was thrilled to have his autograph, but too embarrassed to show my friends what he wrote (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
I saw Penn and Teller at an Equity Waiver theater in Hollywood back in the early 80s. I believe they were mostly doing the college circuit in those days and the only reason I saw them was because I knew the theater manager. She recommended the show highly. They were as weird and wild then as they are now.
Oh, I thought of some others, but mostly they were because of where I grew up. I knew a fair number of kids of celebrities that then went on to claim fame of their own. Probably the most famous of the lot are Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Martin Sheen was a frequent customer of the business that gave me my high school job so I met them a time or two when they were just punk kids.
I guess by around 1989 or so Penn and Teller would have been considered “big”, right? No matter. I had heard something then about how Teller always carried an ink pen with him, usually tucked into his watch band. I thought nothing of it until I saw him back then in the old Biograph theater in Georgetown, Washington DC, waiting to get in line for the next film showing. Sure enough, there it was, extending from his wrist back up his forearm.
