Have you ever met a celebrity IRL?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I’ve also met both Penn and Teller in Vegas. Teller is only “non-speaking” on-stage. After the show he was chatting with the people getting autographs. As I was getting Penn’s autograph, he commented on my nice hat, which I realised much to my horror was a “Sigfried and Roy” cap I’d bought for the cheezy leopard print brim. I stammered “Oh, uh uh…well I went to their gift shop but we paid to see YOUR show!” He gave me a strange look and said. “No, seriously. It’s a NICE HAT.” lol…I thought he was trying to be snide but he really just liked it, haha.

Wynona Ryder came to my theater a couple times when she was “dating” Dave Pirner (sp). She seemed pretty stupid, lol. I also had Willem (sp) Dafoe, Robin Williams and (former prez candidate) Jerry Brown a few times.

When I worked at FAO Schwarz I sold Creepy Crawlers to Smokey Robinson. He was very nice, but I was hoping he would ask me if I liked working there so I could say “Don’t let my glad expression, give you the wrong impression…” heh heh. He didn’t ask. He did buy lots of extra goop and molds at my insistance, tho. Heehee. Melanie Griffith also came to the store but I didn’t speak to her myself. I did overhear her speaking to one of the other salespersons, and I can assure you her voice REALLY IS that annoying in person. Oh, and she was emaciated too. I coulda picked her up by the ankles and flung her across the room. TINY TINY WOMAN!

42

John Ritter. Complete and total asshole when I met him. I’ve never met anyone so into themselves in my life. Other than that, I’ve just met a bunch of pro athletes.

43

I had supper and spent an evening with Bret “The Hitman” Hart when he was the WWF champ. I forget how old I was, but suffice to say I was around 12, so I was a big fan. We lived in this small town and my dad was an electrician. He did some work for this lady who then invited us over for supper in a couple of weeks. Apparently she was Bret’s aunt, and he said it was okay if she invited some people over for supper while he was there. Very cool. I sat beside him on the couch and a few other people and myself asked him wrestling questions.
Also, I have met many famous magicians. Basically, if they’re in town, my boss at the magic shop gets to go back stage so I go along. I’ve also met Penn & Teller and Lance Burton when I was in Vegas. All very cool guys, and I talked to Teller about magic for quite a while after the show. He stayed around talking to a few of us for nearly an hour after their show! Very nice guy. Penn, though also nice, is very intimidating. I asked meekly if I could get a picture with him and Teller. He very kindly obliged.
Also, I have met many punk bands, and have hung out with several after their shows. Including: Good Riddance, Mad Caddies, No Use For A Name, and many others. I just go up and talk to them when they do shows at my University.

44

Just yesterday, in Reno, Nevada, I saw Jack Nicholson being directed by Sean Penn in a scene in their up-coming flick, The Pledge, about a retiring cop trying to catch one last bad guy.

Living in L.A., I see a lot of celebs filming on location:

Robert De Niro & Sam Wanamaker (Guilt By Association)
Peter Falk (Columbo)
Nick Nolte (Another 48 Hours)
Christopher Walken
James Earl Jones (not as tall as I expected)
Emilio Estevez & Samuel L. Jackson (National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon Part One)
Mel Brooks (Life Stinks)
Rich Little, Jayne Kennedy and John Schneider at Disneyland working the Children’s Miracle Network telethon.
Sandra Bullock & Dennis Hopper (Speed) (At the time, I did not recognize Bullock.)
Angela Lansbury (Murder, She Wrote)
Bo Jackson after a Raiders game when he was a Raider and L.A. had pro football! Also met the head coach, Art Shell.
Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee at separate Dodgers games.

Writers & artists:
David Gerrold (The Trouble With Tribbles)
Harlan Ellison (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream)
Richard Matheson (many Twilight Zone episodes)
Robert Bloch (Psycho)
Julius Schwartz (Long-time editor of Superman comics)
Ray Bradbury
Jack Kirby
Kelly Freas
Steven Barnes & Larry Niven (Dream Park series)
George Perez
J. Michael Straczynski
Allan Dean Foster (novelizer of Star Trek Animated, Alien, and George Lucas’s ghostwriter for the Star Wars novelization, among MANY other movies and TV shows.)

And back when I was only 4 years old, when I lived near Dallas, I met the cast of Route 66 when they filmed a show there. My Dad took home movies, which my mother still owns. (They’ve been transferred to videotape.) I also met Jerry Haynes, who was the host of Mister Peppermint, a long-running local children’s show produced in Dallas.

WHEW!

45

I’ve posted this one before, but what the heck:

I grew up near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a mighty popular spot for many celebrities; lotsa celebs have vacation or permanent homes there. During my senior year of high school and the summer before, I worked at a movie theater, and met lotsa celebs. Biggest occasion: the Castle Rock production company bought out one side of our duplex theater and the entire City Slickers cast and crew came in to see Goodfellas. I worked the door, cuz I’m a big scary guy. I think I startled Billy Crystal. Billy Crystal came back in at least once; I saw him in the concession line when I was working box office, and no one even recognized him. City Slickers, incidentally, was filmed very near the garbage dump used by my family.

Other people who came into the theater: most of the cast of Young Guns, Val Kilmer and his then-wife Joanne Whaley Kilmer, Bill Murray, others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Away from the theater, I ran into Lou Diamond Phillips at the San Francisco Bar & Grill in Santa Fe, and lemme tell ya, he had a wicked car.

46

I’ve met on a few occasions Peter Tork, Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz (former Monkees) as well as James Lee Stanley (a musician and actor–he was one of Odo’s guards on DS9)…he’s also a close, personal friend of Peter Tork’s so they’ve toured together.

Also met, while PLD interviewed her, Sarah MacLachlan and we met all the members of Belly. When I was young I met Jeff Conaway (Taxi) and Leonard Nimoy.

That’s all I can think of for now…

47

I shook Ted Kennedy’s hand.

48

Jab1:

Whoa, this is a coincidence. I also met the cast of Route 66 when they filmed the episode in Dallas. I was 5 and living in Lewisville. My mother took us to the set and, here’s the best part, my older brother and I were in the episode. I don’t remember the plot of the episode and I haven’t seen it in years. I do remember the scene involved a woman getting off a bus. She was wearing a mask or something and they wanted us to act frightened when we saw her. Apparently I was a natural, but my brother couldn’t do it. So, they shot a prop gun to startle him. It worked and we were included in the episode.

I also went to college with Lyle Lovett. We were both journalism majors and I eventually got to know him fairly well, but we weren’t great friends. We worked on the campus paper together. My roommates and I used to go to his shows often before while we were in college. Sometimes we were the only ones there and he let us sing with him. At one show in Houston (Anderson Fair, for you '70s-era Houstonians) it was just us and his parents. Like Lyle, his parents were extremely polite, soft-spoken people.

Lyle also talked us into going to shows that his friends were doing. So one night, me and my roommates went to a Nanci Griffith show at a beer bar in College Station (home of Texas A&M) called Grins. Again, we were pretty much the only ones there. We were pretty rowdy and Nanci didn’t seem to appreciate it very much, so we bought copies of her first album. It was a vanity album called “A Light in the Woods” I believe. She still didn’t seem to care much for us though.

Lyle was a good guy. I haven’t seen him since graduation, but I have enjoyed seeing him become successful. Some people deserve it.

49

I met the actor who became “Jaws” in the Roger Moore James Bond movies when I was five years old (I forget his name). My dad was having a grand opening for “Jim Dunehew’s Handy Dandy Market” and Jaws was the host of a local children’s TV show called “Paul Bunyan”. I remember shaking his hand and marvelling at how tall he was – he was the first person I’d ever met who was taller than daddy (dad was 6’2"). The top of my head was about even with his knee and the distance from the heel of his hand to his fingertips was about the same as from my elbow to the ends of my fingers. I don’t remember much else about him though.

When my dad was managing a store in the mountains (I was about 7 – the JDHDM didn’t pan out – especially after they put in a supermarket across the street) he called me over and introduced me to some guy named Leo Gorcy. I’d seen the Dead End kids and the Bowery Boys in movies, but I wasn’t sure this guy could be real. After all, movies were make-believe, weren’t they? Turns out he was legit. He was on his way to a personal appearance in Reno, and had just stopped to get some liquor on his way through. Sad, really.

When I was flying from San Francisco to San Antonio to join the Air Force (January 30, 1980), I had a fascinating conversation with a very well-educated gentleman with bushy eyebrows who sat in the seat ahead of me. We talked about physics and astronomy, amongst other things (I minored in both when in college). I was watching something on PBS in the dayroom less than a week later (something about nuclear bombs) and they interviewed Edward Teller. It was the same exact guy! I’m not utterly certain about this, because I don’t know why a famous physicist would ride in coach, but the guy on TV looked, dressed, and sounded exactly like my interesting companion on the flight. If it wasn’t him, it was his doppelganger!

~~Baloo

50

I can’t believe I forgot this! When I was going to college in San Francisco, I lived in a dorm perilously near the “Tenderloin” (red-light district.) My room-mate and I one night decided we’d earned a study break an would venture the couple blocks into scary-land to the Walgreens and get some candy. (I know that sounds sad NOW, but as a starving college student it seemed a real treat, lol.) Anyways, we were making our way down a hill and saw some shitfaced drunk with two women teetering up towards us, yelling at passing cars. We looked down discreetly as we passed hoping to avoid a drunken confrontation, and as we passed them the guy staggered right into me. I looked right into his face as he apologised, then as he passed my roommate and I stopped and stared at each other with our chins hitting the ground – it was Robert Downey Jr, who was in town filming Heart and Souls! ROFL! I have to confess, even unshaven and clearly on the third day of a bender, he was FIIIIIIIINE!

Oh yeah, and Shawn Kemp (Basketball player) was from my hometown. (Rival highschool – supposedly he was so stupid that the opposite team would chant “S-A-T! S-A-T!” when he was making a foul shot.) He came to the theater I was working at at the time, and I remember looking out the window where a normal person’s face would be, and seeing a torso. lol. He also pulled a fat wad of $100 bills out of his pocket and made a big production of peeling off like 20 of them to get to the 10 dollar bill he used to pay for the tickets. :rolleyes: If memory serves, he was also wearing a tshirt with HIS OWN LIKENESS on it! JESUS! What a putz!

51

Let’s see I cooked Mickey Rooney’s breakfast, in a restaurant where I worked, and Liz Taylor visited me in the Nut House. (She dropped in with the Governor’s wife, on a visit. I just happened to be in the bin at the time. She played Ping-Pong with a friend of mine.) Lyndon Johnson walked by and waved at a friend and me while he was out for a walk from the White House. (We were walking down the street cause we got kicked out of a bar not far from there.) I got to watch Joe Theisman be rude to a kid in a convenience store who wanted an autograph. I delivered several Redskins mail, for a few years, and the local news show anchor, as well. I worked with a very famous Network News guy’s daughter, but never met him, cause the son of a bitch treats his daughter like someone he owes money. I am distantly related to Sabrina Lloyd who was on Sliders, and Sports Night, although it’s a big family, and I am sure she would fail to pick me out of a line-up. Last time I saw her my cousin (her mother) was holding her in one arm.

I spent half a lifetime in a car with Abbie Hoffman one afternoon, during the height of his notoriety. I understand he was much less of a gaping asshole later in life. I can see how that was pretty easy to accomplish, because he was a genuine fuckstick that day. I met a whole bunch of bluegrass musicians back in 1969 at an invitational competition at Sinking Creek. Doc Watson (and Merle, of course) and The Monroe Brothers in particular stand out in my memory. The Country Gentlemen were held up by a broken down bus, and didn’t make it.

I shook hands with Linus Pauling when he lectured at VPI in ‘66. Only about twenty of us at the lecture, if you can imagine. VPI just didn’t quite get the whole Nobel Prize thing, I suppose. Anyway, the thing turned real informal after the opening remarks, and we all just had a regular chemistry class, only with a Laureate for a teacher. Too bad it was only that one day. This is the only real true time I met someone famous in any real sense of the word. We talked. Well, mostly he talked and I listened and wished I could think up a question worth asking.

I heard Les Paul playing the guitar in the next room at American University once. But I didn’t see him. (Actually I didn’t know who it was until much later.) He was playing with someone else, too, but no one knew who that was. (They rocked, by the way, but you knew that.)

Those are my brushes with the famous, and near famous. It looks pretty good, until you remember that I am really old. My mother says some person I can’t remember picked me up when I was a kid. I can’t even remember the name, and I never did know what the hell he was famous for. That one doesn’t count.

Tris.