One night in the late 70s, when I was living in NYC, my then-partner took me to Studio 54. He’d been there several times and knew all the regulars. It was my first time there . . . I’m really not into that kind of scene.
I had to use the restroom, and there was a line. There was a funny little middle-aged man ahead of me, and we soon began to chat. I have no recollection of what we talked about, just some casual small talk.
After using the restroom and reuniting with my partner, he asked me “What were you talking to Truman Capote about?”
I was clueless. I should have recognized Capote, at least by his voice, but I was caught off-guard and never made the connection.
Back in 1988, I took my mom to see a presentation of Cabaret for her birthday. Joel Grey was the star. We both loved it.
The next day, I was at my job (at an art museum) and someone told me that Joel Grey had come into the museum. I got really excited and was running around saying that I had to get his autograph for my mom to round out her gift. I just about ran right into Joel Grey and almost didn’t stop because, in reality, I did not really know what he looked like (you know, when he’s not dressed as an MC). Luckily someone was kind of pointing me in the right direction.
Famous people never look the same in “real life,” so I usually don’t recognize them. I once had breakfast at this place with a friend, sitting in a booth. As we walked out, my friend asked me if I’d noticed that Nicholas Cage had been sitting back-to-back with me the whole time, in the next booth. I had no idea, though I pretty much heard everything they were saying at his table.
On another occasion, I was in the middle of a crowded event in Echo Park, when a person moved by shaking hands with everyone. It wasn’t until he’d passed by that realized that it had been the mayor of L.A.
Told to me by my mom:
My granddad (her father) is a huge Charles Bronson fan, has seen all the Death Wish movies, etc. Her family lived in New Hampshire near skiing areas and were skiers themselves. So sometime in the 70s he was on a small plane returning home and he disembarked the plane with another guy, commenting to my grandma, mom and uncle that they’d had a great conversation about skiing. He was completely baffled when my mom’s family told him how excited he must have been to be sitting next to that guy. It was Charles Bronson and my grandfather had completely failed to recognize him.
This wasn’t quite a meeting, but I was walking to work when I saw this really awkward, gangly poodle. I noticed that his owner seemed to be waving at random people, but I thought he was just waving to friends until I realized it was John Leguizamo. I guess he could have been waving at friends, or saying, “Hey, look at my weird poodle!”
Back in the '70s, Yes played the Ft. Worth convention center twice within a few months. Both times I went with the same two friends. The second time we were hanging out in the park before the show and we walked right past a guy in sweats wearing a pony tail. We turned to each other and all said something along the lines of, “Wasn’t that guy here last time?”
We looked back and realized at the same time that it was lead singer Jon Anderson. He was walking from the hotel to the venue. We caught up with him and got his autograph. He recognized us from the last time, and laughed about us not recognizing him.
We didn’t feel too embarrassed because the park was full of fans and no one else had noticed him either with his hair back and in unfamiliar cloths.
I’ve played a board game with Dave Arneson, co-creator of D+D, without recognizing him. I wouldn’t have known who Gary Gygax was on sight, either, though.
I have face blindness, so I may not recognize people at the best of times, but…
One day in 1984, I was visiting my best friend from university at his girlfriend’s parents’ condo in Toronto. We decided to go swimming, so we got in our bathing suits and headed to the building’s pool. I had taken my contact lenses out, and didn’t want to wear my glasses down there and leave them by the pool, so I was basically walking through a large, multicoloured blur.
We swam, and enjoyed the pool (frustrating though it was not to be able to see the pretty women nearby). Then we dried of and headed back up. IN the elevator, another man joined us, but then got off at a different floor. The elevator doors closed, and my friend turned to me and said, “Do you know who that was?”
I said, “No, why would I? I can’t see anyone; my lenses are out!”
We went to Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant where we saw this guy and his family waiting in line along with the rest of us. He was a famous newscaster. We spent the whole dinner trying to figure out who he was. Because we just KNEW he was a famous newscaster.
We still don’t know. But he WAS, really!
I also danced alongside Kim Basinger in a bar once in Athens, GA but we all knew who she was at the time. What I didn’t know until then was that she is short. Like, really short. As short as me if not shorter (I’m 5’2").
I didn’t realize that the old blind guy whose groceries I regularly bagged was Doc Watson for quite a while. Just because I was living in Boone didn’t mean that I was a fan of bluegrass music.
Mel Gibson. 1989. Up North in Mae Hong Son province while he was filming Air America there.
I was living in the provincial capital and one evening had just settled into my favorite restaurant, The Good Luck, to look over my mail. Floor-cushion seating, no chairs. A group of movie people came in, five or six guys. The town was full of them at that time, so I paid them no mind. I was engrossed in my mail when one of them asked me what was good. I recommended the moussaka. Lak, the owner, made a killer moussaka.
The next morning, I’m heading out of town, and I stop off to grab some breakfast. Lak is all excited. “Mel Gibson was in here last night!” she said. “Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “Yeah, you talked to him!” “I talked to him??” “Yeah, you told him the moussaka was good.” So that was Mel Gibson, I thought. Yeah, it did look like him once I thought about it.
I spent the entirety of St. Patrick’s Day 1996 in Dublin drinking with some wrinkled Californian dude. He was so full of himself. He was also a terrible namedropper, banging on about his close personal friends Hazel O’Connor, Bono, bla bla bla. At one point he went to the john and came back, apologising for taking so long - “signing autographs, I hate that”. I smirked into my pint and rolled my eyes at my friends. When we dispersed, quite drunk that night, he suggested we all hang out another time and he’d get Hazel and the gang along.
I knew his name but it didn’t strike me as significant. Only later did I discover that he wasn’t Californian, he was Canadian, and I’d spent all day getting drunk with theRobbie Robertson,who had every right to be full of himself, be a namedropper, and sign autographs.
My friend’s sister was on vacation in the Caribbean and was hanging out at the hotel pool. There was a woman chasing after two kids, calling them Maddox and Shiloh. She thought to herself, “how pathetic, naming your kids after Brangelina’s.” It was only when the parents turned up that she realised the kids weren’t named after Brangelina’s… She was so freaked out to see them that she ended up having a panic attack.
My uncle was on a flight to Australia a few years ago, and he sat next to this young girl. My uncle’s a chatty guy, so they struck up a conversation and apparently had loads of fun over the next 12 or so hours. When they landed, she said: “Hey, I have a gig tonight, if you’re interested…” It was Katie Melua.
They still email, and he sometimes gets tickets if she’s performing in a place where he happens to be for work.
Twas in the mid 80s, I had removed my contact lenses because they were hurting my eyes. The driver pulled into a Colorado resort hotel for a pit stop. I got out of the car, went inside and there was a large military ceremony going on. I was reclining in a chair, in t-shirt and shorts because it was summer, and I got up and started walking around blindly. When the driver came and got me, they said I’d been standing alongside “Ford”. I thought little “Ford” from my grammar school days had joined the military? No, it was President Ford.
Oh my god. Lucky uncle. I saw her once doing a photo shoot, and she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in real life. (Not a huge fan of her music mind you, but would still love to be on her radar.) Wow.
And apparently super nice and funny to boot. My uncle just has to make do with nice & funny. And he has to wear funny looking reading glasses to emphasize that.
A few years ago, I think late '09 or early ‘10, I was at a restaurant eating a chicken sandwich when some little blond kid walked in with some big ol’ thug guy with an earpiece. Suddenly, people started turning and running up to the kid and going OMG! Finally after the kid left (disrupt my dinner, damn celebrities), some of the other people there were like, it was Justin Bieber! I was like, who is Justin Bieber? Then I ate my sandwich in peace.
