I “met” the guys from Dream Theater by their bus after one of their shows. Those guys were utter pricks. They made the fans get into a line, and made us wait 20 minutes for them to come out. I can understand that part. The part I don’t get is why they felt the need to make their loathing of this type of thing glaringly obvious. They were practically rolling their eyes at people, and James LaBrie (the singer) was just haughty. A friend I was with went to their CD release/signing event at a local music store the previous night. He said that the only guy who wasn’t a total dick was John Myung (the bassist). Had I known they were going to act like that, there’s no way in Hell I would have waited around for that type of abuse.
His son is just as bad. A not for profit I used to work for hosted an Agam show. His son Ron was handling the business aspect. There was a problem with the funds and he called to talk to our director who wasn’t there at the time. When I told him she wasn’t there, he said, “That is unacceptable. I am Ron Agam!”
Better there than the gardening tools section of Home Depot.
Sure. I used to shoot a lot of rap videos and MTV Cribs.
- Worked 3 times with Ja Rule. The third time, he climbs out of his limo with some bodyguard/ posse folks. Sees me across the circular drive setting up. ( This was an MTV Cribs on Star Island in Miami ). Screams out, " Yo niggah how you doin’???" and walks over and hugs me- one very very amused surprised big pudgy white guy. Cracked me the hell up. His posse was slack-jawed. He then encouraged me to take a few hits on what may be the largest joint I have ever seen face to face. It was the size of a huge cigar.
Being in the Prep mode, I politely declined. 
-
Notorious B.I.G. Truly a gentle lovely fellow. I shot his breakthrough video, “This Juicy”. Sat with the crew, talked about the chance he was being given by Bad Boy Records and Sean Combs to get out of dealing drugs on Flatbush Ave.
-
Missy Eliott is one obnoxious woman.
-
Mary J. Blige has a good sense of humor and is a pleasure to work with out in difficult remote locations like Sedona, AZ.
Puffy’s much much smarter than people think he is, and people think he’s pretty savvy. I’ve rarely met a person so entirely on top of their game and posessed of a great long-term plan. Props to Sean.
Cartooniverse
I have personally experienced, more than once, the body odor of Dennis Quaid. Which was a bummer cuz I always thought he was pretty cute.
And speaking of Body odor…
Tobey Maguire once played poker for so long without showering, his odor was becoming offensive. But rather than stop playing and take a shower, he stripped off his shirt and asked his girlfriend to come over and wash his pits for him while he played. And she did.
Ew.
I met Gunnar Hansen (the guy who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.) He came here to give a special showing of the movie and a q-and-a session afterwards. He looked like a burly Viking and was the most entertaining, down to earth, funny guy ever. He told us this story about how he and some other guys on the set of TCM ate some pot brownies and the next day someone told him that he (Gunnar) had been sitting on the porch two hours repeating the phrase “time has no meaning” over and over. He had no recollection of it.
Later, I spoke to him personally, and got his autograph. The only piece of paper I had was my voter registration card, which I had recently acquired before the 2004 election. I had him sign it, telling him it meant nothing to me anyway since Kerry lost. He laughed and said, “I know who Leatherface would have voted for. After all, he was an idiot!” So he signed my voter registration card, and to this day that sums up my experience with politics. (Some time before the election, I made this clay model of John Kerry’s face out of Sculpey, baked it in the oven, and it came out looking exactly like him. Our plan was that if Kerry won, I’d drill a hole in the top of the head and make a pipe out of it and we’d all get high as a celebration. It never happened, of course, and I still have the head, but now the nose is partially broken off.)
When I was living in Seattle, I worked in Belltown and saw Peter Buck (guitarist for R.E.M.) out and about on a semi-regular basis. Every time I saw him he was dressed in all black and wearing sunglasses, regardless of the weather. Every time. Don’t bother saying hello, he’ll ignore you. Occasionally he’ll respond to a wave. Oh, and he never smiles.
This is celebrity to only a few (but possibly to VC03).
I met Douglas P. of Death in June and Boyd Rice of NON a few years ago.
Doug P. was totally cool, signed what I brought, and probably would have had a better conversation with me if I hadn’t been shaking like a fangirl and unable to think of anything interesting. (He did say that 9/11 had changed his mind about visiting the US again.)
Kinda creepy…Rice sniffed snuff [sic] off his hand about once a minute, seemed very manic and very expansive. (Doug P. sat behind the counter and signed. Rice pontificated, and wandered around the store where the signing was.) He was impressed that I brought his Ralph Gean tribute to sign. But I got a really weird vibe off of him, and if you know anything about his former relationship with his wife (she used to be called Lisa Suckdog, and used to write a sex column for Nerve) - basically an all-day-every-day dominant/submissive relationship - you could see that he is quite…destructively self-focused.
Just don’t bust into his dressing room and use his shower.
Okay, now we’ve veered into the subject of “minor anecdotes about dopers that creep you out”…
I met Peter after a Minus 5 show at SXSW, and he was pleasant, though not chipper or anything. He was happy to sign an autograph for me.
Doesn’t Brad Pitt have, shall we say, a casual attitude toward personal grooming?
I don’t know. I am not a fan of TCM, drugs, or John Kerry, but I found that post riveting!
The idea of a John Kerry bong just cracks me up. That whole post sounded like a synopsis of a John Waters movie.
Was she in human form or had she shape-shifted to her natural reptilian self?
So did you meet Lisa Crystal Carver? I’d occasionally pick up Rollerderby when I visited L.A.'s AMOK bookstore.
He used to constantly wear the same garb in Athens, GA, which is about 4 degrees cooler than hell.
I don’t know from once he was famous, but I’d heard that from a lot of people who knew him while he was in college in Missouri.
I do know that even after he was famous, he still hadn’t paid back the tuition he owed to the U of Missouri. Couple thousand $, apparently. And he’d rebuffed the University when they’d approached him about support (not too surprising, I guess, since he didn’t graduate).
Not so much creepy, though, as much as petty.
Matthew McConaughey often boasts how he doesn’t wear deodorant. IME, people who don’t wear deodorant smell bad. So to me he’s Stinky Matthew McConaughey. Not that I like him anyway; boy’s a little too fond of being photographed with his shirt off.
My celebrity anecdote: In the early '90s, I was working as a counter agent for a car rental agency in Missoula MT when a bunch of sports stars came in for a charity golf tournament. This was in Missoula, MT, and a big employer out there is Washington Companies. This guy comes up to the counter for a car and I take his license (“Mark Rypien”) and credit card – no idea who the guy is. So then I ask for his employer and he says “Washington . . .” and I’m getting to type “Companies” when he finishes “. . . Redskins.” So now I’m looking at him, but I still have no idea who he is. When we’re done with the paper work I explain that his car is actually out in the back lot and I’ll have to run get it and bring it up (he rented our only Lincoln Town Car, which didn’t get rented out much). He said, Nah, I’ll walk out with you. So we’re walking out to the back lot and have this exchange:
ME: Redskins, huh?
HIM: Yep.
ME: Should I know who you are?
HIM: Well, I don’t know. I’m the quarterback.
I laughed out loud and he smiled, asked me my name, asked me for directions to the hotel. Very, very nice guy: Carrying his own bag, driving his own car, waited in line like the rest of humanity, not mad that I hadn’t recognized him.
The next day I head downtown with some friends for breakfast at The Shack. The place is buzzing because there’s OMG Mark Rypien and several other football players having breakfast. We walked by their table to be seated and I happened to catch Mark Rypien’s eye. He said, “Hey, Jodi,” and smiled, like we knew each other. My friends were very impressed. 
He was a lovely guy.
And if a billionaires can be mentioned just for being billionaires: Missoula’s Denny Washington, of the aforementioned Washington Companies, is a very down to earth, nice guy, if a very tough business man. But his wife is a “touch me not, I’m Mrs. Denny Washington” bitch, and his two sons are smug entitled grab-ass assholes.
The Mark Rypien story reminds me of my sister-in-law meeting Joe Gibbs, the Redskins coach, at church (he had come there for a speaking engagement). She didn’t know him from Adam and as he walked in she said, “Excuse me, aren’t you the new butcher at Giant?” (a local grocery store).
I was at a LE function in Philadelphia a few weeks back and met Seamus McCaffery. He’ll almost certainly be a justice on the PA Supreme Court soon. He’s also a very dynamic, charismatic fellow. Here’s the odd part: He grabbed me by the face and stroked my goatee asking “What’s this? What’s this?”
I look forward in future years to being able to tell people “The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court stroked my beard.”