:: thud ::
I met Bela Fleck in a mall in Montreal, we chatted, I blathered over myself and mentioned that I played banjo. Forgot to get a picture or even an autograph. I asked “Is it going to be a good show tonight” He laughed and said “Nope, you wasted your money”. I was embarrassed! After we met, needless to say I was despondent.
Well, later that night we went to the gig (Bela, Stanley Clark and Jean-Luc Ponty…great show!). During his solo section, he said “Anybody here play banjo”, I was the only one who yelled. He said “I’ll dedicate this one to the banjo player I met at the mall earlier today”.
Needless to say, I came away a lot happier than I thought I would.
Okay, I have now read the Wikipedia article on Mr. Maris, and I already knew who Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron were. (Well, sort of. I knew they were baseball players.) You may get off the floor.
When the Great Rhymer Tyranny begins, baseball will be outlawed and purged from the annals of history anyway. So cheer up!
Oh . . . silly me.
Nah. Some of my friends like baseball, so I’ll let it continue to exist.
Swooo…
Saves me the work of organizing a secret rebel organization based upon the model from “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and using obscure baseball trivia and stats for the code words.
Jim
I’m not really clear on your thought process here. Given that you know I’ve read Mistress (at least, I think you chimed in on a Heinlein thread I started once in which it was discussed), shouldn’t you choose a different model for your conspiracy than the one I’m sure to be looking for?
(And what does “swoooo” mean?")
You, of all people, should know better than to expect your disloyal opposition to just GIVE you their codebook…
A friend got me backstage at a Suzanne Vega show. She gave me a Heineken!
Buzz Aldrin Jr. signed my copy of Men From Earth. I said something inane in an attempt to be witty, but he was very thoughtful and polite to me anyway.
Walking through Sears in the Mall in Bangor, Maine (maybe 1984 or so…) I hear: “But I AM Stephen King!”
I looked over; it was. Apparently the cashier didn’t believe the name on his credit card… 
When I worked as a topless dancer I met quite a variety of celebrities. I’ve done table dances for Vince Neil (needs to wash his hair more, and he’s kind of boring to talk to) and, on a separate occasion, Motley Crue. Stephen Baldwin was a regular at the club and I met, talked to, and danced for him a number of times. After one time when we talked for probably 15 minutes, he said to me “you’re insane, aren’t you?” and laughed. A couple of days later I was at a coffee house/restaurant at about 1:30am with a friend of mine. We were sticking spoons to our noses and seeing how many we could do. I got (simultaneously) one on my nose, one on my chin, and one on each cheekbone, and then, using a safety pin, made it look like I had one hanging off my boob. I put my hands up “ta da” style for my friend, at which point I realized a lot of people were looking. One table of guys stood up and gave me a standing ovation. Then I looked over and about two tables away was Stephen Baldwin. Our eyes met and he sort of shook his head and looked down, sort of an “I knew you were crazy, see?” kind of thing.
I’ve apparently met some of the Dallas Cowboys, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was dancing at a club in Ft. Worth in 1992, the weekend of the SuperBowl. Several big guys came in that night and a lot of the girls seemed excited about it, and I said hi to them and probably danced for one or two of them, dunno. Found out after they left that they were famous members of the team. shrug I don’t like sports, so I had no idea.
I have had a casual now-and-then email correspondence with Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz (drummer for Weird Al) and even sent him an “I (heart) Bubblewrap” t-shirt, which he thanked me for.
I am family friends with another celebrity, possibly one of the most famous female vocalists of our time. I’ve hung out with her at her house while she was in her pajamas, I’ve gone to lunch with her, I’ve gotten free concert tickets and back stage passes (when there wasn’t an afterparty planned–it was just me, my mom, and Dominic hanging out with her in the dressing room after the concert). She once helped pull cactus thorns out of Dominic’s butt when he was little and fell down while playing with her kids. She’s a really neat person but rather private and so I’m just going to leave it at that out of respect for her.
I haven’t met her, but Pamela Anderson did list my bubblewrap page as one of her favorite websites in one of those entertainment magazines, along with two other sites.
Is he ever not grumpy?
If you’ll forgive the slight deviation from entertainment, I had a very brief encounter with a towering giant of politics.
In 1993, I was working with a lobbyist on a video in DC (okay, we were working on a video, so that fits Cafe Society, right?), and we were in the capitol building on our way to interview Jay Rockefeller (good - but not the towering giant).
Walking through a dark and otherwise empty corridor, we saw walking slowly toward us Tip O’Neill. This was a few years after he had retired as Speaker of the House, and when he was battling cancer. He was obviously tired, and quite frail (died a few months later, IIRC) but he smiled as we approached. The lobbyist greeted him, “Good Morning, Mr. Speaker” and I did as well. He didn’t know us at all, but he graciously shook our hands, and wished us the same before we went on.
As I said, a brief encounter, but you don’t get to shake the hand of a man of that stature very often.
You should see Dave, a favorite political comedy of mine, for Tip O’Neill’s brief cameo.
When I lived in Manhattan in the early 90s, I did physical therapy at a place that also did personal-trainer stuff. Heading up the stairs to exit one day, I passed former mayor Ed Koch on his way in. Didn’t speak to him though, I wasn’t sure it was him (until I confirmed it with the other fellow who was heading out the same time I was).
Then there was the time the one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers juggled my leftover pizza, at Wolf Trap. “This has PORK on it. I can’t juggle pork on the Shabbas!!!”.
Beyond that I’ve had pretty much no encounters with anyone rich and famous.
Which FKB was it? (This is me with most of them, past and present) I’m going to guess it was Paul, if it was during the “champ” challenge thing. At one of their shows in Atlanta he juggled my bra. I wasn’t even thinking about the FKBs. I have stories there, too. I’m close enough friends with two of them (Mark and Rod) to get a “hi Katherine!” and a hug upon seeing each other, and close enough friends with one of them (Mark)that we’re in each other’s cell phones. Howard and Paul would recognize me on sight but might not remember my name. Mark has a summer cottage on the same lake in New Hampshire as my family and if we’re up there at the same time we get together to juggle or just hang out. I’ve dropped him off at his house from our boat after driving him home across the lake. Me juggling with Mark and my boyfriend Dan
I volunteer at a local university’s community run radio station, so most of mine are music related.
A year ago, I got to spend about an hour with Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, and videotaped an interview my friend did with him. He’s just as quirky, fascinating, charming and engaging and warm as you could hope for. He called me “Rasa the Patient” because I didn’t have a tripod and I sat without moving for a full hour while my friend interviewed him and they chatted about music. Wayne and I had an improptu conversation about the nature of argyle socks. It’s so nice to find out that someone who you respect for their work is worth your respect as a person. It was a wonderful, fufn, memorable experience and he treated us like newfound friends rather than strangers.
Once upon a time when I was a wee Rasa, and all of like, 15 years old, I went to see Public Image Ltd. I ended up at the very front, squooshed up against the barricade in front of the stage, and some asshole hauled off and pushed me over for no reason at all. (It wasn’t moshing, it was just mean spirited dickishness.) I fell and whacked my head, and Johnny Rotten (Lydon I guess he goes by in PiL) reached down, pulled me up, SPIT ON THE GUY and called him a bloody wanker.
I don’t remember the names, but in this link, it was (I think) the guy at the far right (well, my right; his left). Either that or the fellow right next to him. Definitely one of the “dark hair, skinny, tall” ones. They played twins the first time we saw them, on PBS in the late 80s, in Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors. I remember they were allowed to modify each chosen item in one way; the mod to our contribution was to remove the pepperoni slices.
Oh! And when I was in college working for a student advocacy group, Barney Frank yelled at me very loudly and rudely, for about 10 minutes, because we DARED to publish our report we’d solicited his response on without waiting for his response. It was pretty funny. I was holding the phone away from my ear, he was so loud. We’d sent him the response form about 8 months before the deadline and kept calling his staff because we didn’t want to make him look bad by publishing the report and having him not be represented but… they dropped the ball, so Barney got on the horn and shouted at me.