I’ve sat in a car with William Shatner
Met and talked to:
William Daniels
Howie Mandel
John Laroquette
John Kay
Franklin Ajayie
Oh yeah, I passed Steven Weinberg in the hall many times, but never had enough nerve to talk to him.
I sat next to John Schuck at a play.
I passed right by Eli Wallach at the Santa Monica Mall.
Didn’t say anything to either of them.
Four U.S. Senators, several Congresspersons, the future Lt. Governor of Missouri.
Also Chubby Checker, Todd Rundgren, Bill Daly (the guy from I Dream of Jeannie and The Bob Newhart Show) and baseball star Ozzie Smith.
Barack Obama is the one I can remember… I know there were others… Carl Edwards (NASCAR driver) was much more eye candy in-person than on tv.
Jennifer Aniston
Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez
Mike Farrell
Nora Roberts
The guy who played Mr. McFeely on Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood
Bob Dylan
Doc Watson
Secretary of Labor Tom Perez lives near me and says hello when we run into each other in the grocery store (our kids were in the same class a couple of years).
Oh yeah? Well I dated Steve Weinberg in high school and dumped him in college.
Mel Gibson. As I’ve related elsewhere on the Board, I met him up North in Mae Hong Son province in 1989 when he was here filming Air America. Or “met” him, as I didn’t even know it was him until someone told me the next day that we’d spoken. (He had asked me what was good on the menu in the little restaurant run by a friend, and I’d been too engrossed in my mail from home to realize who he was.)
Almost certainly George HW Bush. He was in Bangkok in the mid-1990s for one reason or another, and I am as sure as I can be that he was in the ambassador’s car that drove past my wife and me at Siam Square. I could just make out someone’s arm pressed against the darkened rear window, but no telling if it was Bush or the ambassador or someone else back there.
Back when he was in better health and I frequented that part of Bangkok more than I do now, the king of Thailand’s motorcade often passed me by in the late afternoon near Democracy Monument.
EDIT: And that last one, about the king, made me remember Suharto’s motorcade passing me by in Yogyakarta, on the Indonesian island of Java, one Friday evening in 1994. Suharto, who was still in power at the time, was from Yogyakarta and was returning home for a weekend visit.
Also just remembered Roger Waters. The wife and I were in the second row center for his Bangkok concert in I think it was 2002.
Ed Koch said “Hi” to my family once.
I took a repair order for Karen Grassle’s toaster. (Grassle was the celebrity, not the toaster.)
Margaret Randall (locally famous in the '80’s because she renounced her US citizenship during Vietnam and later changed her mind) offered to help me find something in her brother’s bookstore.
I could swear Jimmy Swaggart tried to pick me up on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, but I’d probably just been in the sun too long that day.
Actually I’ve probably seen a lot of celebrities but I don’t remember faces well and anyway most of them were just going about their normal lives and not doing things one associates with celebrities.
Not sure if this one counts at all, but I also shook hands once with Lauro Cavazos, although that was before he became Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration.
John Glenn. The Senator was speaking at the Ohio Union on the OSU campus. Just a hello and hand shake.
Jimmy Buffet. He needed a lift from the hotel/marina to the airfield and I had a vehicle and was leaving the h/m and going past the airfield.
Cesar Romero. He was in NE Ohio doing summer stock. My GF and I went to a restaurant and he was 2 tables away schmoozing 2 older ladies. GF wanted me to ask for an autograph. I said “Let the poor guy eat his meal in peace.”
Marni Nixon. She did a show for a community theater group I crewed for. I was assigned to make sure there was water in a glass for her on the draped table next to her microphone stand on stage.
Paul Shaffer. I was 2 people behind him in line at a deli to order a sandwich.
I met Alan Rickman and he signed my Playbill after a show I saw him in.
Very jealous.
The Queen. I was assigned to her last Royal Visit in Winnipeg.
A bunch of metal bands in the 90s.
At a wrestling show in the late 70s, I was sitting on the aisle the babyfaces used to make their way to the ring, and Andre the Giant was on the card. Huge dude.
I rode on a small commercial plane with Three Dog Night and talked to them for a half hour or so. This was the 1980-90s version in the late 1990s.
I talked with Bowie Kuhn for about half an hour shortly after he was named commissioner of Baseball and knew Bart Giamatti quite well when he was named commissioner.
I’ve spoken at some length with any number of Nobel Prize winners in Economics. (Samuelson, Friedman, Lucas, Modigliani, Miller, Scholes, Merton, Fama, Shiller, …) Those living even know who I am.
In some newspaper (probably the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Press) there was a photograph published in the 60s or very late 50s of me playing touch football with Jim Backus. I was center; he was quarterback.
I shook hands with Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Tony Blair, and numerous other politicians that are well known. I’ve been within twenty feet of many more too numerous to even recall.
The ones I had the most fun with & were the most real & I had the most with:
Leonard Nimoy
Willy Nelson
Reba
Waylon Jennings & Jessi Coulter
Pappy Boyington
Have had many big names in the back of my little airplane but never had much of a conversation with them.
Most fun is like the Cindy Crawford post above. Famous person trying to be regular, make eye contact, small grin and a thumbs up. Then just keep on truckin.
Bertrand Russell, at a nuclear disarmament demonstration in 1961 in London.
I’ve never met Kary, but I know one of his ex-wives pretty well, which is a pretty weird connection.
Band name!
She’s not the first person I’d think of for small talk.
I’ve met and talked with Todd a number of times, at his concerts and at SIGGRAPH.
Recently, I got to see Kate Bush in concert. The only reason this doesn’t violate the rule of the OP is that six “Fish People” carried her down the aisle I was sitting near. But I’d met her a few times before when she came to New York in 1985, and met her plane.
I’ve met dozens, maybe hundreds of musicians doing concert sound and video, but that was mostly work.
I’ve met Al Gore twice, and Frank Gehry three times.
I’ve had breakfast with Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, lunch with Mariel Hemingway, and dinner with Aaron Copeland.
I lived in the same dorm as Christopher Reeve in college.
Bo Diddley.
Jane Fonda and Ted Turner.
Jane Goodall.
John Lindsay.
Michael Bloomberg.
The Dalai Lama.
I’ve shaken hands with four Panamanian presidents, and been within 20 feet of two more.
Sat next to Joan Embery in health class at San Diego State for the whole semester, and worked with her at the Children’s Zoo (San Diego Zoo)
Joan is the lady who brought the animals to Johnny Carson’s show.