Today’s theme: piddly celebrity encounters! It is partially inspired by the new Gawker Stalker column, and partially because I was just talking about Cher. And someone rightly pointed out that I’ve met Cher! I used to work at Tower Records during school, which afforded me access to such luminaries as Cher, Ozzy, and…Joe Jackson. Oh wait, and Jay-Z. He was rather confident. His visit meant hearing “Hard Knock Life” approximately 13,000 times, in a loop.
Cher was promoting her memoirs. I had to stack a gigantic pyramid of them, beneath a Chairman Mao-sized soft-focus portrait of her. She was demure, wore a purple streaked wig, and was mobbed by men in hot pants who stood in line for a very long time. She also graciously received the gift of a fruit platter.
Ozzy was just shopping with a small entourage. This was back in 1999, and no one cared about Ozzy then. In fact we all thought he was some deinstitutionalized psychotic, until I noticed his knuckle tattoos. He was peeved because we didn’t have the Monty Python DVD he was after.
Another time I put on dark glasses and stormed through LAX while my friend ran ahead of me, jumped out of the crowd, and snapped my photo, yelling “Over here, over here!” It was a long delay.
But other people’s celebrity encounters are always better than mine. For instance, a friend has seen Douglas Coupland eat a cheeseburger! I would have swatted it out of his hands. After that last stinkeroo of a novel, some fasting for atonement is in order. Clearly she has more restraint than I do. She also met David Sedaris, who told her that her nicotine patch was “disgusting” and that he’d rather smoke. And she had a chance to club Dave Eggers to death with a skullcracking work of 485 pages, but she didn’t do that either. I say opportunity only knocks once. I still rue the day I didn’t kill Carrot Top. Among others….
In beautiful people, another friend had a class at NYU with Christy Turlington. Still another person used to always wait on Gwyneth at a coffee shop. Gosh, I have a lot of friends!
Last and probably least, I sat next to Creed and some hangers-on in a euro-trash bar at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I would rather meet Richard Simmons I think. Or Siegfried and Roy.
-xxoo
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