Famous Encounters

[bortwein]

Oh I forgot to include this one. After returning from my Honeymoon back in May of 2001, we had flown into Regan International Airport in DC and as we were exiting the airport Al Gore was entering with his guards by passing the security check point so they walked right by us. And to make things interesting, I almosted yelled out "Hey! It's Al Gore". It was more spoken louder than my normal tone, but still loud enough to get him and his guards to walk faster as they entered. Yah! Fun with Government Officials.

----

And I saw Penn and Teller perform in a small club in DC, then after the show I met them and they signed a t-shirt I bought there from them.

[Heather. Redmon.]

Oooh, I remembered another one. Phil and I have danced on stage with Southern Culture on the Skids during thier "audience participation" songs in both Minneapolis and Los Angeles! We got to throw Little Debbies and fried chicken out into the audience! We have an autographed box of Little Debbies Oatmeal Cream Pies. They are a fun band to see live!

Also, when I was little, say about 7, my grandma took me out for a day of autograph hunting (my grandpa worked for the studios and she had a few inside tips). I met Michael Landon, Victor French and Ted Danson all in one day! Michael Landon and Victor French were filming a episode of Highway to Heaven at a local high school and Ted Danson was filming a made for TV movie at the courthouse.

Oh, I talked to David Hasselhoff on the phone when I was a customer service rep for the cable company in LA. I set up an appointment to install a cable modem when the service was first introduced. And, here in Minneapolis at the cable company gig, I set up an HDTV appointment for Dante Culpepper of the Minnesota Vikings.

Plus, a group of our friends here in Minneapolis were cast as extras in a movie that I don't think ever came out with a bunch of B rate actresses who names I can't rember, well never mind this one.

[jack]

here's a few......

eric (e money) and i used to both work at this sort of upscale outdoor clothing store in san francisco. a number of local celebs would shop in the store on a regular basis. i helped robin williams on a number of occasions. very nice, down to earth guy. one time he was in the store, he tried on this hooded sweatshirt that was an extra small. he put the hood on, scrunched it around his face, and stood in the front window pretending to be a living mannequin. peter coyote was another regular customer and everyone in the store thought his wife had the hots for eric. i used to work with tom brokaw's daughter and once he called the store looking for her. i chatted him up for awhile. he asked me for her home phone number, he didn't have it (what a putz!).

but i think my biggest forrest gump moment was once when i was at a bridge school concert a few years back. the bridge school is a benefit concert that neil young puts on every year in the bay area. i had gotten a back stage pass (i knew neil's bass player) and was milling around backstage at shoreline in between sets. the bands this particular year included, green day, pearl jam, and the who (as well as tom waits, brian wilson, neil, and more...). i was standing next to this guy i thought was a roadie and his girlfriend just off stage. next thing i know, pete townshend is walking straight towards me and the roadie guy. he walks over to the roadie and introduces himself. the roadie introduces himself as "billy joe". duh. they had just finished playing (green day) and PT was telling billy joe he liked their version of "my generation". then another guy who looks familiar (but i couldn't place him at the time) walks over and introduces himself as "eddie". so i'm standing next to these 3 guys talking shit, trying to act cool. "eddie" leaves and soon pete and billy joe wander off so i walk over closer to the stage to check out the view of the crowd (which is amazing if you ever have the chance to see a huge crowd from the stage at shoreline. with the lights, all you can see is about the first 15 rows). so i'm standing just offstage and the lights go out and this "eddie" guy is standing next to me again. then i see a bunch of other guys walking past us. it's pearl jam. and eddie walks out on stage. totally true story.

[fodroy]

the kids in the way have been getting bigger recently. they're from my hometown (and they suck). i've met them on numerous occasions. their guitarist (and several old members) used to substitute teach at my high school, those cocky bastards. they thought they owned the class. they were really strict about making us do work when all they ever did was play games on the teachers computer. i took guitar lessons with their drummer. he's the only cool one in the bunch.


alot of people i know like them, but i can't help but tell them what i think of the kids. stupid, cocky, teeny-boppin' pop-punkers.

[HeuristicsInc]

Oh, if we're counting signings, I got to meet Rhys Fulber and Bill Leeb of Delerium/Front Line Assembly/etc. last year.
-bill

[j$]

, I guess, on pure 'name' stakes I've met quite a few famous folk, but it's through working in London theatre, so i meet all these people, but it's only to say 'hello', help 'em out with various bits and pieces, totally work-based. Most of them are b-grade UK celebs that might get an 'oh' out of the UK residents here, but I guess the two 'relative' biggies ...

When I used to run a big rehearsal space, Madonna hired it for rehearsals for one of her west end shows. She cadged a cigarette off me, and her bouncer actually stopped traffic on a busy main road to let her mini-fleet of cars leave the space without waiting ...

Sir Ian (Serena) McKellen I met while putting on a show. He had had, years before, a brief dalliance with my boss at the time. I can therefore confirm he has a hearty handshake, a slightly creepy leer and by all acounts, something of a lunchbox where it counts. he also has a taste for east-end cockney barrow-boys, if his actions in a club I saw him in a few months later were anything to go by.

Oh, I met Salman Rushdie too, at a bookshop i worked in a while back, too. He sweats more than any other human i have ever encountered. I guess I would, in his situation

The rest will probably not mean much to many of you. but UKers, Victoria Wood & Celia Imrie are delightful in real life, just like they've stepped out of Acorn Antiques....

j$

[jute gyte]

Danzig reads comics? I knew he was frontin'!

dude, danzig has his own comic book company. http://www.danzig-verotik.com

[bwell]

I went to elementary school for a year or two with Snoop Dogg. After another classmate made it up to the major leagues (Chris Gomez...now with Baltimore), a Sports Illustrated article mentioned he went to the same grade school as Snoop. I could not remember anyone named Calvin, but there was a kid named Cordozar in my (I think) third grade class. I eventually discovered that was his middle name and suspected that was him (early pictures looked about right), but only had the name and one brief reference to go on.

After seeing this thread I did another search this morning and discovered that Snoop made reference to the school in a February Blender article. I remembered him as a nice, somewhat quiet kid and had wondered why he was only there for one or two years. It turns out that he was expelled after exposing himself to a girl in the cafeteria.

[Bjam]

Oh, Kobe Bryant went to a school around here that played my school.

I also met Nicholas Brendon and Amber Benson from Buffy The Vampire Slayer at a fan convention down in FL when I was littler. And some Lord of the Rings people in a different convention.

And, Jason Mraz's bassist and percussionist.

Oh, and I was on Sub-Zero(short lived British gameshow on Sunday mornings) when I was younger. I was the net detective, so I got to sit in a back room during the live bit of it at the BBC studios in London. I hung back there with the producer and ate gummy bears and watched the show. That's about all I remember. Oh, and I got to go in the Bue Peter garden and saw a load of BBC type folk in the cafeteria.

[Niveous]

I used to work in theatre here in New York. During that time I got to meet Camryn Manheim ("The Practice"), Cynthia Nixon ("Sex in the City"), Kathleen Chalfant ("Kinsey" among countless othere things), Gina Torres ("Alias", "The Matrix", "Angel"), among others.

I met Aerosmith in the usual fanboy autograph signing way.

I met Charlie Watts on the street as he was being accosted by paparatzi.

Bumped into Nick Nolte and Vicki Lewis jogging in Manhattan. My wife thought they were random homeless people.

I also met Niger Ennis, the spokesman for CORE (The Congress of Racial Equality), Tom Duane (the first and only openly gay, HIV-positive member of the New York State legislature), and some others whom I can't think of.

[c.layne]

hrmmm...
saw Gilligan, of Gilligan's Island at the mall once.

met Atom, of Atom and his Package and Har Mar Superstar at a really small club in DC.

i worked for a short time with Tamir, the drummer of Emmitt Swimming at a music retail store. he was kind of a chode and i think he jerked off on the toilet seat in the bathroom. i've never heard emmitt swimming, either. probably because they sucked.

if i've ever met anyone else, i didn't know they were famous. i'm good at that.

[Eric Y.]

okok i can totally beat ALLA y'all.

when i was in like fourth grade (approximately), the new kids on the block were enjoying their meteoric rise to popularity. or something. anyway they were touring at the time and i met not one but TWO(*) of them at a local mall food court. oh yeah.


* - it was danny and donnie i think. but don't ask me which is which. i know one of them is marky mark's brother or something.

[Fried]

My gradfather was the president of the local musicians union in Miami. He introduced me to , Mel Bay, Frank Sinatra and a shedload of other old guys but I don't remeber thier names. Oh yeah, and The BeeGees and Mic Fleetwood but not the band. Currently My sister is close friends with Peter Frampton. I saw Mary Tyler Moore in downtown Minneapolis what she got a statue dedicated to her. I know you guys are SO jealous right now, but I also met Heather Redmond just walking around down town Minneapolis too!!!!!!!!!!!

[Bjam]

Oh! The Monkees! I have a funny story with them in.

So we(as in the family and I) were in Florida for a vacation. It was one of those funky hotel rooms where there's one door to a little room that leads to two seperate apartmenty things. We only had the bigger one. But we kept getting knocks on the door for the people next to us. And they were all older men, and there was music next door, and they kept wandering in and out, and they were very huggy with one antoher. And it was two guys primarily staying there with another two that always visited, so we figured they must be a gay couple or something. My parents went to see some Monkees show that night at the House of Blues, and realise we've been staying next to two of the people in the Monkees the entire time. They checked out the next morning so we never got to say hi or get autographs.

[jb]

My parents taught TV's "Enos" how to ride a horse.

[jack]

peter tork of the monkees lives in san francisco, in the haight. right off the panhandle. i used to see him in the panhandle lots of times. danny glover lives there too, or at least he used to while i lived in the city. i was at the koret center once (the university of san francisco gym, really nice) working out and danny glover was riding the bike next to me. i was tempted to chat him up but i thought that would be rude.

and once when i lived in maryland, i met the guy playing guitar for van morrison at the time. i asked him if it's true that van is a cranky old codger like he's always portrayed. he told me that van wears his watch on his left hand facing in so that he can keep an eye on the time while he plays guitar. once he meets the contractual time, he's outta there. i thought that was kind of funny.

[Dan-O from Five-O]

OK, I think I can top all these encounters with this. Steven Stills once sat in with my band. Meeting someone is one thing, playing with a musician that played at Woodstock I consider to be something else. The whole story is kind of long, if you want to read it let me know and I'll post it.

Suffice it to say it was quite an experience, I got a signed guitar and one hell of a story out it.

[j$]

okok i can totally beat ALLA y'all.* - it was danny and donnie i think. but don't ask me which is which. i know one of them is marky mark's brother or something.

Donnie is the Wahlberg (sp?), Danny was the one who looked like a potato, creating the short-lived (but still employed by me on a regular basis) expression to describe the one really ugly one that's always in a boy-band. EG 'God that N-Sync - I thought Justin Timberlake was bad enough, but what a band of Dannys!'

j$

[Rabid Garfunkel]

Hmmm... shook Teller's hand after a Vegas show (gigantic paws on that man) and got a cheesy Elvisian "Thank ya verra mush" from him.

Asked Ray Bradbury if he grew mushrooms in his basement as a boy. "I ordered them, but the damned things never came!"

While sitting at a Beatnik software tech demo at a long past MacWorld San Francisco (done by Thomas Dolby) found myself sitting directly behind Will Smith and Sinbad (neither of them could get a balky wireless mike to work, heh). Saw Jada Pinkett-Smith later that week at a David Pogue presentation.

William Gibson at a book signing. "Two-A-Day just sounds baaaad, you know? Doesn't really mean anything."

Steve Jobs getting out of his car and saying to my friend (standing next to me in the keynote line of another MacWorld SF) "I hope it's worth it" (the day OS X was unveiled).

...and my own personal favorite, seeing Tom-freaking-Poston at the Disney lot's commisary in Burbank. Him I was too awed to even make eye contact with.

That's all that comes to mind right now.

[JonPorobil]

My Dad has been a taxicab insurance investigator for some time. He used to work for the cab company owned by my Mom. Then came the divorce. Once, I think in the late seventies, he had to investigate an accident between a cab and a tour bus. He looked in the bus, noted its level of relative disarray (beer bottles, pizza boxes, et cetera), got testimony from the guys in the bus, who hadn't seen much, and went back to the office to tell my Mom what had happened.

Mom takes one look at the report and sees the names Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. My Dad was never a big Zep fan and didn't recognize the guys. My Mom threw a fit. But at least she had their autographs...

My Dad also once talked to Billy Joel outside of the latter's hotel for about a half hour. Billy was waiting on a limo that never came, and he got pissed and went back inside. Afterwards, my idiot Dad realized he'd had a Polaroid camera around his neck the whole time, and didn't take a picture. His words on the encounter: "Man, that guy is short."

My roommate's grandfather was James Taylor's guitar teacher. His Mom, before meeting his Dad, went on a date with James. Didn't care for the guy, apparently. My roommate, by the way, is Adam Sonnenfeld, first cousin (once removed) of Barry Sonnenfeld (of Men in Black fame). He got a bar mitzvah card from Will Smith, which he framed.

My middle school best friend went to the Warped Tour one year, and after The Ataris played a set, he stood in line to get autographs. Everybody was giving them crazy random things to sign - a football, a bra, a banana hammock, and so on, in addition to the standard ticket stubs and CDs. Matt, thinking on his feet, had to top it all and give them something they'd notice. So he reaches for his wallet and pulls out a ten-dollar bill. Sure enough, the frontman pauses, turns to the next guy and laughs, and they all gave him the ol' thumbs-up after autographing the currency.

He would later spend that ten on a bag of beef jerky.

One of the journalists for my college newspaper has to interview Paul Newman this week about the school favorite holiday Newman day. On March 30, in honor of the famous quote "24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not!" students will, predictably, chug 24 beers in 24 hours on that day. Paul, who is an alumnus of my school, has spoken out against this holiday, and will speak against it for the paper, assuredly, but one student has to call him.

Oh, and my writing teacher is P.F. Kluge, who just came out with a new novel last week.

[Geoff WreckdoM]

I went to high school with RJD2 and was pretty good friends with him for awhile. We'd go see his punk rock band Parsnip play at freakin' pizza back in the early nineties of Comlumbus Ohio's campus scene. He played guitar and was pretty inventive for a high schooler. The last time I hung out with him he showed me all the records he had accumulated recently including a Paul's Boutique he was very proud of. I guess that was the begining of his big ass career. In fact, My girlfriend used to date him way back when! Imagine that, could've had a world famous DJ, instead she got Geoff WreckdoM.

[c.layne]

hooray, i'm finally in someone's signature!