Famous Encounters

I met a local celebrity last Saturday, at a Walgreens in the city of my birth. My family and I were in town because I had some business there, so we made it a reason to see my immediate family as well. The Walgreens used to be on the corner, across the street, but for some reason they moved and now that's an auto parts store. Weird.

Anyways, this fellow is a journalist, author, pundit, entertainer and archiver of pop culture ephemera from decades gone by. I like his work quite a bit and read his blog pretty much daily.

We had to stop to get baby formula. Walking in, I noticed this gentleman going inside. He drives a distinctive car, so I was pretty sure it was him, and there was some slight embarrassment as I hesitated and let him go in first, even though I should have entered first. Once inside, I introduced myself and we chatted about his work. He was very friendly, and didn't brush me off, and he was the same in person that he appears online- smart, friendly and gregarious.

So our brief encounter made an appearance on his blog today, and he was gracious about the little parking lot deal. I decided to comment on the post (because he asked me to) and now I've crossed the line from idle admirer to blog-posting fan, I guess.

I'm not hugely impressed by famous people, and I don't feel the need to take their picture or ask for an autograph. I haven't met a ton of celebrities, but I feel more self-conscious about being one of those pushy strangers than actually saying hello or shaking a hand. In this case, I hoped I could communicate my appreciation for his work without coming across as creepy.

The coda to this story is that, almost as soon as I posted to his blog, the topic in the discussion thread moved over to frozen pizza. You know how I feel about that, and said as much. Hoo boy, I was definitely in the minority there!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fat Man - A Story

Jim looked out his front door, and waddling down the street came a fat man. This man was uncommonly fat, by Jim's reckoning the fattest man he had ever seen in person, of course there were real fatties on television sometimes in those shows meant to entertain you with grotesqueries.  Jim bent down to pick up the newspaper from the stoop, stood up and looked again at the man slowly shuffling his globular flesh along the sidewalk in front of Jim's house. What a whale, thought Jim. How is he even capable of motion? The fat man was looking at Jim now, watching him. He came to a stop in front of Jim's house, rotated slightly, facing Jim now head-on. This unnerved Jim. The eyes of the fat man, so surrounded by the puffiness of his face, beetled into Jim. "Good morning," the fat man said. "Uh, good morning to you," Jim replied. The fat man looked with his little eyes right into his own. "Is that today's paper?" asked the fat man. "W...
Read more

Brooks Brothers, RIP?

Image
I was going to start this post with an obligatory disclaimer, "Of course clothing doesn't matter, taste being subjective and more importantly it is immoral to criticize how someone chooses to dress." Then I realized that I don't believe that, and I think it's wrong to lie. Clothing does matter, for the same reason culture matters on a grander scale, and the automatic rejection of its importance is a de facto surrender of an entire category of human behavior to those who are currently ruining everything. I won't regurgitate all the history and personal observations of the honorable @Nut_Sac_Bandit in his illuminating post here . So if you want a capsule history of the downfall of this great American brand, go read his piece. It's the familiar tale: the storied brand found it hard to compete against cheaper, imported brands, so they outsourced their production, sold to an overseas company, were sold again to private equity, and finally to another fo...
Read more

Something about The Carpenters

Image
"This is absolutely unacceptable. You should have told me this before I married you." Arms crossed, pouty face. But I know she's joking. Casually mentioning that I actually like several of the songs by The Carpenters, I get the full HOW DARE YOU from my loving wife. She has good taste, so I accept her position. Karen Carpenter was a tragic figure with a beautiful voice. The Carpenters wrote music that many would call anodyne, or sappy. Very much a product of their time, the sort of white bread pop songs they produced are easy to ridicule today in our aggressively cynical age. Ok, so I find as I get older that this sort of thing is more appealing to me. Gen X gets to slide into middle age sentimentality the same as the Boomers did. So it was with much joy that I recently discovered a band annoying called Weyes Blood, fronted by singer-songwriter Natalie Mering. Their latest album, Titanic Rising, is pretty great! Great if you suspect that Mering called the spirit o...
Read more