my first ever face-to-face meeting with a celebrity was in the early eighties, outside fenway park after a baltimore orioles-boston red sox game, when my father & i ran into hall-of-fame orioles pitcher jim palmer. my dad told me who he was & asked me if i'd like an autograph, but i declined, since i didn't want the autograph of the guy in the underwear ads.
for a long while after that the closest i think i came to celebrity was that one of my fraternity brothers is scarlett johansson's brother...but she was like 12 & in manny & lo at the time we were in college, so yeah...oh & also one night a friend & i followed fishbone into a party at tufts & drank their bottles of guinness.
...but ever since i moved to nyc back in 2001, i've had the opportunity to pseudo-brush elbows with a few celebrities here & there in my doings and through it, have developed a sense of celebrity that i assume is different than, say, some dude who has never left windham, nh and only sees celebrities on tv or in the national enquirer or on the internet, naked or non.
i've been in social situations with rob corddry (formerly of the daily show & currently of the hilarious wb online-only series, children's hospital) on two non-consecutive occasions. once was at iona, a bar in williamsburg. i approached him & asked "you know jon stewart, right?" he responded, "you could say that"...and we went on our ways. we also crossed paths at a shins concert at bowery ballroom, where he stood in front of me & between songs, enthusiastically screamed "play your good song!"
other than that, i've had a few other celebrity run-ins. i've been on a flight with corin tucker (of sleater kinney), been at parties & bars with heather graham (who is WAY too skinny) & tracy morgan (on a couch with some ninny), and met the dudes from ac/dc (something that rhymes with "inny"). turns out they all seem like normal enough people...go figure.
which leads me to the topic of michael phelps & the infamous doobie-smoking picture of him. i've been at parties where there have been people who are in bands or films or tv series & never have i once thought to myself "oh my god, i totally need to get a photo of that person doing something that will be construed as awful & will publicly humiliate them & cost them a lucrative sponsorship deal!" that is a sign of somebody who is obviously an ass with no sense of consequences exposing someone who assumes what he's doing, at that point, at a party among "friends," has no consequences. i guess that doesn't matter to kellogg's either way.
#61 - you so famous!
snack: ocean spray cranberry & chocolate craisins trail mix
drink: nestea pomegranate & passion fruit red tea
the kellogg company, out of battle creek, michigan, is the world's largest producer of cereal & had $12.8 billion in revenue in 2008. beyond that, i'll just say that seth meyers covered their actions in response to the photos of michael phelps hitting the bong pretty well. in the end, they're bigger than michael phelps (he's only worth $10 million at the most) & can toss him aside in favor of a cartoon jungle cat any day of the week.
only 1/12th as big as kellogg's & 100 times bigger than michael phelps is ocean spray, an agricultural co-op based out of massachusetts. they're the owners of the largest cranberry-processing facility in the world. both the co-op & the massachusetts thing automatically score points with me & they've also turned down a buyout offer from pepsico, which is rad. even they've had their own problems in the past though. i guess nobody's perfect.
right michael phelps? nobody's perfect? hey michael phelps, i bet you'd love this ocean spray cranberry & chocolate craisins trail mix that i'm eating right now. nuts & berries are good (craisins!), but the chocolate chips make it even gooder if you know what i mean, michael phelps. wink wink. mmm. i bet you could eat like 50 bags of these when you're "training."
since i'm in a reducing-soda intake phase right now, i'm having a bottle of nestea pomegranate & passion fruit red tea with the trail mix. nestea is a part of the coca-cola company, who, by comparison, makes anything evil that kellogg or ocean spray might do look like a girl scout selling you a box of samoas. the label on the bottle tries hard to be hip though. i have to give them that. you've gotta be hip when you're dealing with pomegranates. with phrases like "pure liquid awesomeness" and "(c)an it help you wrestle a wildebeest?" it's a pretty extreme label, just like the pomegranate, the current biggest blinged-out celebrity in the fruit kingdom. long live the pomegranate.