Thursday, January 24, 2008

What's your best celebrity encounter story?

Mine was back in 2002 or 2003, I was living in New York and had just gone to a performance of The Producers. It was later in the run so Nathan Lane was in it but Matthew Broderick wasn't. It was still very fun and I'm glad I went. I remember that the show was very popular that I had to buy tickets like four months in advance. After the show, my friend who had gone with me and I walked over to the Toys'R'Us that's in Times Square. For those of you who have never been, it's a neat store: three stories with a ferris wheel in the middle.

We get there and we're walking around and in the section right next to the Lego section we notice an area that's been cordoned off and set up with a stool-like chair and a bunch of floor pillows. Looked around but there weren't really any signs explaining what was going on so I asked a store employee (for the sake of the story let's pretend that I asked Geoffrey himself). Geoffrey bent down and told me that Dr. Ruth Westheimer was doing a promotional reading of her new children's book. "Wow," I thought to myself, thanked Geoffrey for his help, fed him some leaves from an Acacia tree, and decided to stick around for the reading.

So we stood and listened to Dr. Ruth read her story to a bunch of kids that had materialized from out of nowhere (I think it was the understudy cast from the production of Annie that was playing down the street). I don't remember what the story was about but it wasn't about sex (the kids all kind of looked disappointed). Afterward, Dr. Ruth worked the line of spectators shaking hands and signing autographs. When it came to be my turn, I took the only piece of paper that I had which was my playbill from The Producers and bent down toward her (she is tiny!! I mean short, really short! Like Webster short!) and asked,

"Will you sign this: 'To Kevin, my best friend, never stop dreaming! Love, Doctor Ruth'?"

She looked over at me, hesitated for just a second and in her thick German accent, coldly said,

"No."

It was awesome.

1 comment:

  1. Which story do you want? I can give you WWF's The British Bulldog, stalking Michael Ball (my most favorite musical star), stalking Josh Groban, eating dinner near Shawn White, cruising and art auctioning with Jefferson Darcy (from Married with Children), getting spanked at Seinfeld trivia by Regis, or going to high school with tennis great Lindsey Davenport.

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